The residents of the island of Tenerife have to endure up to two hours of queuing on the road every day to be able to get to work due to traffic jams on the TF-5, while in Lanzarote, day in and day out, beaches are closed due to spills in the sea of ??untreated wastewater.
In Gran Canaria, the dunes of Maspalomas suffer the passage of hundreds of tourists all year round, altering their conservation, while Fuerteventura constantly has water supply cuts due to lack of infrastructure.
In La Graciosa, of only 29 square kilometers and with a population of 800 inhabitants that is multiplying with tourism, waste management is their problem. On the green islands –La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro–, for their part, they complain about the lack of services that forces them to travel to the capital islands to see a medical specialist.
Eight islands that are eight tourist destinations with different problems derived from the same cause: the lack of management in response to the arrival of millions of visitors each year to the Canary Islands. Despite the differences, all the islands united last Saturday, April 20, in massive demonstrations under the cry that the Canary Islands have a limit and the demand to review the tourism model and prevent the construction of new beds.
In 2023, 16.2 million people arrived on the islands, four million more than 10 years ago. However, infrastructure and services have not grown at the same rate, generating a deficit that affects the well-being of the islanders. To the reception of tourists we must add the strong population growth, largely due to the arrival of labor to work in the sector, of almost 30% in 20 years (500,000 people, 300,000 in Tenerife), without The administrations have been able to respond and not due to lack of resources: the IGIC (island tax similar to VAT) on tourist activity generates 3.5 billion euros per year.
The housing problem, as occurs in other areas of Spain such as Catalonia or the Balearic Islands, is common to the eight islands and the main concern of the Canary Islands as was evident in the mobilizations. The pressure of vacation rentals, especially from the large owners, is expelling many people from their neighborhoods and has skyrocketed rental prices. In the capitals it is impossible to find a rental home for less than 900-1,000 euros per month when salaries in the Canary Islands are among the lowest in Spain and the region leads the rate of workers with the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI).
There is no housing and it is not built. In the Canary Islands, the average housing construction is 3,000 a year when, according to the Bank of Spain, around 11,000 should be built to respond to demand. Foreigners buy 30% at the same time that thousands of houses have left the residential area to become tourist apartments, putting upward pressure on prices, preventing Canarians from accessing them. On the public side, the Canary Islands have not built social housing for more than ten years.
“At the beginning, years ago we noticed the impact at an environmental level, on the ecosystems of the islands, but this did not reach everyone. The problem now is that the Canary Islander notices what is happening and it affects him in his day-to-day life,” says Felipe Ravina, a documentary producer who was in charge of reading the manifesto of the mobilization that he released on 20-A in Tenerife. more than 30,000 people took to the streets. “There are traffic jams, people who have to leave where they live because they cannot pay the rent and people who are kicked out of their homes because a foreigner arrives and buys it to put it up for vacation rental. The situation is bloody,” he says.
From the hotel association of the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Ashotel), Jorge Marichal, who also leads the Hotel Confederation of Spain (Cehat), understands the “anger and fed up” of the Canarians. In his opinion, some people make a mistake when it comes to understanding what is happening in the Canary Islands, since, after the mobilizations, there is not a rejection of tourists – as Ravina also makes clear – but of political representatives who, in the last 20 years , they have not known how to manage at the rate at which tourism and the population grew. “We have the same infrastructure as two decades ago and with many more people. This generates pressure on the territory and services, such as health, education, traffic or housing, which those of us who live here suffer from,” says Marichal, who assures that the islands have been in total “ineffectiveness and inefficiency” for 20 years. public.” In his opinion, the problem lies in this lack of infrastructure and the strong growth of vacations. In fact, as he indicates, on the islands today there are 36 fewer hotels than in 2010 and 67,000 fewer traditional beds, which have been covered with the emergence of 225,000 beds in tourist apartments. “Tourism is not the problem, it is the solution. The activity leaves a lot of money with which we can pay for health and education and improve the lives of all Canarians, but it must be managed well,” he says.
The massive mobilizations of 20-A have reached the Parliament of the Canary Islands this week, but beyond fueling the political debate they have served little purpose. The regional government – ??CC and PP – is against establishing an ecotax as demanded by the organizers, although they are open to implementing a finalist tax on tourists for access to certain protected spaces. The PSOE, which governed in the previous legislature and did not implement the ecotax despite including it in its electoral program, is putting pressure on the Government to create it.
Nor is a new moratorium in sight or limiting the purchase of housing by foreigners, as claimed by the organizing groups of 20-A that announce new mobilizations due to the political “lack of action.” “We are going to continue demanding until our claims come true and no more beds are built,” says Ravina, who points out as an example the two luxury projects that are underway in Tenerife, the La Tejita hotel (Granadilla), with 883 new beds, and Cuna del Alma (Adeje), which foresees the construction of 420 high-end villas. According to Ravina, although politicians are playing “to divert attention” while waiting for tempers to cool down, this time it is not going to happen. “The Canary Islands are united and we are clear that we cannot continue down the path of collapse. The Canary Islands have a limit,” she concludes.
A few weeks ago, the Government of the Canary Islands approved a decree of urgent measures with which it intends to put thousands of affordable homes on the market in the coming years, while at the same time it is about to approve a rule to control vacation rentals. The president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, assumes that with this “we are on the path to solving the problems.” But these measures do not solve the deficit in infrastructure and public services, the solution to which will take a few more years. “We are worried because we are playing with our main source of wealth and this is not going to be solved overnight,” concludes Marichal, who warns that competing destinations in the Canary Islands are rubbing their hands waiting for the social unrest to end. increase on the islands and scare away visitors.
This same week, protests have been organized in front of the president’s house, while posters and graffiti grow – one on one of the access roads to the El Teide National Park – demanding a “limit” in the Canary Islands and adoption of measurements.
