Lanzarote seems to have transformed into a massive billing machine where economic success coexists with the suffocation of its inhabitants. A lot of money has been generated, but at what price and for whom. The current culture of exploitation is based on a systemic exploitation of the territory, public resources, and the future of the local population.
While the tourism sector celebrates record revenues, the local population sinks into a subsistence economy. Wages in the hospitality industry (the island's engine) remain stagnant in the face of relentless inflation. This is the basis of the exploitation culture: extracting the value of human effort to feed capital that, frequently, neither pays taxes nor is reinvested in our land.
The housing conflict represents the systemic failure of this model. The uncontrolled transformation of homes into vacation products has expelled the people of Lanzarote from their environments, turning a fundamental right into an asset for speculation. There is no real prosperity when the community that sustains basic services is displaced towards precariousness.
To this is added the management of natural resources, with water as a critical point. It is unacceptable that supply cuts in homes are constant. Water has become the symbol of a perverse hierarchy of priorities: the external client is always ahead of the citizen.
The saturation of infrastructures is the other side of this crisis. Roads, sanitation systems, and waste management are sized for a population that tourism triples in practice. This excess degrades natural heritage and exhausts the destination to maximize immediate profit, ignoring the warnings of a fragile ecosystem that has reached its limit.
Finally, the culture of exploitation is manifested in the hackneyed use of Manrique's legacy. His aesthetics and purposes are used as a simple advertising wrapper to sell an exclusivity that the mass model is destroying. We are exploiting his name to the point of exhaustion, ignoring that the limit of the territory was reached a long time ago.
Lanzarote cannot boast of economic success if the balance sheet shows water scarcity, unaffordable rents, and precarious employment. The island's prosperity is only real if it guarantees the dignity of its people. Otherwise, we are facing an industry that has forgotten that behind every statistic there is a land and a society that are being depleted.