The demonstration on 20-A entitled "Canary Islands has a limit" has been a resounding success, if we can measure as success that it has made enough noise for all national media to have taken it to their covers and that it has even appeared in several British media such as The Guardian or The Sun.
Many people may be worried, thinking that perhaps the protests against "mass tourism" could be perceived by our customers as a rejection of all types of tourism or directly be perceived as tourismophobia.
But the reality is that this will have no material effect, for the same reason that people do not stop visiting Venice despite the fact that Venetians repeatedly demonstrate against mass tourism. It could almost be said that it is even an added claim, because now everyone knows that the Canary Islands are so popular that they even have to hold demonstrations to get fewer people to come. And when people are told what they don't have to do, they usually end up doing the opposite.
Internally, the demonstration will not solve the current problems because the diagnosis is wrong. And when the initial diagnosis is wrong, time passes and things do not change or even get worse.
If wages are low, it is because tourism is a low value-added industry. The grace is in the good weather and nature, the reason why tourists come. But wages will never be better in real terms (once inflation is discounted) because serving drinks or changing beds, however much they may be very sacrificial jobs at a personal level, require almost no qualification, which is ultimately the reason why someone pays a higher salary. Bringing fewer tourists or tourists with greater purchasing power will not generate higher wages because no one pays more for making a bed. It is not an opinion, it is the reality, like it or not. I wish the world was different, but it is like that.
To solve this, the Canary Islands would have to make a radical change in the configuration of its economy, diversifying and industrializing it, but obviously there are no proposals of any kind anywhere in the political spectrum. We simply live in inertia because things are as they are and it is very difficult to change them. The organizers have not made any concrete proposals on this aspect either.
But the main problem is access to housing. The organizers of the demonstration, all in the orbit of the left, blame the housing problem on the excess of tourists and the excess of vacation homes, but the diagnosis is also wrong on this point.
The problem, which occurs throughout Spain and in other countries, has its main root in the lack of real estate supply and this lack of supply is due to a series of structural and cyclical factors. Lack of supply is synonymous with two things, that not enough is being built since the Great Recession of 2008 and that there is not enough legal certainty for owners to put their properties up for rent, legal uncertainty aggravated during the last years of the national government, the only one with real capacity to move mountains in such complicated and multifactorial issues. The following graph is the number of new homes built in Spain and the data speaks for itself. Almost no supply has been created for 16 years, despite the fact that the population has grown and that more and more people live alone or with fewer members in the family unit.
But the organizers of the demonstration ignore this, I understand because it does not fit in their mentality that the main solution to the problem is to build more housing because it is perceived as something contrary to the preservation of nature or something similar.
However, like it or not, in the face of housing shortage, the solution is to build more housing, including protected housing, of which almost nothing is being built today either. And how basically that is the only real solution, saying that the tourists or vacation homes are to blame, is to give a wrong diagnosis that will not solve absolutely anything.
Of course, some proposals of the organizers may be interesting, such as applying fees for access to natural spaces, in my opinion that they are high enough to avoid crowds. Or also some proposals, but not all, of those that are in what will be the new law of vacation housing in the Canary Islands.
However, these are elements of second or third caliber and therefore will not solve the main problem of low wages and lack of housing. And to solve these two problems, especially the low wages, would require great leadership and audacity that does not exist today because we live in the purest of inertias.
Therefore I am pessimistic, I think that nothing will change and that this demonstration does not help either because it does not go to the heart of the matter, but points to wrong factors.
It is a pity, because I suffer a lot seeing how people do not have access to decent housing when the solution is at our fingertips. And not seeing things clearly moves the solution even further away.
