The island of Lanzarote received a total of 2,816,231 tourists in 2022, which more than doubled the number of tourists who arrived the previous year, when just under 1.2 million were recorded, according to data from the Canary Islands Institute of Statistics (ISTAC) published by the Lanzarote Data Center.
However, there were around 250,000 fewer tourists than arrived in 2019, the year of reference for analyzing the recovery of economic indicators on the island.
The data comes shortly after the president of the Cabildo, María Dolores Corujo, advanced at the press conference to take stock of FITUR last week, the idea of declaring Lanzarote a "touristically saturated zone" as a prior step to a process of degrowth, which allows reducing the accommodation offer "maintaining, and even improving," the income produced by those who visit the island.
To receive fewer tourists, but with greater spending at the destination, Corujo pointed out that one of the objectives is to diversify the origin of tourists and reduce dependence on the British market, since more than half of the island's foreign visitors come from the United Kingdom, which caused a controversy with the mayor of Arrecife who considered that this declaration, citing an article from the British sensationalist newspaper DailyMail, caused "international alarm", which the Cabildo described as "disinformation campaign".
The reality is that the proportion of British tourism in the total number of arrivals to the island has not decreased in 2022, not even due to the effects of Brexit. In 2022, a total of 1,311,505 British tourists arrived in Lanzarote, which represents 46.5% of the total. In 2019, the British represented 46.3% of all tourists arriving on the island.
The national market grew by 12% compared to 2019
The market that has grown the most in 2022 has been the national market. More than 350,000 travelers arrived from the peninsula, which represents a growth of 12% compared to 2019, which has led it to become the second largest market behind the British market.
2022 was also the year in which Irish tourism surpassed German tourism for most of the months, for the first time in Lanzarote's recent history. However, arrivals from Germany increased at the end of the year, so that the German country finally remained in third place with 263,911 tourists. A total of 260,346 people arrived from Ireland.
Next is the French market. The island attracted more than 185,000 tourists from France last year, while arrivals from Italy were about to reach 100,000 and exceeded those from the Netherlands (92,000), which used to register more travelers than the transalpine country.
The eighth and ninth place among the tourist-emitting markets to Lanzarote are Belgium, from where just over 50,000 people arrived, and the group of Nordic countries, with 81,594 travelers.