29 January 2024 , 15:09
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Locals are being priced out of their homes in a sunny Spanish destination loved by Brits as the number of holiday lets there surge.
The property market in parts of the Canary Islands has been running so hot for such an extended period of time that those born and raised on the island are increasingly struggling to get on the ladder.
In one 12 month period to August 2023 house prices on the Spanish island chain jumped up 12%, according to data from the General Council of Notaries. Many landlords insist tenants on the island earn three times as much as the average rent. For a property rent at 650 euros a month, two out of three workers on the Canaries don't earn enough.
A big spike in holiday rentals is fuelling the property price rises, with three times as many short term lets available in December in Santa Cruz de Tenerife than long term ones in December, Canarian Weekly reports.
Tourists pack into a bar on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands (Alamy Stock Photo)A shift towards Airbnb and other forms of self-catered accommodation now means that more than half of the 540,000 beds on the islands are found in holiday lets rather than hotels. This means tourists are more directly pushing up house prices in the Canaries, which have long had the highest rate of unemployment anyway in Spain. At the end of 2023, 15% of people living there had no job.
Spanish island loved by Brits wants to cut tourist numbers to stop 'saturation'
In six areas on the Canaries there are more tourist beds than ones for locals. According to Raúl Hernández, there are an average of eight holiday rental spaces per 100 inhabitants across all the islands.
Of all the 200,000 or so holiday apartments there, more than half are owned by people who have just one property - suggesting locals are converting their homes into rentals to make the most of the islands' status as the most visited tourist area in the EU.
Many people have long been sounding the alarm when it comes to over tourism on the Canary Islands, arguing that the biodiverse, sparse and once remote chain cannot handle the 90 or so million visitors they received in 2019.
One of them is Felicitas Brodtrager, a local and academic who has written passionately about the need to change how tourism operates in the region.
“When I set foot out of my home my heart bleeds. My beloved land is in pain. I can see and feel the pain with every step I take in whatever direction. And it hurts. It hurts because it could be different," he writes of Tenerife.
"It could be prosperous, full of hope and marvellously beautiful. It could be thriving, healthy and welcoming. You can’t choose what you call home, your heart decides. Sometimes I wish it would have never chosen this place. It is complicated.”
Aside from housing, one of the major problems in Tenerife - as with the other Canary Islands - is how little is produced there. Just 10% of the largely arid land is cultivated, and that which is is too dry to produce much else beyond potatoes and grapes.
Farmer Natalia Diaz notes that 90% of all that is consumed on the island is brought in. This is not only a climate issue in terms of transport emissions, but a local waste one. "So, all those hotels and all those tourist hotspots, are consuming products from abroad. And the only thing they are leaving us in the Canary Islands is their s**t that ends up in our ocean. Because we haven't even produced that food here," she said.