Although Tenerife is the island that has mostly been in the press, problems resulting from mass tourism exist across the Canaries. From the GC-500 road, in the Arguineguín valley in the south of Gran Canaria, the view towards the coast presents two vastly different realities. The first is a shanty town that has sprung up seemingly out of nowhere, and the other is luxury villas with private pools.
In the first, wooden pallets and dark-coloured fabric cover what lies within each well-defined plot. None of them have water, electricity, or public lighting. The layout of the streets resembles that of any other neighbourhood. Its inhabitants have even created a small plaza with wooden benches and plastic flowers.
In stark contrast, the second image showcases an entirely different scene. Impressive white houses, some up to 120 square metres in size, most with private pools, welcome guests to the Cordial Santa Águeda Resort. This complex, comprising over 80 luxury holiday homes, was inaugurated in 2020, amidst the height of the pandemic.
In the background, one can also spot the CEISA cement factory, a landmark of the town of Santa Águeda for over 50 years, which the regional government of Coalición Canaria (CC) and Partido Popular (PP) intend to replace with a tourist-sports use for the port.
Both figures share the frame of the photograph, but little else. The luxury homes and the shantytown are practically side by side. However, the quality of life between the two sides remains miles apart. "Everything they take from us Canarians is to give it to them," exclaims Juan, 53, seated amidst dozens of caravans converted into homes.
"Money moves mountains," reiterates the man, who works as a lifeguard at a hotel. He barely earns around 1,000 euros per month after deductions and has been surviving in this place for almost 10 years.
The shantytown in El Pajar consists of dozens of huts and shacks in the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, 300 metres from the beach. To the left are banana plantations, and to the right, the town of Mogán begins.
The local council acknowledges that hundreds of people live here on private land. Many of its residents came to this area during the peak of the health crisis because they had nowhere else to go. Others, some of them say, took advantage of the location to build a second home where they could spend weekends or holidays. The current Council blames the previous one for failing to curb urban sprawl and claims that an investigation is pending to restore legality.
This Monday morning, amidst a heatwave in the Canary Islands, the sun beats down strongly on each of the shelters. There is not much noise. The few inhabitants attribute the lack of activity to "people working." Not even employment seems to lift the population out of this place. "If you earn 1,000 euros and pay 600 or 700 for rent, you'll have to beg for food for the rest of the month," says Juan.
The demonstrations against tourist overcrowding scheduled for this Saturday throughout the Canary Islands aim to precisely denounce, among other things, that the reality of El Pajar, with rich and poor on either side of the same land, cannot continue to be reproduced in the archipelago. That inequality in the islands is among the highest in all of Spain, and perhaps, the current tourism model has had something to do with it.
The Gini index, a widely known measure ranging from 0 (perfect equality, meaning everyone has the same income) to 100 (the complete opposite, where one person takes the entire pie), stands at 31.1 in the Canary Islands, the third highest value in the country.
The income of the top 20% in the archipelago is 6.3 times higher than that of the bottom 20%, the highest difference in the country, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE). Even the social perception of the islanders themselves suggests that more and more Canarians feel either rich or poor. One of the two.
In the El Pajar shantytown, Hazmani, 53, knows perfectly well to which social stratum he belongs: "You have to survive. You don't want to be sleeping on the streets. You build a shack and that's it. You try not to bother anyone." Aroa and Echedey, 21 and 34, respectively, also admit it. "My parents lost their house, and the only option they saw was this. It's tough, of course. To lose your home and not know how you're going to get by," she comments. Reda, who arrived in Gran Canaria a few years ago by boat, accepts it as best he can. "Here, we're nobody. Life is underground, not above. And who lives underground? Rats."
What happens to Canarians, mainland Spaniards, and migrants struggling to survive in this spot, in the heart of Gran Canaria's tourism, "is not a single case, nor a coincidence or an exception. It is a constant in tourist towns," emphasises Claudio Milano, PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Barcelona.
According to the expert, in places so dependent on this economic activity, such as the archipelago, there is "an erosion of other types of rights" (whether the right to enjoy public space or access to housing), "there begins to be great speculation," and ultimately, "the depletion of basic goods and resources" for the local population occurs.
"Tourist economy uses common goods for private purposes. Airbnb, Uber... and all those applications that have fostered the touristification of daily life need them. The industry inevitably demands this [message of] 'live like a local.' And this is not found in other sectors. Tourism lives off of us more than we live off tourism," reflects Milano.
In 2015, still with the effects of the 2008 financial crisis reverberating, there were 291,160 Canarians with incomes below 12,020 euros per year, or in other words, 39.01% of all declarants were "lower class," according to the criteria of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Those who were "upper class," with incomes above 30,050 euros per year, accounted for 17.75%. What has happened in recent years? Both percentages have increased. Those who are "lower class" now make up 39.2% of the islanders, and those who are "upper class" 21.78%, according to records from the Canary Islands Statistics Institute (ISTAC) as of 2021, the latest available data.
"Tourist capitalism needs the 'four cheaps,'" says Milano, referring to historian and geographer Jason W. Moore, "which are: food, labour, energy, and raw materials. Many of these processes have been developed through foreign capital through dispossession and deprivation." And all of this is "closely related to the problem of capital concentration," wealth compressed into a few hands.
María Antonia Martínez Caldentey, a graduate in Geography from the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), delves into this idea. "In such touristy municipalities that are, in principle, success stories, we can see that there is a lot of inequality. Yes, there is wealth. The major hotel chains that fill up year after year accumulate capital. The issue is that it is not distributed equitably," the expert points out.
The three Canary Islands municipalities with the most overnight stays in 2023 (San Bartolomé de Tirajana, Adeje, and Arona) are among the 15 with the highest inequality in the archipelago, according to the Gini index calculated by the INE. And that is even though this indicator measures only the disparity in income among residents of the same population. The difference that can be observed between them and foreign visitors must be even greater.
"It's not so much the quantity of tourism, but how it is managed. All tourism policies are designed for them, for the people who come from outside. And they never take into account those who live in the destination, who can also be users," argues Carla Izcara, a graduate in Tourism, and a master's in Anthropology and Ethnography.
The characteristics of jobs linked to the industry also do not help. "Night shifts, peaks of high intensity within the workday. Some of them are very physical, like kitchen or maintenance work. Also the emotional part of working facing the public and being friendly, helpful, the customer is always right, etc," the expert lists.
The combination of low wages, expensive living costs, scant unionisation in the sector, and a lot of labour force that "has no more exits or alternatives" creates a "diabolical" climate for workers who, in some cases, may even be "afraid" that activity will decline.
On the other hand, the label that tourism has always been "a passport to development," reminds Martínez Caldentey, usually prevails in the collective imagination. "It's a hegemonic thought. Not only political but also social and even within academia. The studies that were done, for example, in regions of the global south, mainly in Central America and Latin America, were done with this discourse that tourism has brought prosperity. The thing is, the consequences were not usually looked at too closely: the territorial deterioration it can entail or precarious employment. Now it's increasingly clear to everyone what the industry entails."
Surveys in the Canary Islands confirm this. Last year, a study published in the journal PASOS of Tourism and Cultural Heritage found that 40.2% of residents of Tenerife, the first island to announce the demonstration this Saturday, consider tourism "less relevant" after the activity's halt during the pandemic's peak.
It's not a comparable figure with previous ones. But for Alberto Jonay Rodríguez, lead author of the research, PhD in Anthropology from the University of La Laguna (ULL), and researcher at the University Institute of Social Research and Tourism, it's an open door to understanding, fundamentally, why the most widespread irritation towards the sector in the Canary Islands has arisen just now.
"We understand that it is related to a cultural issue. Tourism has been part of our reality for many decades. It is omnipresent. There are few alternative productive activities. And, therefore, the effects of this were less visible, because they were taken for granted," he says. During the tourism shutdown in 2020, "it became more evident that there were certain changes, that cities were different, natural spaces, highways, were different without tourists. That was an important change."
Jonay believes that the involvement of the Canarian population with respect to tourism "has been very limited," that residents have been seen "practically as labour" and that, given what has been seen, the goal for this sector to serve to improve the lives of local citizens "has been the least interest has been put into it." Now, even social movements that originally had "other types of demands are openly talking about holday rentals," to exemplify the extent of the frustration.
The anthropologist concludes by recalling the "anti-tourism movement" of 1986 whose "criticisms were silenced with the declaration the following year of the protected areas of the Canary Islands." And he wonders if, once again, "some type of measure that really is not oriented to facing the problem in its depth" will be applied simply to calm the waters.
Source: Canarias Ahora
