Between June 2023 and April 2024, the average was 50.22 new licenses each day.
This last month, since the Government of the Canary Islands approved the draft of the regulations that hopes to regularize said economic activity, the ratio is 70 per day.
Acceleration of vacation rentals in the Canary Islands. In the last month, after the Government of the Islands, made up of the Canary Coalition (CC) and the Popular Party (PP), presented the preliminary draft of the future law to regulate the activity of tourist apartments in the Archipelago, the number of Daily registrations for vacation homes in the Autonomous Community have registered an average of 70 registrations per day, 39,38% more than had been recorded until then.
Between June 2023 and April 17, 2024, the Canary Islands added 15,319 tourist rentals, which makes an average of 50.22 new licenses per day. Between April 5 and May 2 of this year, however, it recorded 1,890, raising the daily ratio to 70. In total, the Archipelago currently has 56,173 homes for tourist use, the equivalent of 400 hotels with 500 beds. accommodation each. Nueva Canarias has asked for a moratorium until the new law is approved, scheduled for the end of this year in the best of cases.
“We run the risk that, by the time we have regulation, there may not be a need for a law,” warned Nueva Canarias deputy Luis Campos. “It is urgent that the Government, as we have proposed and has repeatedly rejected in Parliament, approve a decree law to suspend the granting of new authorizations,” declared Campos.
The general director of Tourism Planning of the regional Executive, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, acknowledged this week that a moratorium should be studied due to the “disproportionate” growth in supply, according to the online newspaper Lancelot. Rodríguez mentioned the recent report titled Distribution and concentration of tourist accommodation in the Canary Islands in 2024, prepared by the two public universities of the Islands (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and University of La Laguna), which highlights that in June 2023 there were 39,810 vacation homes and, ten months later, that value rose to 55,129.
“Today, with this growth of 38.5%, decision making is essential. What will be the result? Don't know. You have to weigh different factors. But (…) this requires decisions,” said the general director in the aforementioned media. “It is common when the new legal framework is modified, the suspension of licenses. The objective of this moratorium would be to prevent situations from consolidating that would make the effort pursued by the Law useless.”
For her part, the mayor of Candelaria (Tenerife) and president of the Canarian Federation of Municipalities (FECAM), María Concepción Brito, said that requests to declare new holiday homes have increased "considerably" after the announcement of the future regulations . “We understand that we must contain this boom (…) of an activity that does not have any type of regulation and that is unilaterally changing by the owners from residential use to tourist use” in the midst of a housing emergency, the councilor stressed in the Canarian Mirror station.
The organizers of the demonstrations held in the Canary Islands on April 20 against tourist overcrowding also demanded a “total” hotel and vacation moratorium.
The boom in new licenses has not surprised Agustín Cocola-Gant, a researcher at the Institute of Geography and Planning of the University of Lisbon (IGOT). In Portugal, the expert recalls, the national government approved a law in the summer of 2023 that prohibits the growth of tourist apartments and imposes an extraordinary tax on the owners. But it had previously applied temporary moratoriums in stressed areas and the Supreme Court had issued a dissuasive ruling that allowed vacation homes to be vetoed in residential buildings.
The absence of measures in the Islands in this regard would allow the number of apartments for tourist use in the Archipelago to continue increasing until the final approval of the law. Afterwards, all these homes will have five years to adapt to a new regulation with various requirements, such as having an approved power outlet to recharge emission-free vehicles or having a domestic hot water generation system through renewable installations. If they comply, they will have another five years. That is, the current market could be in order for a decade from 2025, with all that this entails.
Source: eldiario.es
