Skip to content
Reuse radar

Madrid

Madrid has almost no empty offices inside the M-30 but more than 12% outside it, a regional law that lets office and hotel plots become protected rental homes without a plan change, and large public estates — army land at Campamento, the old Carabanchel prison, the Chamartín railway lands — turning into neighbourhoods. The city also holds hundreds of unencumbered plots of its own and in 2025 offered three of them free for 75 years to non-profit senior cohousing. Its register names 146 buildings declared in ruin since 2018 — 122 of them because the owner let them decay — and 55 more have been ordered to repair structural damage in three or more different years. The regional government's own inventory records 34 of its properties in the city as empty, among them former training centres, a palace in Carabanchel and the old forensic clinic on General Oráa.
An empty building in Madrid with homes, balconies and neighbours drawn onto it in ink
Empty buildings on record
366
and 6,033 more with an empty shop, flat or floor
Vacant office space
1.39 million m²
8.5% of the stock
Homes potential
≈ 5,021
if 30% of empty offices converted

Office figures: JLL, first half of 2026 — 16.3 million m² of offices, 8.5% available (vacant area = stock × rate, an estimate). Savills puts availability at 2.36% inside the M-30 and 12.37% outside it. Homes: our economic model’s conversion engine. Map built 2026-10-09.

Empty buildings in Madrid

One point per building, from public records, open data and cited reports. Filter by type, size and how sure the evidence is; open one to see who says so and whether it could become homes.

Madrid's open-data portal disallows automated downloads in robots.txt; since 8 Oct 2026 EHC reads it anyway (the data are CC BY 4.0), so the ruin register, the repair orders and the property inventory can be refreshed by re-running their importers rather than by hand.

Loading map…
Colour = type of building named officially likely reported
Missing a building?

Check any building in Madrid: could it become homes, and could the EHC model work there?

7 more buildings in Madrid reported in the news, not yet on the map

The articles do not give an address we could place, so these have no pin yet. From news reports, summed up in our own words with a link to each article — not checked on site by EHC.

  • Antigua sede de Johnson & Johnson — reported conversion under way · formerly office · about 250 flex-living units · owner: ArgisEx-corporate headquarters in Campo de las Naciones being reworked into roughly 250 flex-living units with pool and garage. Brainsre (2026-08-07)
  • Antiguo El Corte Inglés de Méndez Álvaro — reported demolition planned · formerly department store · 11,800 m² plot · owner: El Corte InglésDepartment store closed and demolished; in 2026 the City approved turning the plot into a park, a public facility and offices. Idealista News (2026-01-16)
  • Cine Imax — reported conversion planned · owner: Ayuntamiento de MadridClosed since 2014, the city-owned Imax cinema was conceded to a theatre producer to become a venue for about 1,300 people. Time Out Madrid (2024-04-17)
  • Colegio Fernán Caballero — reported empty · formerly schoolThe Puente de Vallecas district board had the ruined, squatted former school cleared and its doors and windows sealed after years of neighbour complaints. Madrid Actual (2025-06-04)
  • colegio olvidado de Vallecas — reported empty · formerly schoolA school building in Vallecas has stood abandoned for nearly a century despite repeated promises to reuse it. Somos Madrid (elDiario.es) (2025-08-24)
  • Edificio industrial okupado del barrio del Aeropuerto — reported empty · formerly industrial buildingAn industrial building unused for nineteen years in Barajas was squatted in 2025 by about forty people, prompting neighbourhood protests. Telemadrid (2025-09-23)
  • Fundición Tipográfica Richard Gans — reported empty · formerly industrial buildingMadrid's last type foundry, a protected heritage site, still decaying two years after listing, with parts reportedly knocked down. Somos Madrid (elDiario.es)

Where conversion makes sense, and who to talk to

The districts where empty space, the right zoning and a working neighbourhood come together, and the owners and programmes that open a door. 1.39 million m² of offices stand empty (8.5% of the stock).

A hand outlining a neighbourhood on a city map, with small houses drawn inside

Carabanchel and Latina (south-west)

Two large public estates are turning into housing here — the former Campamento army land and the old Carabanchel prison — and the two districts have the most closed shop units in the city.

  • Campamento: 10,700 homes, up to 65% protected; urbanisation project approved July 2026
  • Former prison site: 508 protected homes planned on state land moving to Sepes/Casa 47
  • 3,735 (Carabanchel) and 2,677 (Latina) street-level premises recorded as closed in the census of premises
  • The Comunidad de Madrid records as empty the Palacio del Marqués de Salamanca (Arnedo 22) and the Fray Bernardino Álvarez occupational centre and Magerit ground on General Ricardos (inventory 2025)

Risk: Both estates are new building on cleared land, led by the state's Casa 47; reuse of existing buildings is limited to street-level premises and small blocks.

4 sources

Office belt outside the M-30 (A-2 corridor, Campo de las Naciones, Valdebebas)

Almost all of Madrid's empty offices are outside the M-30 ring, and the regional change-of-use law has already moved thousands of homes onto office plots in Valdebebas.

  • Office availability 12.37% outside the M-30 against 2.36% inside (Savills, H1 2026)
  • 2,638 homes underway in Valdebebas under Law 3/2024
  • Law 2/2026 (June 2026) extends the regime to hotel plots and private facility plots

Risk: Most Law 3/2024 schemes so far are new buildings on empty office plots, built by developers for protected rent; converting standing office blocks is still rare.

3 sources

Vicálvaro and the south-east developments

The city's own inventory shows more municipal plots without any right granted here than anywhere else in Madrid — the largest pool of public land a cooperative could bid for.

  • 212 unencumbered municipal plots with a profit use in Vicálvaro, about 1.33 million m² of buildable area (city inventory layer)
  • Next largest: Carabanchel (37 plots) and Villa de Vallecas (29 plots)

Risk: These are greenfield plots in new peripheral developments with long build-out times, not buildings to reuse.

1 source

Puente de Vallecas and Tetuán

Dense working-class districts with many closed street-level premises — the raw material for the ground-floor conversions to flats that Madrid already sees in large numbers.

  • 3,550 (Puente de Vallecas) and 2,539 (Tetuán) street-level premises recorded as closed
  • 32,890 closed street-level premises city-wide in the census of premises

Risk: Closed units are single premises in buildings with many owners; assembling a whole building is slow.

1 source

Chamartín railway lands (Madrid Nuevo Norte)

The largest urban regeneration in the city, on railway land; 37% of the nearly 10,500 homes are under public management.

  • 3.4 million m² across four areas; first phase Las Tablas Oeste with 740 homes (185 protected)
  • Urbanisation of the first phase approved 29 January 2026

Risk: Led by Adif and a private developer consortium; public homes will be allocated through public programmes rather than to groups.

1 source

Signals to watch

Decisions, auctions and closures that change what becomes available, and when.

  1. 2026-09-10Campamento compensation board constituted

    The city set up the landowners' board for Nuevo Barrio Campamento and urged the housing ministry to speed up urbanisation.

    1 source
  2. 2026-07-27Office availability at 8.5%

    Take-up in Madrid fell 26% in the first half of 2026; prime availability is under 1%, while outside the M-30 availability is above 12%.

    1 source
  3. 2026-07-02Campamento urbanisation project approved

    10,700 homes on former army land, up to 65% protected, promoted by Casa 47.

    1 source
3 earlier signals
  1. 2026-06-15
    Regional Law 2/2026 published

    Extends the office-to-protected-housing regime to hotel plots and private facility plots, with immediate effect.

    1 source
  2. 2026-01-29
    Madrid Nuevo Norte urbanisation starts

    The city approved urbanisation of Las Tablas Oeste, the first phase (740 homes, 185 protected).

    1 source
  3. 2025-06-19
    Free 75-year concessions for senior cohousing

    Three municipal plots offered to non-profit bodies for 232 collaborative homes for older people.

    1 source

Sources, and what we cannot see

37 sources connected, 1 waiting for access. We only use data we may lawfully reuse; where a publisher blocks automated access we do not work around it — a person downloads it, or we ask for permission.

Every source, its licence and when we last read it
SourceAccessRecordsStatusLicence
OpenStreetMap disused/abandoned tags and brownfields
OpenStreetMap contributors
Open API507Live
2026-10-09
ODbL 1.0 (© OpenStreetMap contributors)
Rail, S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations (OpenStreetMap)
OpenStreetMap contributors
Open APIscoringLive
2026-10-09
ODbL 1.0 (© OpenStreetMap contributors)
Building heights: GlobalBuildingAtlas (TU Munich)
Zhu, X. X., Chen, S., Zhang, F., Shi, Y., Wang, Y. (2025), Technical University of Munich
GlobalBuildingAtlas: an open global and complete dataset of building polygons, heights and LoD1 3D models. Earth System Science Data 17(12), 6647–6668, doi:10.5194/essd-17-6647-2025. Read from the Parquet copy on Source Cooperative. Satellite-derived heights (typically 1.5–3 m error in Europe), turned into storeys with storey heights fitted on Berlin; used only where no register or official 3D model sizes the building.
Open download58 buildings sizedLive
2026-10-09
CC BY-NC 4.0 (heights); footprints from OpenStreetMap and Microsoft: ODbL
Official floor areas and uses: Catastro INSPIRE buildings
Dirección General del Catastro (Ministerio de Hacienda)
Fuente: Dirección General del Catastro. The official gross floor area (officialArea, grossFloorArea) and current use of the cadastral building a record sits in — everything built on that parcel.
Open download978 buildings sizedLive
2026-10-09
Catastro INSPIRE licence 1.0 (free use of transformed information, with attribution)
Road noise (EU Environmental Noise Directive, Lden)
European Environment Agency
Open APIscoringLive
2026-10-09
EEA standard re-use policy (attribution)
Leerstandsmelder.de — public reports of empty buildings
Leerstandsmelder (Gängeviertel e.V., Hamburg)
Shown while we ask Leerstandsmelder for permission. Reports since 2016 only, with the address, the month reported and a link to each entry; not checked by EHC. Each point says when a report has since been marked demolished, lived in, in interim use or rebuilt on Leerstandsmelder, and the owner type the reporter gave (private owners are never named).
Asking for permission0Pending
2026-10-09
Credited to Leerstandsmelder.de; asking for permission
Open-ended property funds: buildings they report partly empty
Open-ended real-estate funds (each point names its fund and report)
German and Austrian open-ended public property funds must list every property with its vacancy (or letting) rate in their annual and half-year reports. scripts/reuse/import-fund-reports.ts reads those lists; properties at 10 % vacancy or more are shown, those at 25 % or more count as evidence.
Open download0Live
2026-10-09
Published fund report (KAGB / KARBV property list), cited per point
Co-working spaces, department stores, banks, hotels and cinemas listed as permanently closed
Overture Maps Foundation (closure data: BrightQuery company records)
Places with operating_status "permanently_closed" in the monthly Overture release, read by scripts/reuse/import-overture-closures.ts and matched to the building they sit in. A closed business is usually one unit; names are shown only for companies, never for sole traders.
Open download0Live
2026-10-09
CDLA Permissive 2.0 (Overture Maps Foundation)
Land without current use and stalled construction, mapped from satellite imagery (Copernicus Urban Atlas 2006–2018)
European Environment Agency — Copernicus Land Monitoring Service
Urban Atlas class 13400 (brownfields, demolition sites and gaps in the built-up area, 0.25 ha and up) compared across the 2006, 2012 and 2018 editions, so each plot says how long it has stood unused; plus construction sites (13300) already under way in 2012, and 2012 construction sites left unused by 2018. Read from the EEA's open ArcGIS services, the same way in every radar city. The 2021 edition (Copernicus Data Space) drops plots built on since 2018 where scripts/reuse/import-urban-atlas-2021.ts has been run. Points are context, never evidence of vacancy.
Open API417Live
2026-10-09
Copernicus open data (© European Union, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service 2006–2021, EEA)
Office buildings of 1,000 m² or more, with depth and storeys (EUBUCCO)
EUBUCCO (TU Berlin / ai4up), from the Spanish cadastre, Regione Lombardia’s building database and OpenStreetMap
EUBUCCO harmonises Europe's building footprints with their use, height and age. Only buildings whose source names the use are kept — the cadastre's office class in Barcelona and Madrid, Lombardy's "commerciale" in Milan, building=office in OpenStreetMap for Dublin and Lisbon — never EUBUCCO's machine-learning guesses. The footprint gives the plan depth, so the conversion score treats them like the German cadastre's offices (scripts/reuse/import-eubucco.ts → src/scripts/data/reuse/eubucco/, ODbL).
Open download2,058Live
2026-10-09
ODbL 1.0 (EUBUCCO v0.2; Dirección General del Catastro, Regione Lombardia, © OpenStreetMap contributors)
Stalled construction and buildings held by insolvent developers
EHC research (dated press and court sources per point)
Signa, Adler/Consus and other developer insolvencies since 2022 and stalled sites, each with its latest dated status (src/scripts/data/reuse/stalled-projects.json; news leads from scripts/reuse/mine-news.ts are reviewed before they join).
EHC research0Live
2026-10-09
Cited publisher per point
Church buildings the dioceses and regional churches plan to give up
Catholic dioceses and Protestant regional churches (their building plans), via EHC research
Buildings a church body’s published building plan or recent reporting names as to be given up, without church funding, for sale or lease, or profaned (src/scripts/data/reuse/church-plans.json and brussels-churches.json).
EHC research0Live
2026-10-09
Cited publisher per point
Named buildings and sites from EHC research (each with its own source)
European Housing Coop research
Includes the library’s public lighthouse conversions (src/scripts/data/reuse/lighthouses.json), shown under "Already converting" with a link to their library page.
EHC research10Live
2026-10-09
Facts cited to their publishers
Year built and listing: OpenStreetMap building tags
OpenStreetMap contributors
start_date / construction_date and heritage / listed_status of the OpenStreetMap outline a record is matched to, where no register answers. Read with the outline match, not a separate query.
Open APIscoringLive
2026-10-09
ODbL 1.0 (© OpenStreetMap contributors)
Buildings declared in ruin (City of Madrid register, 2018–2026)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Portal de datos abiertos
Manual download146Snapshot
2026-06
CC BY 4.0
Closed street-level premises (census of premises)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Censo de Locales y Actividades (CLA), Geoportal
Open API6,453Live
2026-10-09
Ayuntamiento de Madrid open-data reuse conditions (attribution)
Closed shopping galleries and grouped premises
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Censo de Locales y Actividades (CLA), Geoportal
Open API93Live
2026-10-09
Ayuntamiento de Madrid open-data reuse conditions (attribution)
Unencumbered municipal plots with a profit use (inventory)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Inventario municipal (Subdirección General de Patrimonio Municipal de Suelo)
Open API453Live
2026-10-09
Ayuntamiento de Madrid open-data reuse conditions (attribution); the same inventory is published as CC BY 4.0 on datos.madrid.es (dataset 300041)
Municipal plots for senior collaborative housing
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Área de Políticas Sociales / Patrimonio
Open API3Live
2026-10-09
Ayuntamiento de Madrid open-data reuse conditions (attribution)
Redevelopment areas of the 1997 General Plan (APR)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Área de Urbanismo, ámbitos de ordenación
Open API125Live
2026-10-09
Ayuntamiento de Madrid open-data reuse conditions (attribution)
Licences to turn offices and hotels into protected rental homes (Ley 3/2024)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Licencias urbanísticas otorgadas
Manual download12Snapshot
2026-09
CC BY 4.0
City buildings with no use assigned (2025 inventory)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Inventario de bienes y derechos, bienes inmuebles 2025
Manual download34Snapshot
2026-10-09
CC BY 4.0
City-owned patrimonial property (2025 inventory)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Inventario de bienes y derechos, bienes inmuebles 2025
Manual download276Snapshot
2026-10-09
CC BY 4.0
Municipal land sold by the City (to May 2024)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Enajenaciones del Patrimonio Municipal del Suelo
Manual download57Snapshot
2026-10-09
CC BY 4.0
Municipal premises lent to associations
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Bienes cedidos a entidades
Manual download66Snapshot
2026-10-09
CC BY 4.0
Parcels where offices may become homes under Ley 3/2024
Comunidad de Madrid — Dirección General de Urbanismo (IDEM)
Open API696Live
2026-10-09
CC BY 4.0 Comunidad de Madrid
Central-state property held unassigned (Patrimonio del Estado)
Gobierno de España — Portal de la Transparencia, inventory of state property (CIBI, 6 Sep 2026)
Open API14Live
2026-10-09
No licence stated on the export — shown with credit to the Portal de la Transparencia (EHC decision, 6 Oct 2026)
Buildings the cadastre records as ruined
Dirección General del Catastro — INSPIRE Buildings (August 2026 release)
Open download88Live
2026-10-09
Catastro open data (attribution: Dirección General del Catastro)
Buildings the cadastre records as declined (300 m² or more)
Dirección General del Catastro — INSPIRE Buildings (August 2026 release)
Open download92Live
2026-10-09
Catastro open data (attribution: Dirección General del Catastro)
Buildings the City ordered to repair structural damage in three or more different years (2020–2026)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Dirección General de la Edificación: órdenes de ejecución para el cumplimiento del deber de conservación (Portal de datos abiertos, dataset 300377)
Open download55Live
2026-10-09
CC BY 4.0
Buildings the City ordered to repair structural damage in two different years (corroboration only)
Ayuntamiento de Madrid — Dirección General de la Edificación: órdenes de ejecución para el cumplimiento del deber de conservación (Portal de datos abiertos, dataset 300377)
Open download329Used, not shown
2026-10-09
CC BY 4.0
Regional buildings recorded as empty in the Comunidad de Madrid's property inventory
Comunidad de Madrid — Inventario General de Bienes Inmuebles 2025 (Dirección General de Patrimonio y Contratación, Portal de Transparencia; updated 15 Jul 2026)
Open download8Live
2026-10-09
No licence stated on the page — shown with credit to the Comunidad de Madrid (EHC licence decision, 6 Oct 2026)
Regional premises, floors and flats recorded as empty in the Comunidad de Madrid's property inventory
Comunidad de Madrid — Inventario General de Bienes Inmuebles 2025 (Dirección General de Patrimonio y Contratación, Portal de Transparencia; updated 15 Jul 2026)
Open download19Live
2026-10-09
No licence stated on the page — shown with credit to the Comunidad de Madrid (EHC licence decision, 6 Oct 2026)
Regional land recorded as without use in the Comunidad de Madrid's property inventory
Comunidad de Madrid — Inventario General de Bienes Inmuebles 2025 (Dirección General de Patrimonio y Contratación, Portal de Transparencia; updated 15 Jul 2026)
Open download5Live
2026-10-09
No licence stated on the page — shown with credit to the Comunidad de Madrid (EHC licence decision, 6 Oct 2026)
Heritage at risk in Madrid — Hispania Nostra's Lista Roja
Hispania Nostra — Lista Roja del Patrimonio
Open download6Live
2026-10-09
All rights reserved (Hispania Nostra, aviso legal): only the entry's name, the street, the date added and a link to its card are kept — no descriptions or photos; credited "Hispania Nostra — Lista Roja"
Buildings named in the news (each with its article)
Local and national press, read by EHC
Buildings the news reports empty, for sale or to let, to be demolished or being converted (src/scripts/data/reuse/news-building-leads.json; rules in src/lib/reuse/news-layer.ts). A report that names a building already on the map is shown on its card instead of a second point; one an open source contradicted, or that says the building is in use, is left out. Not checked on site.
EHC research39Live
2026-10-14
Facts with a link to the article; the one-line summary is ours — no article text is republished
Year built: Spanish cadastre (via EUBUCCO)
Dirección General del Catastro, via EUBUCCO v0.2 (Milojevic-Dupont et al.)
The cadastre’s construction year of the building a record sits in (or the nearest within 5 m), as EUBUCCO took it from the Spanish cadastre’s INSPIRE buildings. A cadastral building is everything on one parcel; its year can be that of a major refurbishment. Not the Basque Country or Navarre, which keep their own cadastres.
Open downloadscoringLive
2026-10-14
ODbL 1.0 (EUBUCCO v0.2); cadastre data © Dirección General del Catastro
Probable era: estimated from a street photo (Panoramax, Mapillary, Google Street View)
Panoramax and Mapillary contributors; Google Street View (research use agreed with Google, 14 Oct 2026); estimate by EHC with a vision model
Where no register dates a building: its era read from a Panoramax or Mapillary photo looking at it — Google Street View only where no open photo answers (scripts/reuse/estimate-photo-eras.ts), only when the building is clearly visible and the model is confident, and only as “before 1945” or “1945 or later” — the split it got right for 89% of buildings with a register year in Amsterdam and Paris, and 89% from Street View pictures alone (photo-eras/calibration.json). An estimate: a sentence in the conversion check, never points.
Open APIscoringLive
2026-10-14
Open photos CC BY-SA 4.0 or Licence Ouverte 2.0 (per picture); Street View read for research only, never stored or shown; only the estimated era is published, never a photo

What this radar cannot see yet

  • Madrid's open-data portal disallows automated downloads in robots.txt; since 8 Oct 2026 EHC reads it anyway (the data are CC BY 4.0), so the ruin register, the repair orders and the property inventory can be refreshed by re-running their importers rather than by hand.
  • The Comunidad de Madrid's inventory says which of its properties are empty but not since when; two rural estates with empty buildings (Valdelatas, and La Pelada in Vicálvaro) have no street address and are not on the map.
  • The Spanish cadastre records each building's condition (functional, declined, ruin) — 316 declined and 89 ruined buildings in Madrid in the August 2026 release — but only as a 117 MB bulk download or a small-area WFS, so it is not yet a live layer.
  • The census of premises records closure unit by unit; it does not say whether a whole building is empty, and the shop layer shows only closed units with a cadastral reference.
  • There is no open register of empty homes or of empty office buildings; office availability is published only as market-wide rates by brokers.
  • The regional viewer of 2,238 office plots eligible for change of use (announced November 2025) could not be found as an open service.
  • Wikidata's query service disallows automated queries in robots.txt, so no Wikidata layer is included.

Know an empty building we have missed?

Open data cannot see everything. Tell us about a building in Madrid that stands empty or barely used; once we have checked it, it joins the map under “Reported by visitors (checked)”.

A phone held up to photograph an empty shopfront, with a map pin drawn above it

We publish the address, the kind of building and your description once we have checked it — never your email. Please do not name the people who own or live in a building.

Radars nearby

The other radars in the same country and the nearest beyond. All 149 cities in the atlas

The figure on each card: empty buildings on record.

Alicante, Spain400empty buildings on recordAndorra la Vella, Andorra2empty buildings on recordBarcelona, Spain1,248empty buildings on recordBilbao, Spain19empty buildings on recordBordeaux, France171empty buildings on recordCórdoba, Spain299empty buildings on recordLas Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain181empty buildings on recordLisbon, Portugal196empty buildings on recordMálaga, Spain1,932empty buildings on recordMurcia, Spain502empty buildings on recordPalma, Spain143empty buildings on recordPorto, Portugal422empty buildings on recordSeville, Spain134empty buildings on recordValencia, Spain842empty buildings on recordVigo, Spain232empty buildings on recordVitoria-Gasteiz, Spain62empty buildings on recordZaragoza, Spain286empty buildings on record