christina magdaleno
Maspalomas (Gran Canaria) (EFE) With the firm intention of lying in the sun all day, the start of the Holy Week festivities takes place in Maspalomas (Gran Canaria), the main tourist center of the island.
On these days, hotel and non-hotel establishments in the Canary Islands anticipate a Holy Week with an average occupancy of 85% on the islands of the province of Las Palmas, except for Fuerteventura, where a minimum of 90% is expected, while in those of Santa Cruz de Tenerife it will be between 73 and 80%, according to data from employers.
On the Maspalomas sand, around 10:30 am and with the thermometer at 26ºC, some early-rising tourists line up to learn to surf on a beach with hardly any waves and where the number of British and Germans exceeds that of Spanish visitors, who, to a lesser extent, they arrive at the beach in the following hours.
Observing the sand from the shore, a good part of the 100 shades of red on the chromatic scale could be perfectly distinguished on the tourists’ skins, although none of them corresponds to the blush for another common image: the haggling of a couple of euros to street vendors, most of whom are Senegalese, who are trying to knock down the price of a pair of sunglasses or a pair of sarongs.
In this scenario, most of the bars are close to the beach, where the presence of Canarians is anecdotal or limited to the service, and where the background music is clearly focused on the middle-aged foreign public that frequents the islands (“Voyage, Voyage”, “Daddy Cool” and “Never Gonna Give You Up” are the most repeated). These four days are the final fireworks of the high season for tourism in the Canary Islands, where the echoes of the pandemic are already distant.
“There are many more people than last year, but prices have risen and, although tourists continue to spend more or less as before, it costs more for Spaniards because salaries have remained the same. We are taking a little longer to make the box than we did in previous years,” the manager of a bar told EFE.
SATURATION?
A few days ago, the Flight Radar image showing dozens of planes heading to the Canary Islands, a common circumstance at any time of the year, generated some debate on social networks about the sustainability of the tourism sector and the environmental implications of receiving every year about 16 million tourists.
“Europe going on vacation… to the Canary Islands”, read the official Flight Radar account on Twitter, where among the comments cited the most common were Canarian users who warned of the tourist saturation of the islands, the sector that contributes the most weight to the economy of the archipelago, of around 20% according to data from the Regional Government Tourism Department, far from the 33% that reached before COVID-19, in 2019.
While the administrations begin to endorse the message of the search for sustainability with fewer tourists leaving more spending at the destination -the February data shows an increase in spending per tourist of 24% compared to 2019, but also that there was a 4 29% more foreigners-, civil society experiences an increase in social movements around the protection of the territory and against tourism projects perceived as unsustainable.
In the last year, this has been the case of the protests over the hotel projected on La Tejita beach, a protected natural environment, or the luxury villas in Puertito de Adeje known as Cuna del Alma, both in Tenerife, or more recently , in La Palma, where it is planned to build an “Ecoresort” with 1,400 beds in La Pavona and which this week has mobilized more than 300 people in a protest.
In this context, Lanzarote, an island that receives a number of tourists equivalent to 17 times its population, has chosen to declare itself a “tourist-saturated” island and has made public its desire to seek greater profitability with fewer tourists, something for what they say there is “a broad social consensus.” EFE
