ISSN 2184-8793 ISSNe 2975-9056 This is an activity whose effect on the daily life of the populations is very direct, consisting into the immediate daily introduction of external monetary means, which positively results in enhancing the quality of life of the community, in particular the local commerce, which benefits from the presence of new consumers with more elaborated and sophisticated uses and an increased value. As a result, it improves the quality of urban life, since, under pressure from tourism entrepreneurs and visitors, municipal and sub-municipal entities are led to intensify their action in terms of cleaning, arrangement, and maintenance of public spaces, painting facades of buildings, improving the quality of public transport, or monitoring compliance with health rules in public places. The economic gains generated by tourism obviously benefit individuals, especially when we talk about urban areas, through the broadening of the population basis that benefits from the increase of touristic revenues and the democratization in the access to touristic products and services, in which small and medium-sized entrepreneurs act in parallel with economic groups or having them as clients, taking advantage and benefiting from their greater investment capacity and ability to determine the tourism offer. This multiplier effect of tourism on average population and on the small and medium-sized businesses is even more visible in the marketing of accommodation in furnished private homes for short periods, an activity that, in Portugal, the law call local accommodation, especially when intermediated by digital platforms that promote it in a global market as business with cross-border potential that covers almost all every single country in the world2 . Yet, these advantages do not come without costs. Tourist activity generates externalities that cause social, urbanistic, and ecological imbalances, among others, and it is up to the States, through the legal instruments at their disposition to create compensations and balance mechanisms to protect the different legal rights and interests at stake. In economic terms, there has been a marked trend towards a change in the destination of housing stock in urban centres, which has been transformed from household places into accommodations for temporary use, for short periods, mainly for tourism purposes, whether managed in tourist resorts or local accommodation establishments. 2 Feliu, 2020, p.170.
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