The Canary Islands are struggling with a paradox that is spreading throughout all tourist destinations in the world: to what extent what is their main source of wealth has also become their source of misery. Tourism contributes more than 35% of the GDP and fuels the entire productive fabric of the third Spanish destination by number of visitors. But, at the same time, there are many citizens, even among that 40% of the total workers who are dedicated to the sector, who wonder if there are already too many visitors arriving. This question grows in volume with each family that has to leave their neighborhood due to the rise in housing prices, each time they try to use collapsed hospital emergencies or with each new hotel macro project that threatens an already deteriorated landscape.
This is the panorama that emerged yesterday in a historic demonstration on the seven islands of the archipelago. Under the motto The Canary Islands have a limit, 57,000 people, according to data from the Government Delegation, have walked the streets of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Arrecife (Lanzarote), Puerto del Rosario (Fuerteventura), Valverde (El Hierro), San Sebastián de La Gomera and Santa Cruz de La Palma to demand measures such as an ecotax, a moratorium on new projects or greater regulation of home purchases. Six activists have also been on hunger strike since the 11th in La Laguna (Tenerife) demanding the stoppage of two tourism projects on the island.
“It is not tourismphobia, it is corruptionphobia,” the protesters cried yesterday. “Tourism raises my rent,” they continued, “paradise is not made with cement” and “Clavijo, listen, we are in the fight” ―in reference to the president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo (Canary Coalition)―. The archipelago, a synthesis in its small territory of the externalities that this industry generates for all Spanish destinations, yesterday thus became the speaker that has protested loudest against a mass tourism program that does not hesitate to show off its record figures after the sinkhole of the pandemic.
“We receive more and more tourists and, yet, we present the worst poverty and unemployment data and we have the greatest difficulties in accessing housing,” explains one of the spokespersons for the Ben Magec-Ecologistas en Acción federation of associations, Eugenio. Reyes, in the days prior to the call. “It is a total disaster, also from an environmental point of view. “They have burst the system in a single year of government.”
The Canary Islands closed 2023 with a tourist turnover of 22,000 million euros, the highest in its history, with more than 16 million visitors. This is the shiny side. There is another one that is not so: salaries on the islands are the second lowest in the country (1,630 euros per month on average), it has the third highest unemployment rate (16.2%, according to the latest EPA from the INE) , the second highest inflation (3.5%, compared to 3.2% nationally according to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics) and the second highest risk of poverty rate (26.1%). It is the fourth community with the highest rental price per square meter, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife is the second province where prices grew the most in the last year, according to Idealista. This panorama has led the Canarian Government to even applaud the protest. In recent days, President Fernando Clavijo encouraged society to “come out and express its discontent” and accepted the need to rethink the model and ask questions such as imposing tourist caps.
Much of the recriminations are directed at the tourism industry, which accounts for 35.2% of the regional GDP. “This is a territory with clear limits,” adds Noelia Sánchez, also a spokesperson for Ben Magec. “Increasingly, the roads are more saturated, the rent does not stop rising, people who traditionally lived in a neighborhood are expelled; “Natural spaces are increasingly crowded, full of garbage and contaminated, all while maintaining structural poverty and unemployment rates and public services that are not improving.” Most tourists land through a tour operator, wholesale companies that usually offer low prices, which reduces spending on the islands. “Let’s replace mass tourism, typical of the 20th century, with qualified tourism,” summarizes Eugenio Reyes.
“I share 90% of the demands,” explains the Minister of Tourism and Employment, Jessica de León (Popular Party), in a telephone conversation. “But we must focus the demands on the mismanagement that has been done of natural resources and sing the MEA culpa, but not to attack an industry that generates jobs and that is already carrying out a great transformation.” Given the success of yesterday’s call, businessmen have modified their fierce defense of the model. The president of the businessmen of the province of Las Palmas, Pedro Ortega, even acknowledged this week to Cadena Ser that the archipelago has entered a “period of reflection” on the economic model. “We are committed to moving towards regenerative tourism, which has a special impact on not generating negative impacts on the destination,” adds Agustín Manrique de Lara, president of the Círculo de Empresarios de Gran Canaria.
These intentions are observed with ―at the very least― skepticism by the organizers. “In the last edition of Fitur nothing was done other than promoting mass tourism,” Reyes resumes. “The Executive’s dream is to reach 25 million tourists a year. And that at the cost of an overexploited territory. And there are the projects in La Tejita [enclave en el sur de Tenerife donde se construye un hotel de lujo]the Puertito macroproject [un complejo de apartamentos de 1.800 camas en Adeje, también en el sur de Tenerife]or four new hotels in the south of Gran Canaria.”
Once again the counselor responds to these criticisms. “A lot of land that had a tourist use and has now become rustic has been declassified,” she explains, and affirms that the cause is the Land Law that the previous cabinet of Fernando Clavijo approved in 2017. “Those projects that are still alive are those that had some type of license. The decrease is real, and can be verified with figures.”
Hotels no longer monopolize all the criticism for the pressure they exert on the territory. “We have a huge housing crisis. “Urban vacation tourism is devastating the population and entire neighborhoods,” says Reyes. Currently, there are 53,938 tourist apartments registered on the islands, according to data from the Executive, 39.7% more than in November 2022. In total, 220,409 places are available (the group of hotel and non-hotel places totals 363,009). “I no longer know my neighbors, and there are fewer and fewer stores in the area.” These are the words at street level from María Suárez, a resident of the Guanarteme neighborhood, the jewel in the crown of real estate projects in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria thanks to its location on the beachfront. “Housing in the Canary Islands has become a financial asset,” says Noelia Sánchez.
The Canary Islands registered the second largest increase in the average price of housing in 2023, according to INE data, and is in the leading pack in the increase in rental prices, according to the Idealista real estate portal. The increase in prices, partly driven by vacation apartments, expels them from their neighborhoods, and regional legislation prohibits them from residing in a tourist apartment, which complicates the situation for the owners. The department headed by De León made public at the beginning of the month the Draft Law on the sustainable management of tourist use of housing, the rule that will regulate this activity on the islands. This text represents a severe restriction for this activity, for which a minimum surface area of 39 square meters will be required, permission from the neighborhood association or separate entrances for the upper floors, among other requirements. Legislation that, according to the sector, will mean the end of this business. “It is a measure that the Canarians demanded and that the owners demand,” says De León, who admits room for improvement. He clarifies, however, that vacation homes are not the only ones responsible for the situation. “The state housing law has been bad for the Canary Islands because it unprotects the owner and has taken 40% of the housing off the market, which is partly intended for vacation.”
A pressure situation that adds to the hardships of a population that depends on a single industry. “The Canary Islands have an economic structure that is highly concentrated in tourism,” Gustavo Marrero, professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences, Business and Tourism at the University of La Laguna, explained to this newspaper in October 2020. “This is a sector with not very high productivity compared to others,” the economist clarifies. “For this reason, salaries are lower on average.” This low productivity forces, in turn, marathon days. This is clearly observed in the chambermaid sector. “We are slaves,” says Mónica García, president of the independent Kellys Unión Tenerife Association, another of the groups that attended the demonstration yesterday. “Since November we have taken to the streets to demand that our work overload be removed, because we are super exploited.”
This is exemplified by María (fictitious name). “I have no desire to go to work since I wake up,” she laments over the phone. “We work in bad conditions, with a brutal overload, and on top of that with bad attitudes. The bosses think that we are the worst in the hospitality industry.” She goes to work in a hotel in the south of Tenerife at 7:30 to clean the common areas. At 9 she starts with the rooms. “We each have about 14, plus two or three exits [que requieren una limpieza más a fondo]. It is unfeasible. We ask that an in-depth study be carried out to measure the times, but the companies refuse.” And he says: “Without us there is no tourism. We are the main link in the chain, but also the lowest paid. And this has to change.”
These poor conditions and the lack of housing are causing problems when it comes to filling places. “I believe that the situation may be due to many factors, many of them far from the sector and that are the responsibility of the State,” indicates Ignacio Poladura, general director of Viajes Insular and president of the Canarian Association of Travel Agencies and Tour Operators. “We must analyze whether the employer does not offer enough attraction for the unemployed to rejoin the labor sector.” He states, in any case: “The cause of our imbalances is not tourism. It is thanks to him, in fact, that we emerged from poverty and became a prosperous society.”
Yesterday, many thought the opposite. “We have no prospects for living here with miserable salaries and sky-high rents,” stressed Fátima Cabrera, a 19-year-old Psychology student, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. “They are expelling us from our land and this model is to blame.” Not far from Cabrera, four eyes were curiously observing the boredom on the part of Canarian society: Lucy and Hans, a couple of septuagenarian German tourists from Berlin who had just decided to visit the capital of Tenerife. “I hope you understand that we are not trying to hurt you,” they joke. “But we understand: there are already too many of us every year.”
