Organisers of protests against overtourism in the Canary Islands say they expect more than 100,000 people to descend on tourist areas this weekend to demonstrate.
Fears that the Spanish islands off the coast of Africa are overcrowded prompted huge protests earlier this year from locals demanding changes to the tourism model.
However, those demonstrations did not take place in parts of the archipelago where hotels and resorts were based. The marches planned for Sunday, 20 October, target areas where tourists stay, including Playa de las Americas in Tenerife, which is beloved by British visitors.
Ivan Cerdena Molina, a member of the local environmental organisation ATAN, took a leading role in the previous protests and said the new event will attempt to directly engage with holidaymakers.
“We are going to take loudspeakers, we are going to stop in the bars, [hotel] terraces and tell the people what are our problems,” he told the Express.
“We are going to say ‘you are swimming in s***’, you are making our housing prices higher and the industry behind you [is not helping the island].
“I think the atmosphere is peaceful [but] we are going there to demonstrate. We are full of arguments.”
Molina was keen to stress that visitors weren’t to blame for the over-tourism that locals believe has made the islands unsafe and has erased local culture.
“We are getting a lot of understanding from the tourists,” he added, “we got a report on television a couple of days ago and they were interviewing tourists and they were really well informed.
“Actually, I was surprised. Most of the comments were like, ‘we understand, of course they need to have a place to live and [low] salaries are not good for anyone.’ So there was a lot of understanding.”
But the route of the demonstration on Sunday goes through the notorious Las Veronicas strip the site of much of the Tenerife’s drunken debauchery where pints cost as little as £2 and at busy times as many as 15-20 stag/hen-dos can be found partying.
Molina said demonstrators were prepared if beer-swilling tourists started throwing insults at the march.
“I mean, some tourists might feel attacked,” he said. It happened in a previous [protest in tourist areas] some people started showing the middle finger to us.
“But I mean, it’s normal. [They will be] people who are drunk and not knowing where they are. It’s like the lowest quality tourism we have. We don’t speak much to these people.
“It can happen but, in general, tourists are already informed and have empathy with the problems we have here because they also have many of the same problems too.”
One thing Molina and the other organisers are sure of is that there will be a strong turnout, although they do not expect as many as the 120,000 who gathered in Tenerife alone to be present they still expect tens of thousands to descend on tourist areas.
“We are expecting at least 30,000 all in Tenerife we know that for sure that Fuerteventura will for sure 20,000 plus Lanzarote and a similar amount in Gran Canaria to Tenerife, the [smaller islands] will have probably a few thousand,” he added.
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