the macro study that supports a great longevity ‘hack’

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Science and society in general do not cease in their attempt to achieve a formula to be able to extend life a little more, or at least reach have an older age with a better quality of life. In this sense, there are numerous articles that promise this type of improvement, although logically there is nothing miraculous here, but many different factors influence it. A new rule. A trick that has begun to have a presence among specialists In the world of healthcare it is the 5-2-½ rule. According to this premise, it is enough to sleep five more minutes, do two extra minutes of exercise and eat half a serving more of vegetables a day to mathematically gain an entire year of life expectancy. Its origin. This statement is supported by science, and specifically by a study recently published in The Lancet. The work in this case sought to answer a very specific question: what is the minimum change in our daily habits that achieves a measurable impact on longevity? To find out, the researchers did not take a dozen volunteers, but rather went to the UK Biobank, one of the most complete medical databases, to analyze a total of 59,078 participants with an average follow-up of 8.1 years. The analysis. With all these people they decided to measure sleep time, moderate to vigorous intensity physical activity, and diet quality using a dietary scoring system. The mathematics. By cross-referencing the data and applying statistical models, the scientists found a “minimum combination” that was statistically associated with adding a year to life expectancy. The exact numbers of the andstudio were: 5 more minutes of sleep a day. 1.9 more minutes of moderate-vigorous physical activity daily, which is rounded up to two minutes. 5 points of improvement in the dietary quality index, which is approximately equivalent to half an extra serving of vegetables per day. The small print. As with other similar studies, this is an observational study on a population whose lifestyle habits were studied. But it is not a trial that was 100% controlled, where one group was forced to sleep five more minutes and another not to sleep to compare what happened. And this takes a little weight off it. Furthermore, the “extra year of life” is a statistical model at the population level. This means that, if an entire society applied these slight changes, global life expectancy would increase in mathematical models. The problem is that at the individual level, biology is not that mathematical and that is why you cannot compensate for smoking or a severe genetic disease by eating half an extra tomato for dinner. Microhabits. Despite the nuances, the underlying message of the study is tremendously positive. Historically, public health messages have been overwhelming, advertising phrases such as “do 150 minutes of exercise a week”, “radically change your diet”, “get 8 hours of sleep without fail”. This study scientifically demonstrates the immense power of microhabits. It basically tells us that we don’t need to prepare for a marathon or embrace extreme diets for our body to notice it. Adding a handful of spinach to your meal, getting off the subway a stop earlier to walk for two minutes at a good pace, or going to bed a little earlier are actions with almost zero friction. Images | Vitaly Gariev In Xataka | The problem that we read less and less is not a lack of time or discipline: it is that we do not do ‘habit-stacking’

Waymo has not confirmed that it will arrive in Spain. But your documentation says things

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Waymo has registered three legal entities in Europe in fifteen days: Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam. They add to the I had already been in Munich since June. However, no release announcement accompanies the records. what has happened. The French company has an explicit corporate purpose: passenger transportation with autonomous vehicles. That is, the activity for which we know Waymo. Waymo Iberia was established in Madrid at the beginning of June. And the Dutch company points to something else, computing infrastructure, not transportation as such. The four share a shareholder and management team. What it doesn’t mean. A commercial registration like this is not equivalent to a launch date or an assured landing. Uber promised robotaxis in Madrid this year and, when asked for details, there was no response. In fact, the DGT was not aware of any request from him at that time. What does it say?. The name chosen for Spain is not coincidental. Waymo Iberia, and not Waymo Spain, suggests that the target includes Portugal, which A few weeks ago it opened a convenient legal framework for testing autonomous vehicles. Three of the four subsidiaries are in countries with advanced level 4 regulation. Only Holland breaks the pattern, and its subsidiary looks at data, not transportation. So it seems clear that Waymo is registering subsidiaries where the regulatory framework is in its favor. The precedent. Waymo just broke its alliance with Uber in Phoenixhis first city, and has recovered the cars for his own app. The number is small (a little more than a dozen vehicles), but the signal is not: as soon as a fleet gains its own brand and demand, as Waymo has presumably done after years of service, it has an obvious incentive to stop sharing between 20% and 30% of each run with an intermediary. In this case, Uber. The contrast with France. France allows commercial driverless operations from 2021 in specific areas, and An autonomous WeRide van is already circulating in Valence under that framework. The pending question It’s not if Waymo lands this year. It is whether Spain will have a completely ready legal framework, also in terms of insurance companies and municipal regulations, before the question becomes urgent. Waymo has purchased the option of being ready to disembark in Spain whenever it wants, but it remains to be seen if the country will also be ready by then. In Xataka | What happens if you are in a self-driving taxi and someone wants to get into the car and attack you? Waymo’s response is not encouraging Featured image | Xataka

There’s a reason China doesn’t fire nuclear missiles from its most dangerous submarine. You just broke that rule

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The greatest strength of a nuclear submarine is not its firepower, but that no one knows where it is. This ability to remain hidden for months has made these ships the most important pillar of nuclear deterrence since the Cold War and explains why each movement related to them is analyzed with a magnifying glass. It wasn’t just any test. China has insisted that the launch was part of its annual training and that it had previously notified the countries of the region. However, few maneuvers generate as much attention as the ballistic missile shot from a strategic nuclear submarine into the Pacific Ocean. Not only that, since it was an action practically unpublished in decades. Beijing had been avoiding a public demonstration of this type for years and, precisely for this reason, the test has been interpreted as a message directed far beyond the military exercise itself. The letter that is never shown. Missile submarines are the most discreet and valuable component of any nuclear power. Its main advantage is in remaining hidden for weeks or months, guaranteeing a retaliatory capacity even if the country suffers a first attack. This need to maintain secrecy explains why China has barely made public launches from this type of platform and that each demonstration has enormous strategic weight. The signal was directed to the United States. Although the Chinese authorities they emphasized that the missile carried a training warhead and was not directed against any country, the context tell another story. Western analysts believe that the test was intended to demonstrate that Chinese submarines can now launch very long-range missiles. from nearby areas on its own coasts and continue hitting targets thousands of kilometers away. In other words, Beijing wanted to remind that its maritime deterrence capacity is entering a new phase of maturity. Type 094 Submarine A doctrine designed to reduce risks. Everything indicates that the launch took place from protected waters close to China, a strategy known as “bastion.” Instead of sending its submarines to the center of the Pacific, the idea is to keep them under the cover of national aviation, fleet and anti-missile systems while retaining the ability to attack very distant targets. If the new JL-2 or JL-3 missiles They fulfill the benefits attributed to them by analysts, these submarines no longer need to travel too far from home to reach US territory. Nuclear expansion continues. Because the test comes in full modernization process of Chinese strategic forces. Beijing is building new silos for intercontinental missiles, deploying more advanced generations of land-based missiles and increasing the number of ballistically capable nuclear submarines. Pentagon estimates suggest that the Chinese arsenal could exceed a thousand nuclear warheads before 2030a transformation that is changing the military balance in the Indo-Pacific. The Pacific responds worried. Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Taiwan reacted criticizing a pitch which they consider destabilizing for the region, despite having received prior notification. The criticism was not directed solely at the missile, but in the context of a rapid increase in Chinese military capabilities and an increasingly visible naval presence in the Pacific. For many governments, the test represents a new step in a show of force strategy that had already included tests of intercontinental missiles and naval maneuvers increasingly distant from Chinese coasts. The real novelty was not the missile. It is known that China has had ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons for years. What is really new is that he has decided show publicly how one of its strategic submarines can use them, something it had almost completely avoided until now. In fact, the demonstration increases the credibility of your ability of retaliation, forces its rivals to assume that these submarines are fully operational and confirms that Beijing is willing to use its military tests as another tool of political and strategic deterrence. Image | PLA In Xataka | Satellite images leave no doubt: China has launched an underwater creature into the sea that defies naval engineering In Xataka | From cultivating the field to sailing underwater: the Chinese farmer who makes homemade submarines in his free time

Elon Musk’s two companies merge because Wall Street loves simplicity

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SpaceX is no longer SpaceX and xAI is no longer xAI. Instead, the company has decided to merge both names, and from now on it will be called SpaceXAI. That new name makes one thing very clear: the company is selling itself to Wall Street as an AI company that also launches rockets, not the other way around. A fusion that was sung. SpaceX bought xAI —and with it, both the Grok AI model and the social network X— in early February. He did so in a 100% stock move that valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. The name change is above all a marketing “punchline” about that de facto merger. The strategy has as one of its probable arguments a simplification that will undoubtedly be liked on Wall Street: Musk has created many companies that seemed to operate independently, so consolidating them gives that vision of a unified purpose and objective. This is not just about image. After the merger that occurred in February there was a clear reason: the dream of orbital data centers. Musk has been talking for some time about how ground infrastructure can’t meet AI’s global electrical demand, and SpaceX has already asked the FCC for permission to deploy up to a million satellites that work like computing nodes in low orbit. Therefore, having SpaceX and xAI completely merged also by their name simplifies this entire ecosystem. Going public helps. The decision comes shortly after SpaceX debuted on the stock market in June with the largest IPO in history. It raised $75 billion and earned a valuation of $1.77 trillion. The milkmaid’s tale? Before going public, SpaceX spoke of the “Total Addressable Market” (TAM), an estimate of the total size of the business they could access if they captured 100% of the demand and the figure is colossal: 28.5 billion dollarsof which 26.5 billion would correspond to AI, 1.6 billion in connectivity (Starlink) and only 370,000 to the space segment. Part of the animation of the “fusion” between both names showed this aspect. Grok and Cursor as pieces of the future. Grok continues and will continue to operate under the SpaceXAI umbrella, and of course the infrastructure agreements already signed are also maintained. The most important, the one that Anthropic recently signed and for which will pay 1,250 million dollars monthly to SpaceXAI for access to computing in the Colossus data centers. Google will pay 920 million monthly for the same. The other piece of the future is Cursor, the AI ​​agent for programming which is key so that the company can infiltrate companies. And Tesla, what? Since the merger with SpaceX was closed, there has been speculation on Wall Street with a plausible future: that Tesla will be the next to disappear as an independent company. SpaceX’s own president, Gwynne Shotwell, recognized the day of the IPO that there is a clear “convergence” between both companies, although he avoided talking about dates. Both are already collaborating on projects such as the ambitious Terafab, and Tesla maintains an investment of $2 billion in SpaceX which, after the merger with xAI, has already generated a capital gain on paper of around 64% due to the rise in the value of SpaceX shares. A very strong option. This “merger” with Tesla seems certainly likely. Wedbush consulting analyst Dan Ives esteem that there is an 80% probability that the movement will occur, and the Kalshi betting platform handles in these moments a 51% chance of that move arriving before May 2027. Some of the groundwork is already done in practice: both companies share engineers and both face bottlenecks in the form of power supply and cooling for their AI systems. In Xataka | “The idea of ​​making a cell phone makes me want to die,” said Musk. Two years later, it is very deep with its prototype of a mobile phone with AI

AI browsers arrived with the promise of changing everything. Not only have they not done it: they are a danger

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Artificial intelligence browsers did not come promising a smarter tab or a search engine with better answers. They arrived with a much greater ambition: OpenAI talks about getting closer to a “true super assistant”, Perplexity summarizes Comet as “the browser that works for you” and Google presents Gemini in chrome under the idea of ​​a new era of navigation. The promise is clear: that we stop moving around the web alone and start delegating part of the way. The problem is that that same promise is beginning to show a more delicate side. The warning. The University of Washington has now focused on this emerging risk. In an investigation Presented at the Agents in the Wild workshop, and released by the university itself on June 30, a team analyzed seven popular agentic browsers to see how they relate to basic protection of the modern web: the same origin policy. Their conclusion was clear: four of them opened relevant risk avenues and the researchers managed to run a complete proof of concept in ChatGPT Atlas in Agent Mode. The bottom jump. A traditional browser shows us pages and waits for our decisions. We can open a service, copy data, paste it somewhere else, compare options or fill out a form, but each step depends on us. Agentic browsers alter this logic because they incorporate systems capable of interpreting what appears on the screen and moving forward within the browser itself. We are no longer just talking about summarizing a page, but rather coordinating tasks between tabs, operating on open pages and completing actions that were previously left in the hands of the user. A new front. The risk does not arise just because a page is malicious, but because the agent can interpret that page as part of its instructions. That’s where he comes in prompt injectiona technique in which external content tries to alter the behavior of the model with hidden, camouflaged or simply inserted commands where the user does not expect to find them. In a chatbot, that is already a problem. In an agentic browser, the scope changes, because the system can process information from a page and convert it into actions within the browser. The barrier that was there. The same origin policy is one of those protections that we rarely see, but that underpins much of the modern web. Its function, simply put, is to prevent one page from freely reading or manipulating information from another just because both are open in the browser. Thanks to this separation, any website should not be able to simply access what we have in a bank, an email or a private service. The problem arises when an agent groups together information that was previously much more separated. Let’s imagine that we visit a seemingly normal page and ask the agent to summarize it or help us complete a task within it. Under certain conditions, that page may include content from another source, such as an iframe, along with a malicious instruction intended for the model and not for us. If the agent has sufficient permissions, it could access content that the attacking website should not be able to read directly and move some of that information to a form controlled by the attacker. The web would not have directly broken the barrier; he would have used the agent as a bridge. The important nuance. It should be noted that the study does not say that all users will suffer an attack or that any browser with AI is insecure by definition. The researchers analyzed specific versions, at a specific time, and worked with proofs of concept, not with attacks against real services or with sensitive user data. They also observed relevant differences between products: browsers that granted fewer permissions to the agent tended to reduce risk. The paradox. These browsers are attractive because they promise to save steps, understand pages, relate information and execute tasks with less intervention from us. But that same capacity is what makes the failure weigh more: it does not occur only in an isolated tab, but in an environment where there may be open sessions, personal data and pending actions. They may not yet be a massive habit, but the security debate is already here, precisely because their proposal consists of giving them more margin. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana In Xataka | Selecting all the traffic lights is no longer enough to prove that you are not a robot. Now you have to scan QR codes

put a hydrogen train on a narrow track

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Stadler and ARST have presented in Erlen (Switzerland) what both companies describe as the first hydrogen train designed specifically to run on narrow gauge tracks. The idea is that the convoy will begin transporting passengers in 2028 on three lines in northern Sardinia. Below these lines we tell you all the information. What has happened? The Swiss manufacturer and ARST have closed a project that started with a framework agreement signed in 2023 and that contemplates the supply of ten hydrogen trains for the Sardinian network. According to the press release, these vehicles will replace the current diesel units and will allow, according to the company, to save more than 2,100 tons of CO₂ per year, a figure that Stadler compare with avoiding about 450 car trips around the planet. Why is it a technical novelty? Until now, the hydrogen trains that circulate in Europe, like Alstom’s Coradia iLint in Lower Saxony or Siemens’ Mireo Plus H in Bavaria, have been developed for the standard gauge gauge of 1,435 millimeters. Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily, on the other hand, preserve a network inherited from the 19th century with a width of only 950 millimeters, which imposes much stricter axle load limits. Stadler had to design a completely new lightweight aluminum body to fit into that tight space. It is worth clarifying, however, that this is not the first time that something similar has been proposed. And just as they point From Trenvista, in 2011 the Spanish operator FEVE converted a retired 3400 series unit, the so-called Fabiolo, to hydrogen, although that project was later abandoned. What is certain is that it is the first narrow gauge hydrogen train conceived from the beginning to enter commercial service. In detail. The propulsion system is based on fuel cells and hydrogen tanks, but with a peculiarity, because instead of distributing the components across the roof of the train, as other manufacturers do, Stadler has concentrated all the equipment in a central car, named Power Pack. This module acts as a kind of rolling charger that transforms hydrogen into electricity to power the traction batteries, freeing up space in passenger cars for air conditioning, panoramic windows and access to the lower floor for people with reduced mobility. With its own hydrogen. Most hydrogen trains in service are refueled at conventional stations. ARST has opted for a model designed to produce its own hydrogen through electrolysis powered 100% by solar energy, integrating the production plant within the transport network itself. As explained by Carlo Poledrini, central director of ARST, in Stadler’s notethese vehicles are “a central element of the decarbonization strategy of the narrow gauge network” and represent “the first step in the evolution of ARST from a transport operator to an energy company capable of powering its own service network.” Expansion. The project is part of a broader initiative by the Italian Government and its Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport to decarbonise the narrow gauge lines in the south of the country. Stadler affirms which already builds nine similar trains for Ferrovie della Calabria and two more units for Ferrovia Circumetnea, in Sicily, the latter adapted for the slopes around Etna. And now what. Before receiving passengers, the ten Sardinian trains must complete a battery of safety and operational tests. If everything progresses as planned, the first unit should be circulating with travelers in 2028, and from there we will see if the idea ends up gaining traction. Cover image | Stadler In Xataka | Switzerland installed the first railway solar plant in the world: a year later, it has been such a success that its neighbors are already asking about it

If you are going to see the eclipse on August 12, science needs you

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The Generalitat of Catalonia, the Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) and the Vall d’Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR) have just announced a citizen science initiative aimed at analyzing how a total solar eclipse affects the health and physiology of human beings. There is enough data on how they affect these astronomical phenomena to other animals, but there is hardly any information about humans. For this reason, these institutions have launched the Solaris application, with which they hope to gather around 5,000 people to participate in a study whose results will be known at the end of September. The requirements. To participate in this citizen science project A series of requirements must be met. First of all, you need to download the Solaris application and have a smartwatch or any similar activity device that measures, at a minimum, heart rate. Data must be taken for five consecutive days: the two days before the solar eclipse on August 12, 2026, the day of the eclipse and the two days after. It is important that the recordings have time references and, also, that intense exercise is not practiced during the measurements. What you want to measure. Mainly, those responsible for this research are interested in knowing how experiencing a solar eclipse affects heart rate and respiratory rate. Two important factors coincide in this type of event. On the one hand, the excitement of seeing something newwhich on many occasions has never been witnessed. And, on the other, the incoherence of a short dusk in the middle of the day. The fact that light disappears when it is not appropriate and then appears again a few minutes later can affect the mechanisms involved in circadian rhythms. It is true that it is something very specific, but it would be interesting to see if detectable effects actually occur at a physiological level. The results. The total solar eclipse will take place on August 12. Once the application is synchronized with the smart watch, the data reaches the researchers directly, thanks to OneCareAI technology, which allows data to be collected safely and anonymously. Once all the data has been collected, it will be processed to carry out a first draft of the study, which will be made public at the end of September. It won’t take long for participants to know the results. And what about the animals? There is a lot of information documented on how a total solar eclipse affects animals. For example, it has been seen that birds sing a lot, dogs bark and cattle go to the stables, only to return to the pasture again. Activity has also been detected in nocturnal animals, such as bats or some birds. When daylight comes, they return to their hiding places, clearly confused. It has even been documented how eclipses affect some plants, which normally tend to open their flowers at night. Although it is not yet time, we often see how the flowers are seen ahead of time due to the darkness. Beyond all this, we have no idea how the solar eclipse will affect ourselves. Thanks to this Catalan study, we will have information for the first time. Nothing like it has ever been done in the entire world. Do you dare to participate? Image | Magnificent In Xataka | A third of Spain will be completely dark for a minute or two. The astronomical event of the century is approaching

Today “a masterpiece that will go down in history” arrives on Netflix, thanks to an original approach to a unique science fiction story

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Netflix just released ‘Glimpses of tomorrow’the first series that Kyoto Animation produces exclusively for the platform, and it does so with a certainly tragic background: almost eight years have passed since the studio confirmed the adaptation. A year after the announcement, a man entered the studio offices with gasoline and set the building on fire. 36 people died and another 32 were injured. The author was sentenced to death in 2024, and the attack destroyed much of the studio’s materials and equipment, and with them, any progress that existed on the project. In any case, the series has survived the tragedy, and it imagines a Kyoto of 1907 where electricity was never developed and steam became the dominant technology, leaving the city permanently covered in smoke. As a child, the protagonist invented projects that he captured in a notebook called the Electrical Catalog of the 20th Century, together with his older brother. He took that notebook to the war and never returned. The protagonist, now an adult and in the company of a young woman who is trying to escape an arranged marriage, will embark on a search for the treasure of his childhood. Minoru Ōta directs the series in his first project as a director. He had previously worked as a key animator on ‘Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions!’ and ‘Liz and the Blue Bird’, and as episode director on ‘Kobayashi-san’s Dragon Maid’. It is he himself who said that “‘Flashes of Tomorrow’ is a work that will remain engraved in the history of anime“. An unusual statement coming from someone directing his first project. But the truth is that the series is raising expectations: before reaching Netflix, a tour of cinema screenings was held in Japan, the United Kingdom, Thailand and North America that started on June 14, in addition to a screening at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. All of this is part of the effort that Netflix is ​​making to include more anime in its programming: it has announced eight series and three movies for 2026 in Japan. In Xataka | Today the best science fiction series of the moment returns, with a twist in its story that has given it a perfect score

Europe believed that the Russian ghost fleet moved oil. Report points to something much worse: drone “aircraft carriers”

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During the First World War, the United Kingdom created the called Q-ships: Seemingly harmless merchant ships that hid cannons under their decks to attract German submarines and surprise them when they approached. The idea of ​​turning a commercial ship into a weapon It wasn’t new.. The striking thing is that, more than a century later, it could have evolved much more than we imagined. It all started with some drones. At the end of 2024 they began to register drone raids on several American military bases in England and, shortly after, on other strategic facilities in Germany. The devices appeared and disappeared without a trace, forcing investigations to be opened that they never identified publicly to those responsible. Those flights seemed like another episode in Europe’s growing hybrid war, although a new report maintains that the true origin could have been much further from the coast. Capture of the IISS report The hypothesis. a study from the International Institute for Strategic Studies maintains that it is “highly probable” that Russia used ships linked to its well-known ghost fleet as platforms to launch and recover drones. This network of oil tankers and merchants had been associated until now with crude oil transportation to avoid Western sanctions. If the hypothesis ends up being confirmed, those ships would have also played a military function much more sophisticated covert. A tanker can become an aircraft carrier. They counted TWZ analysts that the great advantage of a merchant ship is precisely that no one expects it to act as a military platform. A ship can remain for days in international waters, discreetly approach the coast, launch a reconnaissance drone and continue its trade route without raising suspicion. Compared to an aircraft carrier, whose presence is impossible to hide, a cargo ship offers perfect cover for operations that are difficult to attribute. The chosen bases. The targets included facilities such as RAF Lakenheathwhich is being prepared for host nuclear weapons American, as well as RAF Mildenhall, RAF Fairford, RAF Feltwell and Ramstein air base in Germany. The researchers collected around of 170 citizen noticesof which approximately half were considered credible after being corroborated by several witnesses or images. They also detected coordinated flight patternsdifferent types of aircraft and trajectories incompatible with recreational use. The sea offers an explanation. The report poses that some drones were able to take off from Russian-related ships located out of visual range of the coast. Among the possibilities is the Orlan-10a military drone with sufficient autonomy to cover these distances and equipped with intelligence sensors, surveillance, reconnaissance and even electronic warfare capabilities. The authors themselves recognize that using an identifiable military model would increase the risk of attribution, so they do not rule out the use of modified commercial drones to make it even more difficult to trace their origin. The boss worries. Plus: the study’s authors admit that their conclusions rest on a combination of cluesknown capabilities and geographical coincidences, not on definitive public evidence. No European government has officially linked a specific ship to a specific incursion, although various policymakers have called for new investigations. For their part, both the British Ministry of Defense and the US Air Force in Europe have confirmed drone flights, but remain silent on any intelligence information related to their possible authorship. The hybrid war. If the hypothesis is correct, the problem would no longer be solely the existence of a ghost fleet dedicated to transporting Russian oil. Europe would also have to assume that some of those same ships can serve as discrete platforms for espionage operationsreconnaissance or electronic warfare hundreds of kilometers from the front. In other words, the biggest threat of the report is not to identify who launched those drones, but to propose that a simple merchant ship could play part of the role that until now was only attributed to an aircraft carrier. Image | Google In Xataka | Europe has encountered a problem bigger than Russia: drones cannot be stored for more than eight weeks In Xataka | Cities such as London or Madrid appear on Russia’s new objective map. The reason: drone production

In Spain more than 40,000 tourist apartments have ‘disappeared’. The question is whether we are facing the end of their bubble

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The tourist rental business is no longer what was. Or that at least is the message that the real estate market seems to be sending, according to recent reports published by two organizations that (from different perspectives) know the sector well: the Bank of Spain and Fotocasa. The first warns in his annual report 2025, published just a few weeks ago, of the departure of tens of thousands of homes from the vacation rental market. The second, Fotocasa, speak directly of a “puncture” of the business, with a “flight of owners”. The big question is… Why? Cycle change? It is still too early to talk about a change of cycle, but the latest data from Fotocasa Research and the Bank of Spain (BE) suggest that something is changing in the country’s vacation rental market. Although tourism still booming and it’s not crazy that Spain reaches this year for the first time the 100 million of foreign visitors, the market is emitting signals that suggest that renting an apartment on Airbnb, Booking, Vrbo or Holidu is no longer the business it was a couple of years ago. Interest in buying apartments for tourist rental is falling and the number of landlords who decide to put their homes up for sale to leave that market increases. What do the figures say? That something is moving in the sector. Still very timid, but perceptible. The percentage of buyers who acknowledge that they are looking for a home to use as a vacation rental is reducing little by little. If in 2024 they represented 3.4%, in 2025 that percentage was reduced to 3% and the latest survey, corresponding to the first semester, places it at 2.8%. “Although the tourist modality continues to represent 3% of purchase operations linked to a second residence or directly to investment, the trend shows a progressive reduction in interest in this model,” comment the platform, which sees a loss of “attractiveness” of the sector. Is it the only indicator? No. The market also suffers at the other end, that of the sellers. Fotocasa Research has detected an increase in the number of landlords dedicated to tourist rentals who are trying to get rid of their homes. That is to say, there are fewer people interested in entering the vacation rental market… but also more people who are already in it and want to leave. The trend is once again tenuous, but eloquent. In 2024, 1.8% of the owners who went to real estate agencies to sell their homes dedicated them to vacation rentals. In 2025 the percentage was very similar (1.6%), but this year it has risen to 3.1%. “It represents practically doubling the weight recorded two years before and shows that more and more owners are choosing to abandon the tourist rental segment,” they explain from Fotocasa. And what does the Bank of Spain say? In your latest annual reportpublished a few weeks ago, the BE confirms that vacation rentals are deflating. To be more specific, its technicians documented an increase in the number of tourist apartments between 2021 and 2024, which placed the total stock at 400,000 homes that last year. In 2025, however. The average was 355,000 homes. The latest data from the INE show that in May they were advertised on online platforms in Spain 341,001 homes tourist, also far from the 381,837 registered a year before. That means between 40,000 and 50,000 fewer homes on the market. In some regions thousands of properties have been erased in recent years or even more than 10,000, such as happens in Alicante. What is the reason? For María Matos, spokesperson for Fotocasa, there is little mystery. If vacation rentals “are losing part of the attractiveness they had in recent years” it is mainly due to three factors. First, because investors are “reorienting” their strategies, looking for “stable alternatives.” Second, vacation rentals have lost profitability compared to a few years ago. And third (but not least), the changes at the regulatory level. “It responds to a context of greater regulatory uncertainty in which the regulations have been modified throughout the year,” comment Matos. The truth is that in recent years both the central government and some regional and municipal administrations have taken steps to prevent the flight of housing from residential to vacation rentals and, in the process, alleviate the rise in rents. Weight of tourist homes in the rental market of: Urban Area Center of the tourist area Malaga 29.9% 44.6% Las Palmas de Gran Canaria 12.9% 26.9% Seville 12.1% 44.9% Santa Cruz de Tenerife 9.6% 8.2% Palm 7.6% 0.7% Valencia 5.7% 9.8% Barcelona 4.0% 22.2% Madrid 2.8% 14.9% Saragossa 1.4% 14.9% Total Spain 10.8% 10.8% Has it changed that much? Yes. BE himself recognize that “regulatory limitations” on vacation rentals have taken their toll on the market, as has the transfer of homes to the seasonal rental market. It comes with taking a look at the newspaper archive to find town councils and autonomous communities that in recent years have applied moratoriums to the granting of new tourist rental licenses or toughened its regulations. The most forceful change was applied last year by the Government when it activated a single short-term rental registry, although this measure received a blow of the Supreme Court a few months ago. Another important regulatory change is that, since April 2025reinforces the weight of neighborhood communities when deciding whether or not they can operate housing for tourist use in their buildings. Will it be noticed in the market? Just because tourist apartments lose strength in the market does not mean that the price of residential rentals will go down. The B.C. remember that, in general, its weight is limited in the Spanish market. According to their calculations, vacation homes represent 1.5% of the total housing stock, although that percentage has fine print. If we talk about the rental market, its relative weight rises to 10% and if we refer to specific regions with strong tourist demand, that footprint skyrockets. In … Read more

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