We live in the Dominican Republic, a country visited by ten million tourists every year, which has more or less an even number of inhabitants. And this makes the government proud and above all the very active tourism minister David Collado who hopes for exponential increases in the record figures achieved so far in the coming years. Furthermore, hotel construction is expected in the future everywhere, even where there have never been any before.
Yet there apparently exists a saturation point for tourism development. They know something about it in the Canary Islands where recently, with the slogan “the Canary Islands have a limit”, tens of thousands of residents in the eight islands took part in simultaneous mobilisations to protest against mass tourism which is submerging the archipelago and impoverishing the territory .
They ask the authorities to limit the number of tourists: “We are not against tourism, we simply ask to change the current model which allows its unlimited growth”, underlined one of the demonstrators on television. The protesters also called for a stop to the construction of new hotels on Tenerife, the largest and most developed island in the archipelago.
With a population of 2.2 million people, the Canary Islands welcomed 16 million visitors last year. Four out of ten inhabitants work in tourism, which corresponds to over a third of the gross domestic product. But the sector, the protesters say, does not distribute wealth among the population and causes a surge in housing prices.
Among the immediate measures called for by the demonstrators are the introduction of an “ecotax” on tourists and rules that allow residents and workers preferential access to homes.
