Property rent in Spain: From €180 to €3,000 a month for same sized apartment depending on area

A flat on the Passeig de Gràcia (pictured left) in Spain's second-largest city comes in at a cool €29.58 per square metre every month, compared with €1.80 per square metre in Carrús, a neighbourhood in the large town of Elche just south of Alicante airport.

For a comfortable-sized three-bed apartment suitable for a small family, this works out at around €2,958 in the former compared with €180 per month in the latter.

For a small, one-bedroomed flat, the price still sits at about €1,479 on the Passeig de Gràcia, but around €90 a month in Carrús.

Property valuation experts at TecniTasa say renting a home on some of the most desirable, attractive and central streets in the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, Bilbao, Cádiz, Marbella, A Coruña in Galicia, San Sebastián, Zaragoza in Aragón and Pamplona will practically never come in at below €1,500, reaching €3,000 to €4,500 for a large, spacious apartment.

But other than the Carrús suburb (pictured below right) in Elche, some neighbourhoods in the towns and cities of Alicante, Castellón, Huelva, Torrent (Valencia province), Málaga, Almería, Jaén, Granada and Jerez de la Frontera (Cádiz province) have homes to rent which regularly cost a lot less than €200 a month, even for those of a good size and quality, and even drop into double figures in some cases.

The Passeig de Gràcia has knocked the stately C/ Serrano in Madrid off the top spot of the most expensive street to rent a home in Spain – in the latter, a 100-square-metre apartment, typically a three-bedroom type with room for a couple and one or two children, costs an average of €2,784 per month for its tenants.

For the same type of apartment in Pamplona, a tenant would have to pay €2,490 a month; in Marbella, €1,920 a month and in Cádiz, €1,786 a month.

At the other extreme, Elche-Carrús' €180 for a 100-square-metre apartment is far from an isolated case: in the Torrejón neighbourhood in Huelva city, the farthest south-western provincial capital in Spain, this same apartment would cost an average of €198 a month to rent and, if it was based in the Pescadería district or old fishermen's neighbourhood in Almería city, would barely reach €200 a month.

The Forbes report, based upon TecniTasa's research, reveals how rental prices have shot up the most in Pontevedra and Vigo, both in Galicia; Santander in Cantabria, and Castellón in the Valencia region, rising by 13% in 12 months.

By contrast, rental prices have gone down by nearly this amount over the past year in the cities of Córdoba in Andalucía; Huesca and Zaragoza in Aragón; Ávila, Salamanca and Zamora in the centre-northern region of Castilla y León, and Guadalajara in central Castilla-La Mancha.

Cities with the greatest gulf between the most expensive and the cheapest properties for rent are, unsurprisingly, Spain's two largest metropolitan areas: in Barcelona's Besós and Ciutat Meridiana ('Meridian City') neighbourhoods, renting a 100-square-metre apartment comes in at a 10^th of the price of the same one on the Passeig de Gràcia, at barely €300 a month, whilst in Madrid, the same size of flat in the San Cristóbal de los Ángeles neighbourhood costs just €470 a month to rent, which is one-sixth of the price it would be if it was on the city's most-expensive street, the C/ Serrano.