Rafa Jiménez, candidate of Drago Verdes Canarias to the Parliament of the Canary Islands for Lanzarote, proposes an "urgent moratorium on the creation of hotel places and vacation homes on the island, and invites the rest of the political forces to publicly subscribe to that agreement."
"To begin to control the tourist nonsense of the island it is necessary to move from words to deeds, and with us in the institutions of Lanzarote those deeds will become reality", he comments. "Our first measure will be a moratorium on the growth of lodging beds, census vacation homes, regulate them and stop their excessive development in its tracks", he acknowledges.
In the opinion of the electoral coalition led by Alberto Rodríguez, the PSOE is "directly responsible for the situation that the island of Lanzarote is experiencing in terms of environmental and tourist collapse and recalls that during his time at the head of the Ministry of Territorial Policy, hotel places on the island were increased."
"With the PSOE, one of the many legislatures in which they governed with the Canarian Coalition, the hotel places of Lanzarote were expanded with the construction of two new hotels: one in Playa Blanca and another in Puerto del Carmen, who are responsible then for the saturation of the island? If Loli Corujo and the PSOE want to atone for their sins, they must start by joining the moratorium initiative that we put on the table”, they recall.
The candidate also acknowledges that it has been "15 years of shared governments between the three groups (PSOE, Canarian Coalition and PP) that have led Lanzarote to this situation that makes tourism and the day-to-day life of the locals barely compatible".
"The time has come to start working and take seriously the things that affect our neighbors", he clarifies. "It is not normal that there has not been a count and regulation of vacation homes knowing that today, it is one of the elements that most strain the long-stay rental housing market, savagely increasing prices and practically ending its offer", Jiménez asserts.
The green coalition is committed to "overseeing and limiting this activity, paying special attention to the most strained areas and to the areas that have traditionally been residential and that lately are being occupied by tourists", he makes clear."Allowing this situation to have been reached is enormously irresponsible and desperately politically inactive"
"If you enter the main digital rental platforms, the vacation homes on the island exceed 7,000, while the long-stay ones will have a hard time finding more than twenty, and at totally out-of-market prices", he informs. "Allowing this situation to have been reached is enormously irresponsible and desperately politically inactive", Jiménez concludes.