Canary Islands warn UK tourists 'what we're asking for is very simple'

Thousands have moved to Lanzarote and Tenerife's streets to protest against the Canary Islands’ "unsustainable" tourism model this weekend. Locals want the tourism industry to be shaken up and changed amid an unaffordable life for many residents.

The protests – which will take place under the banner “Canarias tiene un límite” (The Canaries have a limit) – are being backed by environmental groups. These include the likes of Greenpeace, WWF, Ecologists in Action, Friends of the Earth and SEO/Birdlife.

“We’ve reached the point where the balance between the use of resources and the welfare of the population here has broken down – especially over the past year,” said Víctor Martín, a spokesperson for the Canarias se Agota, translated as The Canaries Have Had Enough).

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“Demand [for water] is rising in urban areas where there are more tourists,” he said. “We’ve had a very dry winter and a water emergency’s already been declared on Tenerife. There are going to be restrictions if there’s not more rain this month but it’s 36C here right now.

"This is all unsustainable and it means that we won’t even be able to keep normal levels of tourism going. And yet the authorities and the businesses here are trying to stick with this model.” He added: “I realised we’d reached the limit when I saw people who were working as hotel maids or waiters were living in shacks."

“The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around – and with the connivance of – a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.”

“What we’re asking is very simple: given that tourism is the main economic activity and the cause of all these problems, we want an immediate halt to these two mega-projects,” he said. “We also want a tourist moratorium that will lead to a study of the load each island can take and which will determine whether we’ve already passed the critical point. In areas where there’s an overload, we want to see a stage of degrowth of economic activity to benefit natural resources. Otherwise, you have an existing model that only benefits a very few people.”