The César Manrique Foundation (FCM) has announced this Wednesday its support for the demonstration Canary Islands has a limit, called for next Saturday, April 20 on six islands of the Archipelago, including Lanzarote. In the case of the island of volcanoes, it will depart from the music kiosk of Arrecife at 12:00 in the morning.
This mobilization defends rethinking the current tourism model, based on the massive arrival of visitors and demands that public institutions reflect on and tackle the future of the Archipelago.
"There are plenty of reasons and unreason, all of them visible, growing and overwhelming", the Foundation said in a statement. In this line, it has highlighted that "Lanzarote has a limit, exceeded for some time" and that the "negative consequences invade our daily lives, mistreat the land and compromise the future of young people."
The Foundation has insisted that "citizen discomfort increases at the same rate as the number of accommodation beds grows, the number of tourists, the roads, the cars, the roundabouts, the extraction of gravel, the population, the lack of housing, the consumption of water and energy, the attacks on natural and cultural heritage, the saturation of public services, the outdated salaries... on the verge of collapse, overwhelmed, massified."
26 years ago, the FCM published its Manifesto for the sustainability of Lanzarote, 1998, whose content could not be more current. Since then until today, "that manifesto has been placed at the entrance of the Foundation's headquarters, in an explicitly vindictive attitude".
The FCM has returned to remember it by putting it on the table: "Our tourism model is exhausted, it is unfeasible as a paradigm of balanced and fair development, for us and for the land. We need an alternative that involves stopping growth and creating regulatory and planning frameworks to improve our quality of life, because, as we said in 1998, growing indefinitely is already going backwards indefinitely.”
"And that's where we are", the Foundation added, "there will be no real development without alternative policies that respect the sustainable and continuous relationship of human beings with their environment, without containment and reorientation strategies."
Therefore, the FCM asked then and has recalled this Wednesday "the consolidation of a legal framework that protects the right of the community to regulate the limits of productive practices, at the levels it deems appropriate for its well-being."
To conclude, he added that Lanzarote has a limit and the Canary Islands have a limit. "Time ran out a long time ago. Stop now!".