Waiters in Spain warn UK tourists who visit 'restaurants and hotels' in Tenerife

Waiters in Spain have warned UK tourists who visit bars, restaurants and hotels that staff are sleeping in TENTS as shanty towns spring up in European Union holiday hotspots. Waiters in Tenerife are being forced to live in tents amid a lack of affordable housing.

Local worker Miguel de Abreu Freitas is being forced to live in a tent alongside others in Costa del Silencio. Miguel, along with many others, were evicted from a nearby residential building amid soaring rents in the Canary Islands.

The rising cost of housing in Tenerife has caused shanty towns to crop up. Low-paid service workers can no longer afford their rent and have been forced to set up makeshift housing, they have told the Telegraph newspaper in the UK.

READ MORE Tenerife bar worker warns over 'dark side of island' after Jay Slater vanishes

José, a 65-year-old kitchen assistant who works in a hotel, rented a property for £340 a month before the landlord turned it into a short-term rental for holidaymakers. José said: “Now anything with one or two bedrooms costs at least €900. I earn minimum wage, €1,100.

"If I have to pay that kind of rent, then we won’t be able to eat. Here we eat by cooking on gas.” José Antonio Díez Dávila, coordinator of Mobile Street Outreach Units (UMAC) at Caritas Diocesana de Tenerife, told Canarian Weekly: "We have been sounding the alarm for years about housing access problems and homelessness in Tenerife, especially in the south."

An analysis carried out by Caritas - a confederation of Catholic relief services - shows 2,400 people across the island were living in shanties, substandard housing or other structures such as tents and campervans.

It comes as The Canary Islands government has announced new regulations under which holiday rentals can only be licenced if the building is at least 100 years old and the apartment measures at least 39 square metres.