Dicen que va a cambiar — They Say It Is Going to Change

Second-hand information, and how much weight it carries

Almost everything in this dialogue is something somebody else said, and that is not an artificial setup. A great deal of practical information in Spain circulates exactly this way — through a cousin who works at the ayuntamiento, a neighbour who heard it at the bar, a colleague whose brother-in-law is a lawyer. The grammar of reported speech is therefore not a written exercise; it is how people tell each other what is going on. Spanish has a precise set of hedges for how much you are vouching for, and using them correctly makes you sound considerably more reliable. dicen que is the weakest: they say, no source. corre el rumor de que is explicitly a rumour. por lo visto and al parecer mean apparently, and are what a careful speaker uses for anything they have not verified. según mi prima attributes it. me consta que means I know it for a fact, and is strong. And the flat me dijo que claims only that the person said it, not that it is true. A Spanish speaker who reports a change in the law with dicen que and one who reports it with me consta que are making very different claims, and being caught out on the second is much worse. On the substance, since the rumour in this dialogue is a real one: the regulation of holiday lets in Spain is genuinely in motion and genuinely local. Competence sits with the autonomous communities and, in practice, with individual councils, so the rules in Barcelona, Palma, Seville and Madrid are different from each other and change often. Registration numbers are now required for advertising a short-term let in most of the country, several cities have frozen new licences outright, and communities of neighbours were given clearer power to refuse a holiday let in their building. If you are ever on the letting side of this, the one safe rule is that nothing your cousin tells you substitutes for the ayuntamiento's own website — which is why Alex's instinct to confirm it por escrito is the right one. One small point of usage. Notice that Sofía answers ¿Y qué le contestaste? with a bare Que era nuestro. Spanish allows a reported clause to stand alone as an answer, with no verb of saying in front of it, and it is extremely common in speech: ¿Qué te dijo? Que no venía. English cannot do this — that it was ours is not an answer — so it has to be learned as a pattern rather than translated.