MASPALOMAS, (Spain): Thousands of flag-waving demonstrators hit the streets across Spain’s Canary Islands on Sunday to demand restrictions to the mass tourism they say is overwhelming their Atlantic archipelago.
Rallying under the slogan “The Canary Islands have a limit”, demonstrators began marching at midday in tourist hotspots across all of the archipelago’s seven main islands.
Protesters gathered outside a convention centre in Maspalomas on the island of Gran Canaria, the only water park on the island of Fuerteventura, and the nightlife district in Playa de las America in Tenerife’s southwestern tip.
Waving white, blue and yellow flags of the Canary Islands, chanting and whistling protesters slow-marched by tourists sitting in outdoor terraces in Playa de las America before they rallied on the beach.
“This beach is ours,” they chanted as tourists sitting on sunbeds under parasol shades looked on.
The demonstration follows large protests held in April in town squares across the archipelago against a model of mass tourism critics say favours investors at the expense of the environment, and that prices local residents out of housing and forces them into low-paid service jobs.
Ivan Cerdena, a spokesman for local environmental group ATAN which has played a leading role in the protests, said organisers wanted to take the demonstrations to “the epicentre of this unjust tourist model” this time around.
“These tourist areas with their huge blocks of cement that were created for the exclusive use of tourists, these are the places we believe we should apply a little more pressure to see if the government pays attention to us once and for all,” he told local television ahead of the protest.
Holding placards reading “The Canaries are not for sale” and “Enough is enough”, demonstrators called for limits on tourist numbers and curbs on what they describe as uncontrolled development.
Some 6,500 people took part in the protest in Tenerife, 5,000 in Gran Canaria and over 1,500 people in Lanzarote, local officials said.
Last year a record 16.2 million people visited the Canary Islands, more than seven times its population of some 2.2 million, a level demonstrators argue is unsustainable for the archipalago’s limited resources.
The islands located off the northwestern coast of Africa are on track to smash this record this year.
Some four out of 10 residents work in tourism, which accounts for 36 percent of the islands’ gross domestic product, official figures show.
But many locals complain they do not share in the wealth generated by the tourism sector.
One in three people living in the Canaries are at risk of poverty, according to the latest figures from the European Anti-Poverty Network.
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