The Canary Islands Have a Limit. So Why Are We Still Ignoring It?

The Canary Islands are facing a critical turning point. Canary Green recently sat down for a long-form podcast interview alongside José Manuel Sanabria, Deputy Minister for Tourism and Employment of the Canarian government, on over-tourism, housing, and the political decisions shaping the future of these islands. Here’s what came out of that conversation.

The Protests Were Right

Tens of thousands of people marched across the islands under the banner Canarias tiene un límite. They weren’t anti-tourist. They were teachers, nurses, young families, people who work in hotels and restaurants. People who love these islands and are watching them change in ways they didn’t choose.

What they were protesting was specific: short-term rental licences in residential areas have removed housing stock from the local market. Rents have gone through the roof. Young Canarians can’t move out of their parents’ homes because the apartment that should be theirs is listed on Airbnb. “Everything is becoming tourism-based and there’s nowhere to live now.”

The numbers haven’t stopped rising since. Which tells you something about the gap between recognising a problem and actually fixing it.

The Model Is Built to Extract, Not to Last

The bigger the hotel, the less it tends to give back. Large resort operators are often foreign investment companies whose managers fly in with one mandate: optimise occupancy, cut costs, maximise returns. What happens outside the walls of their building is simply not their problem.

This isn’t just a values question. It’s an economic one. When profits leave the island, when locally owned businesses get squeezed out, when workers earn just enough to get by but not enough to build anything, the community that hosts all of this tourism gets poorer in real terms even as the visitor numbers climb.

“We’re squeezing the juice out of these islands. And I don’t feel the politicians or the business owners are thinking that far ahead.”