Faced with the announcement by the management company Canarian Hospitality of the start of works on a new luxury tourist complex in Playa Blanca, the citizen platform Lanzarote has a limit has publicly expressed its rejection of what it considers “a new element of pressure on an already overwhelmed territory”.
The project contemplates the construction of a 97-room luxury hotel, the works of which will last for approximately two years. Although the establishment itself does not reach massive figures, the platform insists that "the problem is not solely this specific hotel, but the model and the planning that allows and supports it".
They remember that the new Island Spatial Planning Plan (PIOT) would still allow the execution of around 5,000 more tourist beds just in the municipality of Yaiza, which would mean a very significant increase in pressure on a territory that already shows clear signs of saturation.
Legal, but a "nonsense" in the current context
From the platform they underline that, although the project has all the favorable reports, as political leaders have hastened to clarify, and it complies with current legality, "legality is not always synonymous with coherence with the social and environmental reality we live in".
Lanzarote receives close to four million tourists annually and suffers from serious structural problems: a deep housing crisis, difficulties in filling jobs in the tourism sector due to a lack of affordable housing, weekly water outages in different municipalities, and growing infrastructure saturation. In fact, they recall that in the municipality of Yaiza itself, there are establishments that cannot operate at 100% of their capacity due to a lack of staff, a direct consequence of the rising cost of rent and the scarcity of available housing
For the organization, it is "incoherent to continue increasing the accommodation offer while these basic imbalances that directly affect the resident population are not resolved".
Without a moratorium, there are no real limits
The organization also questions the recent institutional declarations in favor of a "sustainable" model or limiting population growth.In their opinion, without a Tourist Moratorium promoted by the Cabildo, those words lack practical effects. “The only immediate tool to stop new licenses is a moratorium within the current plan. Everything else is rhetoric,” they maintain. From the platform, they conclude that the debate is not ideological, but a matter of territorial survival and social justice: “More beds mean more pressure on water, more traffic, more waste, and more difficulty accessing housing. This directly affects how we live every day”.Therefore, they call on citizens and institutions to open a real and urgent debate about the future of Lanzarote before the planned growth definitively overflows a territory that, they insist, has already reached its limit
A mobilized citizenry
The platform frames this announcement in a social context marked by massive mobilizations and demonstrations held in the Canary Islands in recent months against the current tourism development model and overtourism.
“The streets spoke loud and clear on all the islands. The citizenry is saying enough,” they point out. In this regard, they consider that continuing to authorize and execute new tourism projects without establishing effective limits means “turning their backs on an evident and majority social outcry”.
From Lanzarote has a limit they go further and affirm that, with decisions like this one, “the political class continues to laugh in the face of a citizenry that is increasingly clear and forceful against mass tourism”.
A fragile territory and at the limit
The island already has more than 44,000 tourist beds in some 11,077 vacation homes outside of any planning instrument, which are not reflected in the total tourist places collected in the PIOTFor the platform, continuing to increase the supply—even if progressively—"worsens a situation that directly impacts quality of life". The almost absolute dependence on desalination plants for water supply, the forecast that the Zonzamas environmental complex will reach its management limit, recurrent water cuts, and the constant increase in traffic are, according to their complaints, "symptoms of a model that has exceeded the island's carrying capacity". "If oil stopped coming in due to an external crisis, the population could only be supplied with water for two days," they recall, as an example of the existing structural fragility
