In the foothills of Mount Teide on Tenerife, only the salamanders stir in the quivering midday glare. The peak, also the highest point on Spanish soil, is an apparently docile volcano; a neighbouring stack blew itself to pieces 170,000 years ago, leaving behind a range of rocks with eerie, jagged profiles and a lava field like a petrified peat bog. This extraterrestrial landscape is barely an hour by road from the island’s southern beaches. But you could be in another country, if not galaxy, from the pullulating resorts. This summer, a wave of protests against over-tourism, which has swept European destinations from Amsterdam to Barcelona, finally made landfall at this normally most forgiving of destinations.
As the season nears its apex, a miasma of coconut oil rises from the serried sun-loungers. The hotels and cafes are busy. They’re putting a smile on people’s faces at Mister Sister, a drag bar in the town of Adeje. But all is not cloudless. Since April, hundreds of islanders have taken to the streets with banners and chants asserting “Canarias no se vende, se ama y se defiende [the Canaries are not for sale, they are loved and defended]”.
Protesters have specifically condemned a huge development scheme called Cuna del Alma, which is set to bring more hotels to Tenerife, including to a small community called Puertito de Adeje, or the little port of Adeje, which has been described as the last unspoiled quarter of this Atlantic outcrop. The demonstrators also complain that locals are being priced out by the soaring market for hotels and second homes. With more than five million tourists descending every year on an island with a resident population of fewer than a million, these concerns are understandable. And it also feared that British tourists will bring some of the problems of their homeland with them: that potable water supplies will be placed under intolerable strain and raw sewage discharged into the sea.
There have been similar protests in neighbouring Gran Canaria over plans to find room for another 129,000 hotel beds, while in late July 20,000 people took part in a rally against over-tourism in Mallorca, another Spanish tourist destination favoured by Brits. That said, the demonstrators in the Canaries are clear that they’re not against tourism per se: it accounts for 40 per cent of jobs in the archipelago. They simply feel there’s more than enough already.
Any visitor can see they have a point. As far as the eye can see, brand new windows and balconies descend in glittering terraces almost to the shoreline of Adeje, as if the town had been seized by a speculative fever for conservatories or a gold rush for patios. Out in the bay, the sailboats and catamarans are triple stacked with pleasure-seekers looking forward to inshore cocktails and thrumming club beats.
Those engaged in more rarefied forms of tourism – or, even, “travelling” – may find their sympathies naturally extending to the Spanish locals. They’re likely more concerned that this summer’s protests could impair their access to Rembrandt’s house or the Sagrada Família rather than Tenerife, with its slavishly recreated English breakfasts and hoarding-sized restaurant menus. And perhaps this is the moment to note that class is an under-explored aspect of this debate.
In the Aqualand water park, the shrieked exclamations are couched in Scouse and Black Country accents. Few now engage in the anachronistic holiday diversion of tracking down a two-day-old English newspaper to read; nonetheless, on the Tenerife waterfront it’s all Daily Mirror or Daily Express. Working-class families have been coming back to Tenerife year after year for two weeks of beaches, beer and affordable sunshine, and who would begrudge them that? In the morality debate of over-tourism among the chattering classes, too often the verb to holiday can be conjugated as follows: I travel responsibly; you’re a tourist; they’re wrecking the planet.
All the same, the Canary Islands are a good test case for the future of mass leisure. The volcanic tundra at the foot of Mount Teide was formed a blink of an eye ago in geological time; similarly, it’s a mayfly’s lifespan in the history of Tenerife since islanders embraced tourism as their guarantee of financial security. Within living memory, they were market gardeners, taking advantage of their mineral-rich soil to cultivate bananas, potatoes and tomatoes. Today only the bananas are grown on a commercial scale, and that’s made possible with financial assistance from the EU. The island is locked into a commercial dependency with the industry that is threatening its environment.
The upmarket hotels display black and white photographs of an older, rural Tenerife: the homely ranches and prairies of produce are almost like a reproach. The over-tourism activists are calling for a reset. “What we’re asking for is for no more development,” the film-maker and campaigner Felipe Ravina told the BBC. He said a freeze on new tourism projects would give the Canary Islands a chance to reconsider their economic model. “Ironically, it is tourism itself which is destroying the very same product which it is selling,” he added.
There are signs that the message may be getting through. In Gran Canaria, it’s reported that politicians have agreed to call at least a temporary halt to their plans for making up thousands of new beds. Sebastian Ebel, the boss of the German airline company Tui, which operates flights to Tenerife, has argued that package holidays like the ones it offers aren’t the problem because they provide work for locals: it’s apartments for sale and Airbnb properties that drive up house prices. But he said it’s up to locals to “decide how much tourism they want”. It’s not quite waving the white flag. But it is acknowledging that the advance of holidaymakers’ knotted handkerchief can’t go on unchecked.
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