Closer to the coast of Africa than Europe, the sun-baked archipelago of the Canary Islands has long held an irresistible allure for the British.
The Victorians used to travel here, by boat, to enjoy the warm air – albeit in much smaller numbers.
In the 1880s there were just three hotels boasting a grand total of 45 rooms in Santa Cruz, the capital of Tenerife, the largest of the islands making up this Atlantic outpost of Spain.
Later, in 1927, Agatha Christie found a bolthole from turbulent times at home on the island. Winston Churchill visited in 1959 and then a trio of lads from Liverpool named Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Paul McCartney really put the island on the map when they took a holiday here in 1963.
In their wake a mass tourism market blossomed; and how times change.
Last year more than 16million visitors beat a path to the islands, somewhere north of five million of them British – a record-breaking number.
Holidaymakers come for the year-round balmy weather, short-haul flights and friendly welcome of the Canarian people.
But in recent weeks, much like the clouds of orange Saharan sand that sometimes blow around these parts, a cloud of discontent has swept across the Canaries.
Pockets of graffiti have been popping up on walls and buildings around the ever-popular south of Tenerife.
‘Tourists go home!’ ‘Your paradise, our hell!’
There have been protests too, with a larger one across five islands planned this weekend, organised by the group Canarias Se Agota, which translates, broadly, as ‘the Canary Islands are exhausted’, which is linked to several different associations including ecologist groups. Neighbouring island Lanzarote has also seen pockets of protest this month.
On Thursday a group of young Spaniards began an indefinite hunger strike, of all things, as part of a protest against the effects of mass tourism on island life.
So what exactly is going on in Britain’s favorite winter sun destination?
Last week we joined the holiday crowd flying into Tenerife and spoke to locals, tourists and protesters alike and found an island as warm and welcoming as ever.
But probe beneath the surface of the sunbeds and pedalos, and there are signs of the strain the ever-growing footfall of tourism is having on an island where the number of residents (approximately 950,000) is swollen by more than five million visitors each year, 2.2million of them British.
The welcome of locals from taxi drivers at the airport, to restaurant staff, right down to cleaners at the hotel I visit is nothing other than smiling and scrupulously polite.
There is a reason couples like John and Jane Lodder, from Hampshire, come back here year after year. John, 75, used to own a property here, but after he sold it ten years ago he kept coming back for holidays at a favorite hotel in the resort of Los Cristianos.
John, a retired senior manager for a biscuit manufacturer, says: ‘We have never experienced any animosity at all, quite the opposite in fact.’
And yet, there is a problem on these islands that is inextricably linked to tourism.
One activist explained it thus: ‘We’re not against the tourists, we just want a change of model towards a type of tourism that is more sustainable,’ he said.
‘Tenerife is collapsing and there are tourists who are coming and are not enjoying their stays because they’re stuck in traffic jams all the time and won’t come back if we continue along the route we’re going down at the moment.’
Fellow protester Brian Harrison was once a visitor himself, hailing from Bridgend, south Wales, before arriving on the island in his 20s, marrying a local and making Tenerife his home.
His villa in La Tejita, a windswept, eerily barren beauty spot at the very bottom of the island, just a mile south of the ever-busy airport, stands as a stark reminder of the perilous balance between the natural landscape of this volcanic land and the footprint of mass tourism.
Turn one way, and there’s a yawning stretch of almost empty sand, punctuated by a smattering of sunbeds, with waves crashing at the shore. Turn around, however, and stretching before you, as far as the eye can see, is a vast unfinished concrete jungle, a ‘macro-hotel’ project, one of two massive developments that have become the focus of protests.
The five-star La Tejita development was given the green light in 2018, but until just a couple of months ago had been on hold for three years, amid protests and court battles.
On the ugly fences surrounding the giant, grey dustbowl, we find expletive-ridden graffiti, though aimed at the hotel, not the tourists who might one day come and stay here.
Brian, an engineer, says: ‘Since I moved here all the urbanisable land has been built on… there used to be space on the island and now there’s not. The island is unrecognizable from when I arrived.
‘It didn’t happen overnight. It’s kind of the “boiling frog” syndrome. The residents have witnessed it bit by bit and have acclimatized, but it’s come to a point where the waters are boiling and we’re suffering from a situation which is unsustainable.
‘I’ve spent most of my adult life here. It’s just that I feel helplessness with what I’m seeing in front of my eyes.
‘There’s a lack of control over tourism. Towns where there are 500 homes which are operating as holiday rentals, with half of them owned by Brits or Germans and all the transactions occurring in their home countries – and these people buying more and more properties to make more and more profit.’
‘We’re saying, why not apply an eco-tax like in the Balearic Islands where every single tourist who enters maybe has to pay five euros a night, possibly more like ten euros a night in the all-inclusive hotels?’ says Brian.
‘And all that income goes to improving infrastructure on the island, public transport, roads, sewage treatment plants and so on, and that would automatically regulate the amount of tourism that enters. The same for rental cars, a daily tax on hire vehicles which then goes on improving roads.
‘We’re not saying “get rid of tourism” but we’re presenting alternatives to improve how tourism affects the lives of people who live on the island.’
It’s a tricky balance. Certainly, nobody working in the tourism trade wants to see the holidaymakers, on whom the island’s economy depends, disappear.
British expat John Parkes has lived on the island for 37 years; he owns tourist apartments and The Vault bar, in bustling Los Cristianos, so is well-placed to appreciate the complexities at play.
‘Thankfully most of the residents in Tenerife realize that tourism is the lifeblood of the island,’ he says.
He does, however, think there is a problem, as do others we speak to. Until 2015, private holiday rentals were not allowed in the Canaries – it was only hotels and designated tourist complexes.
Then came the introduction of what is called ‘Viviendas Vacacionales’ licences, which opened the door to those who wanted to rent their home out on Airbnb and the like.
The ‘Airbnb effect’ is a phenomenon familiar to many global holidayspots in which areas with high concentrations of holiday lets have seen rental and house price rises, making it harder and harder for people who live there. Devon and Cornwall are prime examples of this.
Holiday rentals are far more lucrative than long-term rentals to local, low-paid workers, which have pushed up prices and put immense pressure on local residents who can’t afford homes.
‘This isn’t something that is just happening here,’ says John, sitting in the high-ceilinged lobby of perhaps the island’s most eye-catching hotel, the Bahia Principe Fantasia – a Princess-castle, turreted resort that looks like a mini Disneyland – where he is enjoying his own short holiday.
‘Before 2015, a one-bedroomed apartment in Los Cristianos might cost 600-700 euros a month, but now it’s 1,100 or 1,200 euros. The problem is you have people who work in hotels, bars, restaurants and their take-home pay is about 1,300 Euros a month. It just doesn’t add up.’
House prices have rocketed too – a surge of 8.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2023 in the Canaries, according to data released by the Spanish Ministry of Housing.
In 2022, there were 29,582 Brits officially registered as living in the Canary Islands but the actual figure is said to be considerably higher.
Add in the digital nomads – the growing band of workers in the post-Covid era who would rather work from home in a place like Tenerife than in a tiny flat in London, say, and pressure mounts.
In 2022, Airbnb named the Canary Islands the ‘top destination for digital nomads’ to live and work remotely.
The 90-day Schengen rule is quite enough to cover a three-month escape from the British winter and last year Spain introduced a digital nomad visa, allowing Britons and other non-EU citizens (fulfilling certain criteria) to live and work in the country for up to a year.
Glance online and there is a plethora of hubs and social media groups catering specifically to digital nomads on the islands, with co-working spaces and friendly ‘networking’ meet-ups in sun-filled cafes.
With British incomes, they can afford local rental prices more readily than many islanders.
Over the past decade, rental costs in the Canary Islands have increased 85 per cent while salaries have only grown by 6 per cent. Wages in the Canaries are the second-lowest of anywhere in Spain and the lowest paid are those working in the hotel and catering sectors.
Ironic, isn’t it?
In more than one location on the island, there are caravans lining quiet streets. Not all the occupants are travelers, looking for a low-cost holiday, some are local workers who have chosen a caravan over the unaffordable demands of an apartment.
We also spot signs of rough sleepers and stories abound of workers sleeping in caves.
In the bustling tourist metropolis that is Playa de Las Americas, a British mother-of-three, who has visited Tenerife on a handful of occasions over the last two decades, notes that her daughter spotted a man, sleeping surrounded by cardboard under a bridge.
‘That’s not something I’ve ever seen here before,’ she says.
Undeterred, British businessman and YouTuber Andrew Knight is of the view there aren’t many places better to live or to visit.
The 29-year-old, originally from Liverpool, is sitting with his father Paul, 64, who has holidayed here for decades, explaining how he fell in love with the island life that he films and shares on his YouTube channel, the Knightsrider.
In recent months those videos have attracted a small, but regular scattering of abuse.
Andrew, who moved to Tenerife almost ten years ago, says: ‘They see my videos on tourism in Tenerife where I am showing the beach and say “we are full” and “go home”.’
These aren’t trolls, he says, but rather accounts that appear to belong to young locals. His response is simply to delete them.
Recently, he has had to field a growing number of worried messages from people who follow his social media accounts.
‘People have messaged me saying, “My daughter’s coming over and I’m concerned she’s not going to feel welcome.” I have been putting out videos reassuring people.’
He thinks there are solutions to the genuine problems.
‘I think the government should do more to give tax breaks to owners for long-term rentals and protect them from squatters.
‘They could maybe tax the hotels more. And the government should be clamping down on complexes like one near us that are meant to be residential but are all Airbnbs.’
As for tourism, he very wisely points out that the faceless minority who are besmirching this island’s welcoming reputation ‘don’t realise how much the island relies on tourism’.
‘Everything here comes back to the income from tourism,’ he says.
Back in 1797 British naval hero Horatio Nelson, then Rear-Admiral, assailed these shores in the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife – suffering not just a defeat, but losing an arm to boot.
Despite defeat, he and his men were still allowed to leave with their war honors and two loaned schooners.
A long tradition of hospitality – and a 200-year cordial relationship between these sun-baked islands and sun-loving Brits – that’s surely worth fighting for.