La Graciosa and its limits

October 5 2023 (12:26 WEST)

“La Graciosa, the island of 428 tourists per inhabitant. No place has as much tourist pressure as the eighth Canary Island, an old lost utopia.” This is the headline that the newspaper El Mundo dedicated this summer to the island of La Graciosa... It is curious that, if the PSOE announces it - we already did it in the last term - they call us radical environmentalists, creators of poverty and maintainers of subsidies. However, if someone else says it, liberals and defenders of the more the better begin to worry.

It is not necessary for a newspaper to come and tell us the reality of La Graciosa, you just have to take off the blindfold and look. But for that you have to want to see. See how in Órzola, the gateway to the protected natural space of the Chinijo Archipelago, rows of cars occupy land and plots; see how in La Graciosa the rubble and waste proliferate; see how the island's health services are overwhelmed, see how the number of vehicles has not stopped increasing. If we add to this view the data that we already know, 300,000 visitors a year on an island of 700 inhabitants, we realize that the territory of La Graciosa has gotten out of hand.

For the PSOE it is essential to protect and preserve the environmental, social and economic wealth of La Graciosa. That is why we have proposed establishing a carrying capacity and a co-responsibility fee aimed at caring for the natural resources of the Chinijo Archipelago: its unsustainable growth and the absence of limits is prioritizing quantity over quality, wasting its values and reducing the well-being of its population.

It is not an idea of the PSOE, other tourist destinations on the planet have adopted measures such as those proposed here. the Cíes Islands have established a maximum number of visitors per day, Barcelona has adopted measures to limit the number of visitors and Venice has recently approved a tourist tax.

That is why we request that work be done on the Master Plan for Use and Management, that the necessary preliminary reports be drawn up so that all parties involved can express their opinion, contribute and participate. In this way we can conserve and protect natural resources, economic development and quality of life in La Graciosa.

Ariagona González Pérez. Spokesperson for the Socialist Group in the Cabildo of Lanzarote

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