Thousands protest against Canary islands' 'unsustainable' tourism model | Hacker News Reader

Thousands protest against Canary islands' 'unsustainable' tourism model

theguardian.com

62 pointsskilled89 comments

Just one hundred years ago tourism was only available to a tiny elite. Like with all goods and services provisions that have been scaled exponentially in the mean time, the problem is that there is poor accounting and management of side-effects (externalities). Impacts on environment and local communities are ignored as it is simpler and more profitable to do so.

Sustainability is a complex problem facing every aspect of modern life that we have barely begun to acklowledge, let alone start really solving. E.g., the article does not discuss the interplay with the other intensive industry of the Canary islands (banana plantations) that also competes for resources and creates its own problems.

It will take major economic, political and behavioral development to transition to long term sustainable economies and its anybody's guess what the final outcome will be.

For me personally I've only recently connected the dots. Collectively as a society we are currently talking about carbon-neutral vs carbon-negative, global warming and clean energy. As someone who fell for that narrative for quite some time, I can see why. The more uncomfortable but in my opinion significantly more compelling answer to what stands in the way of a sustainable human co-habitation of planet earth, is: not CO2 emissions, it's modernity. The writing by Tom Murphy drove that point home for me.

One example: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/03/lets-make-a-deal/

> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.

Big picture: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/our-time-on-the-river/

This is very dangerous point of view, which will lead to a lot of suffering.

Humanity managed to lift vast majority of itself from abject poverty, grow enough food for everyone, prevent children mortality - unimaginable 100 years ago.

And this is called modernity, which if reversed will bring back hunger and misery.

Yeah it's like we're currently stuck in a local minima in regards of environmentalism, and we can choose to go forward and try to improve using technology, or go backward and improve it by impoverishing ourselves.

I'd argue that our actual minima is around 1950s, which means we are halfway forward to be able to geoengineer ourselves to a better earth than if we're not here at all. But it may be a futile hope.

For many years I believed in our ability to engineer our way out of this one. I'm an engineer by profession, and so are you I assume. It certainly shapes the way we view the world.

If we continue our current growth of energy use, we'll be using the entire luminosity output of the Milky Way galaxy in 1000 years. Color me skeptical, but I say that won't happen. So something will have to give, and that's never ending growth. There are a lot of humans https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/08/ecological-cliff-edge/ and increasingly fewer other animals. Extinction rates are up a thousand fold to the background and accelerating. Geoengineering like so many other ideas in this space are the lie we want to believe that there is a way forward that won't involve fundamentally changing our way of life. Let's just keep doing the same thing we have been doing, a way that is demonstrably causing the sixth mass extinction, but this time with ~sustainable growth~ ~green energy~ ~carbon offsets~ ...

The number of humans is going to plateau and start gradually declining by the turn of the century; that should put an end to the endless growth assumed in whatever model assumes that ludicrous use-of-entire-Milky-Way-luminosity prediction.

Slime molds in pitri dishes are famous for using up their resources and then plateauing ..

Sustainable growth is like saying humane torture. An oxymoron and a lie. Sustainability is all about an equilibrium and long term circular processes, how can that be compatible with ever increasing resource usage, aka growth?

Our financial and societal systems are built on growth, we define prosperity in terms of growth. A traded corporation isn't considered successful when it earns as much as last quarter, it needs to earn more every quarter, ad nauseam.

We want to have and do a lot of stuff that we absolutely don't need. For example, going to the canaries on holiday. It doesn't even make us happy most of the time. We can get rid of that and still be a long way from misery.

Modernity has poisoned our waters, created and unleashed novel sicknesses upon the world, harnessed the atom in order to destroy life, and hides behind medicine as if that excuses all of it.

That's a very human centric point of view you show. Also if you look at anything but GDP it's a much more complicated picture, happiness certainly hasn't been on a never ending upward trajectory. We've also made life miserable for so many animals. We are currently in the sixth mass extinction. We are the sixth mass extinction.

Recognizing a problem does not imply a solution. Do I think it's reasonable or realistic to go back to pre agricultural revolution? No.

Is modernity a reckless party with finite resources? Yes.

https://www.jeremychin.com/repository/hard-truths/0002.jpg

Yes, the real sustainability problem is multifaceted and far more profound than the focus on fossil fuel induced climate change. But for me the currently near single-minded focus on the latter subset has some redeeming virtues:

i) it is an intrinsically global problem. Local emissions diffuse in the atmosphere and become everyone's problem - this pushes for a change in collective mindsets. This is not unlike the viral spread of the recent pandemic, you can't tackle global risks with defunct supra-national mechanisms.

ii) it is a reasonably quantifiable problem (it aligns easier with the prevalent financialization culture and toolkit - this opens up possibilities for immediate "solutions" like building sustainability reporting standards, carbon taxes etc.). Biodiversity and broader ecological health, let alone social/cultural issues are more subtle and subject to challenge.

In other words, as we reluctantly start tackling the unsustainable energy system, we might learn tricks and behaviors that will hopefully be useful more broadly. It is a sort of piecemeal, divide and conquer approach rather than pulling the plug and jumping into the unknown. In the fullness of time it may not work but it makes sense to give it a try.

There is much to like about "modernity" it would be a pity if something happened to it. Being able to travel around and enjoy the wonders of planet and cultures is immensely enriching. Let's hope that there is enough collective intelligence around to transition into a sustainable mode that preserves the good bits.

I think I'm generally on board with the notion that trying is better than giving up, and maybe thinking about green energy is a stepping stone towards discussing modernity and the role it plays in ecosphere destruction. At the same time, all of the current topics with widespread reach in that area frame it from a perspective of getting to do the same things we get to do today. Even your answer does so "Being able to travel around and enjoy the wonders of planet and cultures is immensely enriching." yes flying and traveling thousands of kilometers in a high-speed fashion are astonishing achievements. But they are also astonishingly destructive for all the other life on this planet.

Also did we experience the same COVID-19 crisis? The one where the UN held a vote to see if this constituted a global crisis, one which would allow waving international IP laws for vaccines. And voted NO this is not a crisis. In my experience when faced with harsh situations, people tend to look inward, towards a smaller circle. Are less compassionate and less willing to share. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I don't see the world destruction initiated and primarily caused by the global north going to bring the best out in us. I'm predicting wars, fascism and closed borders. I don't want that to happen, but for me there is overwhelming evidence that points in that direction.

Strongly disagree. It is perfectly possible to sustainably grow, without having to sacrifice growth. Look at France: https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1775434131066822775/pho...

It's like you didn't even read my original comment. So yes, if you look at only one metric, namely CO2 and then only at a single country, one known to have exported pollution heavy industries to poorer countries, yes the graph doesn't keep growing.

Pollution and climate change is a global problem. The global graph for CO2 isn't going down. And even if it will, that still leaves us with other green house gasses, deforestation, PFAS, plastic pollution, other pollution, mining, rising extinction rates and more.

I looked at your graph, do me the favor at look at mine https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/

An unpopular opinion really. I remember at the turn of the century people were concerned that China would ignore all environmental concerns and that they had the attitude, "The west got to be dirty to scale, so we should be allowed to as well"... Its really a human belief IMO, "the rich get to rape the environment for so long, its unfair to clamp down on me now".

In my opinion- that is true. The wealthy should deplete their resources solving this, on earth, not mars. They do owe "us", for collectively hoarding wealth at the expense of everyday people... and have the time and resources to do so. Any other response is just an excuse and lies.

I actually don't think the environmental problems we face will be solved until collectively we remove the burden of the everyday person to actually contribute. UBI.

Until then it's a cycle of, extract resources, hoard capital, and minimize everyday people- so that the first two steps can continue without anyone at the top feeling uncomfortable. Well, I believe it will become VERY uncomfortable if this continues.

Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs. They’re between a rock and a hard place. The government needs to figure out a way that the locals can capture more of the value tourists bring.

> Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs.

That's not strictly true, and it's (stopping all tourists) not what they're advocating.

A third of their GDP comes (directly) from tourism, which suggests some room to move (downwards) on tourist quotas, while still retaining a fair amount of revenue from that sector, but without jeopardising access to scarce resources (potable water, housing, etc).

They could change the laws so as to halve the tourist load, but double the money extracted per tourist.

Really just a matter of stopping unscrupulous businesses from renting out common (public) resources at rock bottom prices and externalizing the costs.

Sure it would destroy the cheap end of Canary Islands tourism, but the local government should be looking out for it's citizens interests, not the interests of outsiders who want a cut-rate vacation.

I struggle with the idea of tourism being a good basis for an economy. At some point you reach a level where the appeal is outweighed by crowding, and the experiences people want are no longer available.

Sounds like that’s solved by raising prices, no?

Yep, exactly my thought. Start raising prices (via taxes or touristic accommodation quotas or whatever) and find that goldilocks zone balancing revenue and pressure on the environment/locals.

The problem here is that this creates negative externalities on the housing market unless regulation is in place. Otherwise, it creates an incentive for short-term housing over long-term housing, which affects the people who do live there. This is the crux of the matter in many places that have a problem with tourism.

Regulation is definitely necessary to protect low-income residents. Areas that understand this and implement it well will be rewarded for it.

tax stays of less than 3 months by 50%

Surely it’s self limiting, as more tourists arrive the attractiveness goes down.

From a sustainability point of view though 10,000 people concentrated in a single tourist complex is better than 100 villages with 100 people each.

It's not a 100 villages though, is it?

It's 2.2 million local residents living a long term largely sustainable life that are being swamped by an additional non resident 13.9 million people per annum.

Nothing is sustainable about living on the canaries. Energy is largely imported fossile fuel, water comes from desalination via said energy. The banana monocultures are an ecological desaster as well.

Economic sustainability != Environmental sustainability

Tourism in general is unsustainable but mass tourism in limited areas is more sustainable per head than spread out tourism

Tourism here, as in most places overrun with tourism, isn't advancing by consolidating all prior tourist locations into a single more efficient tourist hotspot, it's proceeding by adding on additional tourist mega plexes.

Sure, but what are the alternatives? They never had significant industrialization. Before mass tourism, their economies were based on fishing and banana farming. The British Crown Dependencies, without the great weather and scenery of the Canaries, developed into offshore tax havens.

Which is why Víctor Martín in the article is quoted as saying:

“The problem isn’t the tourists,” he said. “It’s a model that was built around – and with the connivance of – a business class that doesn’t want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.”

There is a lot of illegal accommodation and illegal housing. They are not able to catch that.. or they dont want to

Yes, the "they" in your "They are not able" is the "political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens".

I know the islands well. Tourism is still only a third of the economy there. International shipping and agriculture sustained the islands for hundreds of years, prior to the 1970s when cheap jet air travel came of age. They import a lot now, but can in theory totally self-sustain. Each of the islands has a very different biosphere suited to different farming.

We should pay attention to the Canary Islands, the rest of the planet is the coal mine, The problem is identified as "tourism" but their relation to the global economics within a climate change context is the real story.

> 13.9 million people visited the islands

Nearly all of them flew there. A few passenger cruise ships stop by.

> a water emergency is already been declared on Tenerife

They've a housing crisis, a cost of living crisis and now 36 degrees in April after a dry winter.

Most of Tenerife is volcanic and the plant life around tourist areas is heavily irrigated. Without that it's a quite barren, unattractive environment. Without enough water for just the population, tourism is unsustainable.

> It's a model that was built around a business class that doesn't want to listen to what needs to be done, and with a political class that serves that business class instead of serving all the citizens.

So, the usual root causes, greed and short-term thinking.

> We should pay attention to the Canary Islands, the rest of the planet is the coal mine

I enjoyed this line.

> only a third of the economy

Yeah and I’m sure the rest is advanced industry and not at all goods and services consumed by the tourism-industry workers and their families

Santa Cruz where most of the local population lives gets half of its water from desalination plant.

Desalination is already cost-effective and can provide water for tourists if needed. They would just need to build a desalination plant in the south.

Electricity already is largely generated by wind, solar and tide.

Air transportation probably causes the biggest pollution.

Apart from that such tourism is very sustainable. It provides value to people who need to go on holidays. It doesn't matter if the food and necessities are imported because tourists would have consumed the food anyway if they had stayed at home.

While it causes unsustainable rent increases to local population, that can be managed somehow. Maybe give subsidies to them by using the profits from tourism. Tourism tax is not unusual invention in many places.

Tourists bring little value beyond what they spend on themselves. That’s why countries that have developed a strong tourism base struggle to develop further. It’s an economic dead end.

> Take away the tourists and they have no economy and no jobs.

Nobody is arguing to take away tourism. They are arguing against it's unsustainable growth. The industry is perfectly ok in it's current state, brings in 16bn dollars a year.

Yup. The problem is the local elites and their tendency towards profit maximization at the expense of everything else.

It's a very familiar story.

Place the blame where it belongs: the government and regulating the industry.

Businesses and elites are playing the game according to the rules that they are given.

Maybe the rules need improving, but that is a governance problem. There are reasons why the governance is difficult (e.g. capture) but that doesn’t mean blame should be shifted.

Businesses and elites are playing the game according to the rules that they are lobbying for.

Fixed that for you.

Yeah, they do like to pretend that the game either exists in either a vacuum or a direct democracy that is untainted by those same elites.

> Place the blame where it belongs: the government and regulating the industry.

Why? Why are we blaming the guard who is trying to stop the hoard from destroying the city rather than the hoard which is destroying the city? Companies need to behave ethically and if they dont know what is ethical I'm sure they can afford to have some philosophers on the board. And if they can't afford that, that still doesn't absolve them from their unethical behavior. I refuse to participate in this blame shifting mentality, as if companies have no other choice but to be unethical.

You are quite naive. Government in many countries is a framework to help enforce ethical behavior. Without enforcement I wouldn’t pay my taxes just because “I want to pay my fair share”. I pay them because the IRS exists. Having companies and industries regulate themselves just leads to a lot of “trust me bro I’m good” scenarios.

I'm not talking about what is, I am talking about everyone's resignation to it. At the very least I would expect people to blame the businesses and companies equally. But what I observe is not just tacit acceptance of company behavior but in some places stating it as if that is how it should be.

It is a beautiful place, but without tourists its basically just goats and bananas.

And what’s wrong with that?

Inherently nothing, but you cannot build economy just on that. How would you import all expensive stuff on island? People would be unhappy that they don’t have jobs. People are never truly satisfied with anything.

That's all a real man and a woman need.

In the bealearic where I lived they call it “turismo basura”. Here now the main concern is the construction of new hotels in the coast. Ironically also the issue is lack of affordable housing for locals. Many buildings are run down and sit empty in the capital. There is some truth to the message but as always the way is delivered leaves you wondering. Not to mention the negative effect the clampdown on tourism would have on the local economy. I classify this as petty noise.

I would like to comment on the Guardian reporting. It was always a news organization that I loved but their reporting has become so one-sided that it’s now questionable if this is really journalism at all.

Why not interview the local elected politicians or the local tourism organization? Apparently there’s a problem with those two resorts being built. Are they really that outrageous? Why not report on them even just by calling a representative?

Even if they are biased it would be a counterpoint to the other (also biased) claims in the article.

What are you talking about? They include a quote from Fernando Clavijo, the regional president of the Canary islands and link to an article reporting on a statement he made to the media. Admittedly it’s in Spanish, but it’s 2024 your phone can translate that in a heartbeat.

The selected quote is not a counterpoint to the claims of the activists. It’s merely an admission that mass tourism causes issues.

Also as I said they did not interview him but only quoted another interview.

So you’re not satisfied with an interview with a local politician, you also want them to disagree with the activists? That’s not balance, that’s creating disagreement where it doesn’t exist. I bet you’re fun on Twitter

>their reporting has become so one-sided that it’s now questionable if this is really journalism at all.

I haven't regarded The Guardian as a journalism outfit ever since they painted Trump's koi feeding in such a biased light that even the Japanese media went "Nani[1] the fuck?" in utter bewilderment.

[1]: https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BD%95

Do you mean this?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/06/trump-dump-p...

That's the one, yep.

>the two men began spooning out fish food before appearing to lose patience and emptying their wooden containers with a shake.

Emphasis mine. That was in fact nothing out of the ordinary, and The Guardian only alluded to this at the very end of the article and video to technically not be outright liars:

>However, other footage made clear that Trump was merely following his host’s lead.

A drive-by glance at the article and/or video thumbnail heavily implies Trump dumped the feed of his own accord by himself.

I haven't respected The Guardian ever since that bullshit.

And despite having extraordinary trails, almost no tourist is going in the inside of the Islands.

Imho, they should limit new tourist developements on Fuerteventura and El hierro (reserving part of fishing towns for fishermen maybe), maybe on La gomera and La Palma (i don't know those well), and leave Tenerife and Gran canaria alone (i also feel that Lanzarote has too much character to add new development)

> And despite having extraordinary trails, almost no tourist is going in the inside of the Islands.

Thx for the tip! I'm considering a visit to the Canaries some day (by boat), and I'd be way more interested in say, hiking a trail up a volcano, than hanging out at bars / restaurants / souvenir shop etc.

Canary Islands has one of the lowest property taxes in Spain: 0.3% rural and 0.5% urban (+0.05% if it's unoccupied). Obviously not enough judging by the ~20% of empty houses. It's easy to blame tourists and/or immigrants but it's really their own government policies' fault.

So you pay a 10% premium for an unoccupied property?

That's the whole point. With high property taxes the property won't be empty for long.

Singapore had a similar challenge being in proximity to some of the largest population centers on earth, and having finite space/resources of an island.

1. "Right of first sale" to citizens born in the country. The real-estate speculators were not happy with the two tier bidding model, but the first home purchase a citizen makes shunts the international market pressure.

They once had the same issues Brazil developed, where the opportunists priced local citizens out of their own cities. The absurd outcome was some natural Brazilian citizens would have to work 34 lifetimes to live in their own city.

2. Prohibit commercial ownership in favor of 7+ year leases asset managed by the government (it is an island remember, and unused holdings are a liability due to malaria/mosquitoes.)

3. Put illegal-drug-dealers in front of firing-squads the following Tuesday, and seize their assets. Most idealists think this law is savage, but have never had to deal with real organized crime at scale.

4. Oil refinery produces excess energy for fresh-water desalination. Say what you want, but an island has very low carrying capacity for tourists. Even importing massive resources to cater to customer needs still hurts local ecosystems. Note, Hawaii also had long battles over water-rights with resorts playing dirty politics, and then literally burned down due in part to invasive dry-grass take over.

Poor people do not have a lot of influence outside of voting. A cathartic protest is essentially asking the same people that benefit from misery to handle their existing conduct differently.

Give a clear list of pragmatic political demands, warn of lawsuits, then follow up and sue domestically with a jury of your peers... I assure you investment funds give zero F's about complaints, but will eventually leave if their behavior has negative economic outcomes. The argument that they offer something economically unique is a false dichotomy, so just build a Starbucks and or McDonalds on top of whatever abomination they were planning... daily revenues will win out over hypothetical trickle-down economic urinal models.

Good luck, as I have only seen Singapore successfully deal with this phenomena due to its oil industry resources. =)

Oh huh, a Guardian article about a protest about unsustainable tourism in Tenerife and the Canary islands and the environmental damage it's creating. Wonder if they're going to mention that an awful lof of those developments on Tenerife are illegally dumping all their sewage in the sea rather than building sewage treatment... nope.

For context, there's been a huge amount of anger in the UK that was basically kicked off by the Guardian about how the UK's seas and rivers are catastrophically polluted with sewage by our water companies, we're supposedly the dirty man of Europe now, privatisation and Brexit has ruined everything and it's all getting worse, to the point it's likely to influence the next election. One of the big headline stories involved a British windsurfing champion leaving because it's like "surfing in a sewer"... and moving to Tenerife, where sewage treatment is objectively far worse and as mentioned there are sewage systems that just dump all their sewage out into the sea basically everywhere. (This is something that was fixed in the mainland UK decades ago post-privatisation, and in fact seems to be one of the big infrastructure improvements that privatisation was done to get funding for.) The rest of the coverage has been about as founded in reality as that.

When looking for information on this, I even ran across people that were presumably from there complaining on a forum about this and how it'd probably only get fixed if British tourists found out about it and started objecting. Guess there's little chance of that.

Limited number of tourists VISA per year, available via a bidding system.

This will obviously restrict the destination to the richest and not fair for the tourists, but from the host country it’s definitely a way of limiting the number of tourists while extracting the maximum value from each of them.

I don't think that is compatible with Schengen / EU freedom of movement

We’re not even talking about an independent country. Tourists could still arrive via internal flights.

There are a lot of people in the EU and other countries that don't need visas, so I'm not sure that's the right dial to use.

Yes, the vast majority of canary tourists are from EU. Mostly british and german. And we can not just fly there, we can just move there, thanks to the EU. And this is good.

But that I can fly there for 20€ from germany, this is nuts. So maybe the solution is to stop subsidizing flying (taxfree kerosin etc)

20€? How so?

I paid 290€ from Frankfurt 4 weeks ago.

For a little bit above this price you can fly to Cabo Verde (double the distance) from London

Ryanair for example. Not at peak times in holiday, but they even advertise that flights start at 15.77€

https://www.ryanair.com/flights/de/de/fluege-nach-teneriffa

I just paid around 500€ round trip to Fuerteventura from MUC and that was the cheapest direct flight. For 20€ you don't even get breakfast at the airport.

Are you aware of skyscanner?

(Or just check ryanair directly)

No idea if copying the link just works, but here it offers me flights starting from 14€ for this month.

https://www.skyscanner.de/transport/fluge/de/tfs/?adults=1&a...

Not that I recommend flying with them. They are cheap. And I like it save (and have ethical concerns about unnecessary flights). But many people use that bargain to fly so cheap for just a few days and then head back.

And I have to say, in winter in germany it is tempting.

I think a simpler approach is to limit the number of flights.

The local airport authority already has to decide how many slots are made available and allocate them, so there's no additional admin overhead.

The reviews on the restaurants there are regularly people whining about how expensive everything got. People spend hundreds of dollars to fly there and live in some 5 star resort just to complain about a $20 menu.

They simply have the wrong kind of tourists.

I think that's just it. There's a lot of (british) party tourists and all inclusive type of tourists. I don't think that's the type of tourist anyone would want. And the building of these hotels and real estate is in the hands of the government. So they brought this onto themselves. If you fly in (especially on Tenerife) you see hotel after hotel after hotel. It's disgusting really. (I thru-hiked the island and it's beautiful, but the coasts are weird, tho beautiful)

And Germans. Who live in German resorts and only visit absurdly cheap restaurants with German flags. At least in maspalomas that was kinda weird.

Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians really put me off about Canary Islands. They behave as it is their Germanic colony. They just push away and hiss at strangers. No you're not direct and straightforward, you're a loose butthole.

Can't say anything about that, but had the pleasure at Las Veronicas with the brits. Holy crap, that was disgusting. The girls were dressed even more loose than the hookers.

They are part of the EU, so anyone from there can freely move and live there. You cannot restrict this. Limitations in flights would be feasible, I guess.

If it was where I lived, I'm not sure I would only like to have the richest tourists visiting. It would be nice to have some down-to-earth people as well.

Do the richest tourists contribute to the local economy the most anyway? Or is it more like they spend lots of money with multinational companies (e.g. big fashion brands) that ultimately pay tax/have suppliers elsewhere?

Where Canaries take electricity from, it's all oil power plants right?

This isn't the only one unsustainable tourism model in Canary island

Interesting use of 'quotes' in the title.

‘Interesting’ use

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