What happens when a society transforms its landscape into a commodity and its people into scenery? When "progress" serves as an alibi to erase a culture and turn life into a showcase?
The answer is more disturbing than it seems; what we call development may actually be a modern form of colonization. This is not an abstract reflection, but a reality that the Canary Islands experience every day, where mass tourism and real estate speculation are reproducing patterns of domination that the Martinican poet, Aimé Césaire, denounced more than seventy years ago.
In his devastating Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire proposed a thesis as simple as it is radical: colonialism is not just a stage of the past, but a logic that endures. It is based on the objectification of the other, on their reduction to a useful thing, an economic resource, a decorative object. That logic can change its face—military, religious, economic, tourist—but it maintains its core intact, which is based on stripping, subduing, and invisibilizing.
To understand the current situation in the Canary Islands, we must remember that the archipelago was one of the first colonies of modern European expansion. The Castilian conquest of the 15th century not only implied military occupation, but also the systematic destruction of aboriginal cultures and the establishment of a monoculture economy oriented towards export. Since then, the Canary Islands have lived in structural dependence, first agricultural and now tourist.
From the tourist boom of the 20th century, the archipelago almost exclusively reconfigured its economy around the foreign visitor. In recent decades, that tourism has mutated; it is no longer just about temporary visitors, but a wave of new European residents with greater purchasing power, who buy homes, modify the real estate market, and profoundly transform the social fabric of the islands.
The data is eloquent; the price of housing in the Canary Islands has risen by 40% in the last five years, while Canarian salaries remain among the lowest in Spain. In municipalities such as Teguise or Arona, entire communities have become residential areas for foreigners, expelling families who had lived there for generations.
This transformation reproduces traditional colonial mechanisms with surprising clarity: the dispossession of the territory, the expulsion of the local population, and the folklorization of the culture.
Much of the Canarian coast has been privatized or transformed for tourism. Urban land is subject to speculation, while hotels, resorts, and urbanizations oriented towards the foreign visitor multiply. The common Canarian society can no longer afford to live near the sea where they were born.
The increase in housing prices, fueled by foreign purchases and vacation rentals, is displacing Canarian families from their traditional neighborhoods. "Insular gentrification" is no longer a metaphor, but a reality that is experienced in La Oliva, in Costa Teguise, in Los Cristianos.
Canarian culture is presented as "added value" for the tourist, but not as a living expression. It becomes a spectacle, a souvenir, a brand to sell. Meanwhile, the real and diverse identity of the Canarian people is relegated or stigmatized as "not modern enough."
Césaire warned that colonialism turns the human being into a thing. The Canarian people, in this new model, run the risk of becoming just that, an object of service, a folkloric decoration, a provider of experiences for others. They are not seen as a political subject with their own voice, but as a human resource functional to the tourist machinery.
Some will consider this analogy excessive. But what else can we call a model where the wealth generated remains in the hands of large foreign chains, where the capacity to decide on the territory is subject to foreign interests, and where the dominant narrative silences any claim of sovereignty or identity?
It is not about literally comparing the current situation with the armed colonization of the 15th century. It is about understanding that many structures of power, dependence, and symbolic subordination remain in force, albeit in other forms.
Faced with this reality, it is urgent to propose an alternative. It is not about rejecting tourism or falling into xenophobic discourses, but about demanding a fair, sustainable, and decolonized model that starts from the protagonism of the local population.
Decolonization must include multiple dimensions: economic (recovering control over resources), political (deciding from the Canary Islands for the Canary Islands), cultural (affirming Canarianness as a legitimate identity), and ecological (stopping the destruction of the territory).
This means concrete policies such as limiting vacation rentals, taxing second homes if they are vacant for more than six months a year or are not used for long-term rentals, promoting local agriculture, protecting real cultural heritage, not the folkloric one. It also means that the Canarian people recover their voice in the decisions that affect their land.
Césaire spoke of "a civilization that cheats on its principles" as a civilization in decline. If the Canary Islands wants to build a healthy society with a future, it cannot continue to function on the basis of an extractive economy disguised as modernity.
The Canary Islands is not a theme park. It is not a giant hotel. It is not a postcard for European leisure. It is a land inhabited by a people with memory, dignity, and the right to decide on their destiny.
Césaire's work reminds us that every liberation process begins by clearly naming what others prefer to silence. The time has come for the Canarian people to recover their word, and with it, their future.
