The Starving Place: Activists Risk Lives in Protest Over Canary Islands Tourism

There are certain things José Real expected—and committed to—when he began hunger striking in early April 2024. Pain was one, and it started for him around day four or five, he can’t quite recall. Memory loss was another, and that came later. Fatigue, however, came swiftly, and Real took to a wheelchair within the first week. But it was day 14 or 15 that he felt pain in his chest, and with it, fear.

At the hospital, doctors told Real that his potassium was so low his heart—along with other major organs—risked failure.

“I remember crying in the hospital that I wanted to go back,” he said in Spanish. He shrugged it off, his dreadlocks falling off his shoulders. It was months later, the end of a long and arduous recovery. 

Real was one of 10 activists in the Canarias Se Agota collective who protested the Canary Islands tourism industry with his life on the line. He is a biologist by trade and high school teacher by vocation. All of those experiences and motivations intersect on the path that brought Real to this moment, this radical act specifically. 

Children are naturally enchanted by nature, he said—“it’s something innate”—and he was no exception. His passion for the environment allowed him to imagine an education in biology as a tool he could use one day to help people. He once considered the medical field, but his time spent as a researcher for El Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas—the Higher Council of Scientific Research—helped him fully comprehend the reality of the climate crisis. Around the same time, folks in his family and neighborhood fell victim to an urban planning financial scam. Real began attending meetings, making signs, thinking about hands-on actions he could take. His new fervor for activism quickly found a new motive in environmental justice. 

Real started a Canary Islands chapter of Scientific Rebellion, an international collective of scientists dedicated to nonviolent civil resistance in the name of climate change inaction. Explaining his personal philosophy of activism, he said in Spanish, “You have an ethical obligation to society. You have to set an example. You have to be the first.” Real camped on a hotel construction site for four months in the name of land conservation. Then, he went on strike.

The strike lasted 19 days, with six active strikers remaining at the end. “Nuestros cuerpos por nuestra tierra”—“our bodies for our land”—is Canarias Se Agota’s motto. Strike organizers called it a “last resort.” They hadn’t any other idea on how to make their voices heard by their government. And indeed, in its run, their strike garnered international attention as a major protest amid a wider movement for tourism reform in the Spanish archipelago—a movement caught between a desire for tourism to boost the economy, and the need to conserve water.

Tourism has been the main economic product of the Canary Islands since the mid-20th century. However, the area is exploding post-COVID, attracting record-breaking tourist droves in the last years since the pandemic lockdowns. In a sense, this bodes well for the economy: The GDP growth of the Canaries in 2024 alone is almost 4%, the highest of all regions in Spain. But locals insist that the quality of life is worsening. Salaries have stagnated while the cost of living has skyrocketed. In the last 10 years, rent prices in Santa Cruz de Tenerife have doubled. Over time, many locals have been effectively pushed out of their residences, and replaced by those whose salaries come from elsewhere. In April, more than 100,000 took to the streets of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the region’s capital city, to protest.

Real was born in Santa Cruz, in a barrio where kids of different families played football together on the streets, running gleefully from passing cars, protecting the little ones. But much has changed.

“It was a nice neighborhood. All of the neighbors knew each other, would help each other … a united, working-class neighborhood,” he said in Spanish.

Now?

“Fixed tourist neighborhood. You are not able to live here.” It was early in the morning. Near where we were speaking, a man slept soundly: a park bench for a bed, his backpack strapped to his body.

Some attribute this gentrification to the rise in digital nomads—traveling remote workers—post-COVID. However, it’s not simply destination popularity that plagues permanent Canarian residents. The movement for tourism reform has an economic bent, but it is dually focused on sustainability in a region with limited resources—limited even more so in recent years. 

The islands are experiencing their longest drought since 1961. In early March 2024, Tenerife declared a drought emergency. Many smaller islands in the Canary chain already use desalination plants as their main form of water supply, but Tenerife depends on underground water reserves and, with them, rainfall. In 2023, El Cabildo de Tenerife pledged 20 million euros to desalination efforts; in the face of these recent developments, they pledged 7.3 million more. In a year and a half, 19 Olympic-size swimming pools full of desalinated water will be available to the island per day. However, this solution requires fossil fuel energy and ejects waste in the form of brine.  

LifeNieblas is a reforestation initiative that uses atmospheric water via fog collectors. Project field tech and biologist Saul Oliva Cabrera and his team are at the analytical forefront of local climate data on the island of Gran Canaria. The last four years alone tended toward more heat and more aridity.

“What actually is happening ... it's not easy to understand. It's not that we don't want tourists,” Cabrera insisted. “Tourism pressure is huge in a place that has reduced space and reduced resources, especially potable water. We don't have massive lakes or rivers or a lot of rain. We have underground water galleries, but they are depleting quickly.”

Furthermore, a deeper frustration emerges from the feeling that many politicians act to protect tourism, even at the expense of local life, culture, and environment. So far, the only implemented countermeasure against tourist traffic is an “eco-tax” for tourist entry to the Masca ravine, a natural area in the northwestern corner of Tenerife.

Jaime Coello Bravo serves as the director of Fundación Telesforo Bravo Juan Coello, an organization that promotes local engagement with the natural environment. He marched with his colleagues in the April 20 demonstrations. Before this role, however, he spent 22 years working for the government, doing environmental management and then urban planning. A government should serve the interests of its people, he said. During his time working for the Cabildo in Tenerife, Bravo witnessed the prioritization of private interests. He asked me to imagine a classic American Western, with a painted set.

“The island has become a set and we, the residents, feel like extras, like secondary actors. The main actor is the tourist who comes by plane. Everything is for him,” he said in Spanish. “When you see in Barcelona or in Mallorca, the people that are reacting aggressively, shooting water pistols or shouting, that I don’t like. But deep down, I understand it, because they have reached a limit of patience.”

When construction resumed for tourism macroproyectos— “macroprojects,” or massive hotel complexes—this past winter, it was salt in a long-irritated wound. 

Hotel de la Tejita had been paused for two years, facing permitting issues and delays. Now, as it proceeds, it does so with the controversy of private construction in the public domain—and more than 160,000 signatures of opposition on Change.org.  The plan for the Cuna del Alma development in the south of Tenerife initially raised flags due to the effect mass construction could have on the area’s archeological sites and rare plant species: viborina triste. In February 2024, the Canary Islands Agency for the Protection of the Natural Environment lifted its stop order on the project, deferring to a license the developers acquired from the Adeje Council.

While both projects market themselves as sustainable tourism initiatives, there’s a lot of resistance to both construction sites given that they disturb and change untouched coastal zones. The developers behind these projects—a Spanish company and two partnered Belgian companies—did not respond to requests for comment.

These emergent developments sparked the strike, which Canarias Se Agota founding member and geography professor Víctor Onésimo Martín described as a last resort. But the hunger strike ended as it began—with dissatisfaction. 

On April 23, 12 days into the strike, Canarias Se Agota brought more radical terms and one of the ailing strikers to the office of Canary Islands President Fernando Clavijo Batlle. Among the terms: a complete moratorium on tourism, a daily tax for tourists, and the creation of a citizen’s assembly in the Canary Islands government. When I asked Real what the government’s response was, he said in Spanish,  “What response?”

“He didn’t offer anything,” Martín said in Spanish. “He didn’t even offer a subsequent meeting to discuss this issue further.” 

The president’s team did not respond to a request for comment. Reuters reported that a drafted law, expected to come into effect in 2025, will toughen restrictions on Airbnb-type short-term rentals/stays across the islands using additional police support. The legislation aims to block new-build properties from joining the already overwhelmed short-term rental market. Current hosts have five years to adapt to these stringent rules, including securing a green light from their neighbors before renting out.

The draft law directly responds to complaints from locals “​priced out of the housing market,” but fails to address the complex environmental issue being posed by massive hotel construction—and being protested by many locals, incessantly. Cuna del Alma, for example, develops upon what is one of the last untouched corners of Adeje, Tenerife’s regional tourist hotspot. And it’s not exactly excellent for business. The Canary Islands offers a competitive advantage to foreign developers: the lowest corporate tax rate in all of Europe—4%—and repatriation without a withholding tax. 

Where does the money go? GeoTenerife is a science communication and education company connecting the Canary Islands to students and journalists from all over the world. CEO Sharon Backhouse explains it like this: “​​The Canary Islands gets all their fabulous spaces cemented over.  These huge mini villages get built. And all the profits leave.”

After Martín and his colleagues emerged from the Cabildo with empty hands, they looked critically at the human lives to be lost amid apathy. So, the strike ended. But the movement for land conservation and a moratorium on tourism persists. Not just across the islands, but globally: with continued activism, focused research, and conversations between neighbors on the street.

In early October, Martín collaborated with Rebelión Científica Canarias to host a conference on tourism at Tenerife’s University of La Laguna (ULL), bringing together activists, community members, and scientists. The ongoing conversation about reform in the Canaries is as much tied to social outlook as it is to environmental conservation.

Spain conquered the Canary Islands archipelago in the 15th century. It involved soil degradation, water resource degradation, and the loss of vegetation cover and biodiversity. Driving up the mountain to his fog collection field site, Cabrera pointed at clusters of pine trees. Sixty years ago, he said, there was nothing there. 

“They spent centuries chopping down trees, chopping down forests and using the resources … it eventually ends up with an island completely bare ground,” he said. “Most of the pine forests that you see here in Gran Canaria … is reforested.” 

According to a study done by the ULL Department of Soil Science and Geology, the conquest was when the island’s process of desertification began. Desertification refers to land’s change from fertile, agrarian soil to arid, bare ground. Human activity on the Canary Islands—deforestation, hotel construction, air and water pollution, water consumption—has caused the land to change, deteriorate, and slowly fail to sustain life as its nutrients deplete with no recharge. 

During a hunger strike, the body responds to its lack of food by harvesting its own muscle and fat for energy. This is what causes emaciation. Since the hunger strike ended, the activists have spent months recovering.

In a region dependent on tourist traffic, the road to economic reform in the way that activists desire is long. But as I looked toward the blossoming forest in Gran Canaria, I thought again to what Real told me: Someone has to be the first.