New licenses are prohibited,
but how many streets in Lisbon
have short-term rentals?

This map of Lisbon shows all apartments registered as authorized short-term accommodations.

The historic neighborhoods are the most affected. Santa Maria Maior, Misericórdia, Arroios, Santo António and São Vicente represent 12,679 of the 18,660 licensed units.

The streets speak: there
is vacation rental
accommodation here

There are more than 18,000 licenses issued in Lisbon,
with Santa Maria Maior and Misericórdia being the
boroughs with the most options.
By Isabella Moura

Since October 2024, Lisbon City Council has stopped granting licenses for Local Accommodation in Lisbon, a measure proposed to try to curb the growth of this activity.

With the tourism boom, owners have withdrawn apartments from the conventional rental market and placed them in so-called "local accommodation." There are many mandatory signs that can be seen throughout the city, indicating that there is short-term accommodation in that building (accommodation commonly found on Airbnb or other rental platforms).

Although measures have been implemented to curb this, the annual increase in licenses over the last 10 years makes the current state of how housing is being exploited evident. Academic studies address this very issue, stating that local accommodation has altered the dynamics of access to housing [1], promoted changes in the local commercial network [2], and caused deep changes in the public space [3].

It was in 2018 that the peak in approved license applications was recorded, contributing to the distribution of more than 18,000 places throughout the city of Lisbon. Currently, the sum of all licenses indicates a capacity to accommodate 108,000 people in more than 70,000 beds. To find out if there is accommodation in a particular place, there must be a sign with "AL (Alojamento Local)" written on the building or on the door of the floor.

To view the number of accommodations on each street in Lisbon, this tool allows you to filter and indicates how many accommodations there are. Try searching for the name of your street or, before that, try "Avenida Almirante Reis," the street with the most local accommodations in Lisbon, or Avenida d João II or Rua do Fanqueiros, the streets that complete the Top 3.

Percentage of streets/parishes with short-term rentals

If your street has local accommodations, don't be surprised. 49% of Lisbon's streets have local accommodations. These are all the parishes in Lisbon with the percentage of streets in the parish with at least one local accommodation.

Some notes on data cleaning

There are more than 18,000 addresses with local accommodation in Lisbon. The data cleaning process was the most time-consuming step, as there is no standard for addresses and they are entered spontaneously without following an internal database. Many addresses provided contained typing and spelling errors that made it difficult to match them with official streets. A concrete example: In some parishes, the total number of official streets in the parish was lower than the number of streets with local accommodation in that same parish.

In addition, it is important to mention two facts:

  • 49 records do not have an address that can be identified.
  • 330 records do not indicate the building number of the accommodation, only the street name.

The final, cleaned, and structured data is available here and can be reused and improved.

Methodology

For cleaning: Python using FuzzyWuzzy library, capable of comparing the address provided at the time of the license application with the official streets of Lisbon. This made it possible to standardize the streets. Regex to improve the DF, eliminating columns and creating new ones.

For analysis: Pandas, for statistical analysis, and Matplotlib for support visualizations.

For visualization: The records were visually observed in Qgis and then enhanced in Illustrator.

Project under The Lede Program: An Introduction to Data Practices, Columbia Journalism School(July 2025).