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7 months ago
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THOUSANDS of people took to the streets today in Tenerife to protest against mass tourism and demand their politicians take action.
The anti-tourist hordes filled a square in the capital brandishing banners including some that read “You enjoy we suffer” in English.
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SolarpixOthers read: “Where is the money from tourism?” and “‘Tourist moratorium now.”
They waved Canary Islands’ flags and blew vuvuzelas to make a deafening noise in Santa Cruz.
Protests also took place at the same time on other Canary islands including Lanzarote and Gran Canaria.
More demonstrations are scheduled for the Spanish mainland in cities like Malaga and Madrid as well as London and Berlin.
The protests were organised under the slogan “The Canary Islands have a limit.”
Campaigners have been quick to distance themselves from anti-tourist graffiti which has appeared on walls and benches in and around southern Tenerife.
At the beginning of this week a picture was published in local press showing the words “Go Home” on a hire car in the popular holiday hotspot.
Anti-tourist protestors want the authorities to paralyse two tourist projects including one which involves the construction of a five-star hotel by one of Tenerife’s last virgin beaches.
They are also looking for more protection from mass tourism – to help with the local environment, traffic, and housing issues.
Other demands include the protection of natural spaces, a tourist tax and better working conditions for hotel cleaners, who joined today’s protest in Santa Cruz as they insisted to local press: “We are not slaves.”
Official sources put the number of demonstrators in Tenerife at midday at around 10,000 people, although that estimate had increased to 15,000 by 1pm local time with some predictions it could end up surpassing the 50,000 mark.
An estimated 1,000 people started the protest march that began just after midday today from a park in Lanzarote’s capital Arrecife.
Many more subsequently joined it and some local reports put the number of demonstrators at “at least” 5,000 by the time it reached a city beach called Playa El Reducto.
In the Gran Canaria capital Las Palmas, marchers carried banners in Spanish which said: “It’s not phobia, it’s love for my land.”
A woman protestor held up another which said: “Fourteen million tourists a year but 36 per cent of Canarians at risk of poverty.”
One of the other banners exhibited by protestors said: “The Canary Islands government is an estate agency”
Another said: “With so much Airbnb where are we going to live.”
More than 1,000 people were said to have joined the protest march in Fuerteventura by just after midday local time.
Protestor Xiomara Cruz, who took part in the march in Gran Canaria, said ahead of its start: “They made us believe that in the Canary Islands we live from tourism and what we want is the right of islanders to live in their land.”
She called the protests a “rallying cry from a population tired of seeing how our islands are being destroyed.”
Paula Rincon told local press: “It pains me that Canarians cannot afford to live in their own neighbourhoods.”
Insisting the current tourism model led to “more people paying lower prices and badly-built hotels that destroyed beaches and protected areas” she added: “I don’t know why we aspire to so many numbers when this doesn’t filter down to the rest of the population.
“The current system doesn’t benefit us, it impoverishes us.”
The protests in the Canary Islands are mostly taking place away from the main tourist areas, which in Tenerife and Gran Canaria are in the south of the islands.
Some British holidaymakers have shown their support for the issues raised by the islanders but others have accused them of biting the hand that feeds them.
The Canary Islands’ tourism minister Jessica de Leon urged British holidaymakers not to cancel their holidays ahead of today’s demos.
Canary Islands regional president Fernando Clavijo initially admitted he was worried tourists might be put off coming to the area, before softening his message last week and describing the April 20 protests as an opportunity to “revise” the current tourism model.
Jorge Marichal, president of regional hotel association ASHOTEL, has claimed tourists were ringing establishments to ask whether it was safe to come.
He has also insisted ‘non-regulated’ holiday lets are a big problem and the reason there is less control than there should be on the numbers of tourists in places like Tenerife.
Messages in English left on walls and benches in and around Palm Mar in southern Tenerife at the start of the month included ‘My misery your paradise’ and ‘Average salary in Canary Islands is 1,200 euros.’
In an apparent UK backlash, a response left in English on a wall next to a ‘Tourists go home’ message said: “F##k off, we pay your wages.”
Protest platform Canarias Se Agota has insisted it has nothing to do with the graffiti that has appeared in parts of Tenerife over recent weeks – and has accused regional politicians of blaming them of tourism-phobia as part of a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign.
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