"Pedestrian abandonment in Arrecife: between hotel uncivil behavior and municipal neglect"

A reader of La Voz criticizes that the City Council does nothing about the expansion of terraces in the capital

April 5 2025 (15:57 WEST)
Updated in April 5 2025 (21:03 WEST)
Image of a terrace in Arrecife
Image of a terrace in Arrecife

A reader has contacted La Voz to criticize that pedestrians have less and less space to walk on the promenades due to the conquest of these spaces by bars and restaurants without the City Council doing anything.

"Arrecife suffers from a growing lack of respect for pedestrians. Every day, those of us who walk through the capital of Lanzarote are forced to avoid obstacles, overflowing terraces, signs, chairs and all kinds of furniture that invades the sidewalks without control. What should be a public and accessible space for everyone —especially for the elderly, people with reduced mobility or with strollers— has been taken by some hoteliers who act with absolute uncivil behavior and without the slightest respect for coexistence", explains the citizen.

The reader adds that "the most serious thing in Arrecife is not only this improper appropriation of space, but the inaction of the Arrecife City Council, always more occupied with parties and next to the offender, in this case more understandable when it is very common to see the councilors themselves enjoying the "terrace life" in these premises, being accomplices to the mistreatment of people's mobility, looking the other way while the city becomes an obstacle course. Municipal permissiveness is already complicit in the problem."

Finally, she states that "it is not about being against the hotel industry, on the contrary: it is about demanding that they comply with the rules, like any other sector, and that the common space is respected."

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