A grandmother and her two grandchildren stood in front of a large white banner, with a photograph of César Manrique and on which could be read: "We must not falter, we must continue forward, be vigilant and keep the critical conscience alive, because the future is never achieved, we have to do it from the present". She made an effort to convey the words one by one, as if she were drawing them in the minds of the children. They listened to her attentively, as someone who knows that they are receiving a life lesson.
Around, yellow shirts, hats and Canarian flags dyed the streets of Arrecife this Saturday morning. A few minutes before 12:00 noon, the roads surrounding the José Ramírez Cerdá Park saw a tide of banners flooding the entire space. The participants started the route in front of the Music Kiosk, in a historic mobilization that brought together around 10,000 people to call for a change in the mass tourism model that prevails in the Canary Islands.
The Canary Islands have a limit demonstration, scheduled on all eight islands, was convened in the case of Lanzarote by anonymous citizens and without a political party behind it. Despite the anonymity of its call, the island of volcanoes was the third in the Archipelago with the highest attendance, behind the success of attendance in the two capital cities, Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Citizens of La Graciosa, Fuerteventura, La Gomera, El Hierro and, in the afternoon, La Palma also took to the streets.
Along with the protesters was the omnipresent figure of César Manrique, the multidisciplinary artist from Lanzarote who foresaw all the demands that Canarians are now making 34 years after his death and on the island where he was born. Banners with his photograph, dozens of posters with his phrases and even t-shirts or cloth bags with his message.
Among the crowd you could also see the workers of the Art, Culture and Tourism Centers of the island or the members of the César Manrique Foundation, dressed in red caps and shirts and waving the message "Stop now. Lanzarote is dying."
One of the first slogans chanted by the attendees was "there is no bed for so many people", in reference to the 2.69 million foreign tourists who visited the island of volcanoes in 2023, not counting peninsular and Canarian tourism, which amounts to three million. To the visitors, we must add the rise of vacation homes, with more than 7,500 tourist homes registered on the island and the increase in the price of houses for sale or rent, reaching constant record prices, well above the salaries on the island.
The march lasted for two and a half hours, with more stops than planned and concluding in the square of the building of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, where the manifesto was read and all the attendees gathered in a circle.
"I am saddened that in these Islands, after having performed miracles such as that of Lanzarote, where an utopia was created from nothing, the Government and the authorities have not had enough vision of the future to realize, at that time, that it was necessary to stop and program to promote an intelligent tourism industry and end the chaotic speculation that extends throughout the Canary Islands." Thus, recovering Manrique, a chinija started reading at the end of the demonstration.
At the end of the march, the organizers recalled that 38% of the Canarian population is at risk of social exclusion. In addition, with data from 2018, they highlighted that 18.4% of the population was then below the poverty line, despite the rise of tourism on the island.
"We keep hearing that this tourism model is the cow that we all milk from, well, it is clear that the milk is distributed among very few", they stated during their intervention. In addition, they have stressed that "it is not a demonstration against tourism, but against massification." At this point, they highlighted "the deterioration of public services", such as health, water supply, resource management or transport on the island.
This mobilization seeks the declaration of a tourist moratorium, to prevent the construction of more tourist beds in the Archipelago and demand a study of the carrying capacity of natural spaces, control of housing prices by not building more, but avoiding the purchase of second homes by foreign citizens not resident in the islands and "managing better", the implementation of a final ecotax that leads to the care and preservation of natural spaces.
To conclude, they have returned to Manrique's manifesto, from 1985. "In Lanzarote, our island of extreme fragility, the time has come to stop."
