Housing prices in Spain's suburbs spiral out of control with more than 100% increases in three years
New residents are driving up prices in many towns, some in rural Spain, according to an analysis by pisos.com
Ana Cantero
Monday, 13 April 2026, 15:59
There is little room for optimism in the Spanish housing market. Real estate platform pisos.com has published an analysis showing price increases of over 100% in some parts of the country, many of them located in rural Spain, over the last three years, specifically between March 2023 and March 2026.
The most notable cases are Villena (Alicante), with an increase of 135.51% (from 757 euros per square metre in 2023 to 1,783 euros in 2026); Torre-Pacheco (Murcia), with an increase of 114.52% (from 1,216 to 2,609 euros per square metre); and Villafranca de los Barros (Badajoz), with an increase of 113.73% (from 357 to 763 euros per square metre).
Elda (Alicante) has also seen a 107.21% increase in price per square metre, while other towns such as Guía de Isora (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), Talayuela (Cáceres), Fraga (Huesca), Trujillo (Cáceres), Miranda de Ebro (Burgos), Deltebre (Tarragona), Andratx (Balearic Islands) or Almazán (Soria) have grown by over 65%, at a rate much higher than that of the provincial capitals.
According to the study, this phenomenon points to the arrival of new residents who, displaced from more expensive areas, are driving up the value of properties that were previously almost unmarketable in just a few years.
"The suburbs are no longer the refuge they once were: there are municipalities far from big cities that have doubled or tripled their prices in three years, demonstrating that the affordability crisis is no longer an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon," spokesperson for pisos.com Ferrán Font says.
In the case of provincial capitals, Madrid leads the price increase with 42.78%: the average price has risen from 4,461 euros per square metre in 2023 to 6,369 euros per in 2026. A 90-square-metre apartment in the Spanish capital now costs almost 172,000 euros more than in 2023.
Valencia, with 41.57%, and Malaga, with 37.66%, rank second and third. Other provincial capitals such as Palma, Santander and Soria have also seen increases of around 30%.
The suburbanisation effect
The real estate portal states that the impossibility of accessing housing in big cities has forced thousands of families to move to surrounding municipalities, where prices used to be more affordable. However, this shift has led to a rise in property values in the suburbs.
As a result, Madrid and Valencia's suburbs, for example, have now seen price increases approach those of the cities themselves, as is the case in Paterna and Mislata (44.67% and 39.72%, respectively) in Valencia and Pinto (33.75%) in Madrid.
"When the peripheral market behaves like the metropolitan, affordability ceases to be a problem for large cities and becomes a national problem. This demands urgent structural solutions regarding land and the promotion of new housing, not only in provincial capital cities but also in medium-sized municipalities that act as safety valves," Font says.
