The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has requested the Yaiza City Council to, in the person of its mayor-president and "without further delay," contract the drafting of the project and the supervision of the demolition works of the Princesa Yaiza hotel (originally Son Bou), in Playa Blanca, in execution of the sentence issued on October 31, 2005, which annulled the building permit with which the establishment was erected.
The order, dated October 29, 2026, and with Judge Óscar Bosch Benítez, president of the Second Section of the Chamber at its headquarters in Las Palmas, as rapporteur, grants the local corporation one year for the drafting of the project. Once drafted, the works must be executed within a period not exceeding two years, all at the expense of the owner entity, Hotel Princesa Yaiza SA.
The resolution dismisses the two appeals for review filed by the company against the decrees of the Justice Administration lawyer of April 17 and August 5, 2024. Those decrees had confirmed the request made to the City Council to carry out the partial demolition within a period of three months. The Chamber also rejects the company's request to suspend the execution proceedings and orders it to pay the costs of the appeals, which it sets at 300 euros. Furthermore, it orders the mayor to inform the court of the status of the proceedings within six months.
The court starts from what it considers "an undeniably incontestable fact": that the sentence has not been complied with for almost two decades, and states from the outset that it shares the criteria held by Club Lanzarote SA, the César Manrique Foundation, and the Cabildo de Lanzarote. In the opinion of the judges, "it cannot be admitted that the execution of a final judgment, issued in 2005 and determining the illegality of what was built, remains indefinitely conditioned by the successive promotion of legalization proceedings and by the judicial challenge of each of the resolutions that fall within the execution proceedings." In their view, admitting it would turn exceptional legalization and the processing of the proceedings themselves "into a mechanism for permanent delay in compliance with the ruling," and that is, the Chamber adds, "what, very regrettably, is happening in the case at hand."
Double responsibility
The ruling includes both the Yaiza City Council and the hotel owner in this responsibility. According to the court, the firmness of the judgment "does not tolerate that the obligated party" can "unilaterally dispose of the pace or the very eventuality of its execution" by indefinitely reproducing administrative requests on an already judged matter or by systematically challenging resolutions that seek, "after decades of waiting, the satisfaction of the fundamental right to effective judicial protection absolutely ignored by the executed local administration." Regarding the review appeals, the ruling states that they are "dilatory actions aimed at artificially prolonging the processing of this incident." With respect to the second of them, it maintains that "its bad faith in proceedings and abuse of right are even more evident."
The court also recalls, with Club Lanzarote, that a firm municipal agreement of January 22, 2016, already declared the legalization of the building impossible and ordered its demolition, and that this has not even begun. The Chamber partially upholds the incident initiated in November 2024 by the City Council itself to specify how the partial demolition should be executed, which was based on a technical report prepared by an architect. The magistrates emphasize that it is "the executed local administration that, for the first time, proposes a formula" that would allow compliance with the judgment, and they adopt the solution proposed by the César Manrique Foundation. This solution consists of commissioning the project according to that report and then tendering the works, although the court extends the deadlines proposed by the foundation, of four months and one year, in view of "the special technical complexity" of the demolitions. The ruling also reiterates that the incentives for tourist renewal and requalification are not applicable to the hotel, as the same Chamber already ruled in its judgment 88/2022.
The non-application of those incentives was the owner's main reason for disagreeing with the technical report. The court also includes the warning from the César Manrique Foundation that the establishment "remains and will remain open to the public and fully operational, as if the judicial resolution annulling the license had never been issued." It also includes its assertion that the excess buildability is "almost triple," which would require demolishing more than 60% of what has been built. Hotel Princesa Yaiza SA requested the suspension of the execution until a new development plan existed, following the annulment of the General Supplementary Planning Plan of Yaiza.
The Chamber responds that "in the case examined, the current impossibility of carrying out the partial demolition is not alleged, but rather the possibility that a future urban planning order may allow the preservation of what the final judgment ordered to be demolished." It adds that "it is thus sought to make the effectiveness of a current judicial mandate dependent on a normative event that has not yet occurred," an expectation that "does not alter the legal framework of the execution nor provide grounds for paralyzing it."
The order is based on a ruling by the Constitutional Court of January 26, 2009, according to which the mere expectation of a regulatory change does not constitute a legal or material impossibility of execution. It also recalls that Article 105.1 of the Law of Jurisdiction establishes that "compliance may not be suspended nor total or partial non-execution of the judgment declared." The magistrates admit, unlike the foundation, that a ruling by the Supreme Court of July 17, 2025, allows for a transaction in the execution phase, but within the limits of what has already been definitively resolved. They emphasize that in this case there is no agreement between the parties, so Article 77 of the law cannot be applied. They also specify that the Supreme Court dismissed on November 17, 2025, the cassation appeal that the owner invoked as pending.
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