By Borja Suarez and Corina Pons
Gran Canaria, Spain (Reuters) – Thousands of people protested against mass tourism in the Canary Islands of Spain on Sunday, urging the authorities to limit the number of visitors to protect local residents from housing costs, traffic congestion and overloaded services.
Walking under the banner “The Canaries have a limit”, the demonstrators went down to the streets in all the main islands of the archipelago and in several cities in continental Spain. Some sang the effects of tourism on the water supply.
“Tourism is very important for the Canary Islands, but we must realize that the collapse is total,” said Juan Francisco Galindo, director of the hotel in Tenerife, in Reuters.
His father has a small property on the island on which the local administration made an expropriation prescription in 2023 due to the approval of a luxury hotel complex project.
“These 70 square meters (750 square feet) that they want to expropriate are all that my father has. His health situation has deteriorated since it happened,” he said.
More than a million foreign tourists visit the Canary Islands each month, against 2.2 million local inhabitants, according to official data.
Spain, which has experienced a record number of tourist arrivals in 2024, expects even more visitors this year.
Galindo said the number of hotel beds had tripled since the 1970s when the islands infrastructure was built, leading to housing costs, traffic jams, traffic jams and limited access to health services during the tourism season.
Spain has witnessed several events against Suntourism in other popular holiday destinations, including Mallorca, Barcelona and Malaga. Similar demonstrations took place in the Canaries last year.
Sirlene Alonso, a lawyer who lives in Gran Canaria, criticized the regional government’s plans to build more accommodation instead of limiting tourist figures.
“The objective is not the quality of tourism, but more and more tourists. The number of tourists and people who come to live here overwhelm us,” she said.
Officials of the Island of Canary have traveled this week in Brussels to search for European Union funds for affordable housing in the most external areas in the region.
(Report by Borja Suarez in Gran Canaria and Corina Pons in Madrid, writing by Emma Pinedo and Ana Cantero; edition by Helen Popper)
