Almost twenty years after the previous major crisis in Lanzarote, the main conclusion we can draw is that we have learned little since then. And we greatly fear that the current one, even deeper than that one for having ...
Almost twenty years after the previous major crisis in Lanzarote, the main conclusion we can draw is that we have learned little since then. And we greatly fear that the current one, even deeper than that one for having penetrated a broader spectrum of society and the productive fabric, will not serve to learn from our mistakes either.
That the crisis of the nineties brought us a collapse of real estate prices and the paralysis of countless real estate developments and hotel complexes, which sowed the island's orography with concrete skeletons as banners of excess supply, only served for a transitory awareness that we had overexploited the goose that lays the golden eggs.
As soon as the winds of recovery arrived, this economic concept, as simple as when supply exceeds demand, the correction is inexorable, was soon forgotten. But also, when we talk about the territory, the accomplished facts leave no room for maneuver.
Apart from the subjective definition of the quality of the tourist offer, whether the current accommodation plant is more complete than it was before or what are the variables that a tourist really values, we can analyze with a broad perspective the economic consequences of the recent boom in the island's tourist offer, which in just ten years leaves us with 50% more tourist beds. A model that, once the bubble has burst, shows us in all its nakedness the monoculture of tourism, the sudden enrichment of a minority and an unemployment rate that exceeds by ten points the already more than dramatic Spanish unemployment figure.
Because what some wanted to draw as a virtuous circle has become a dramatic reality. The sequence produced of more hotel supply, more construction, more immigration, wild growth and greater apparent wealth now becomes lower hotel occupancy, rock-bottom prices, lower qualification, lower perceived quality, more unemployment and, consequently, less disposable income for the residents of the island.
Immersed in this bleak panorama, it is at least shocking that a term as elementary as the limited carrying capacity of the territory continues to be attributed to the most abstract intellectuality, when it is an essential aspect to understand where we have to evolve if we do not want to continue forging our future degradation.
Because circumscribing the progress of the island to mass construction is the great fallacy of recent years. Establishing barriers to urban growth does not imply that new productive or service activities that generate employment cannot be developed or that new leisure alternatives cannot be planned. On the contrary, if we promote new activities, we will be laying the foundations perhaps not for such speculative growth, but for a more sustainable growth over time.
Although there will always be someone willing to put Lanzarote on their head in order to profit, it would be good for the majority to learn from past mistakes and bet on a shared model of sustainable growth.
