The Parliament of the Canary Islands has approved a sector-specific law that alters the legal and financial framework of the archipelago's main economic drivers. The new Law on Tourist Municipalities of the Canary Islands grants local authorities their own administrative system for the first time. The legislation is designed to address the structural deficit in the municipal finances of southern Gran Canaria, which have historically been forced to fund public services designed for millions of annual visitors with budgets calculated solely based on the registered population. The law introduces a weighting system that recognizes the impact of the transient population on the allocation of public resources.
The municipalities of San Bartolomé de Tirajana and Mogán, where the largest concentration of tourist accommodation is located in the province, are spearheading a legislative initiative they spearheaded through the Association of Tourist Municipalities of the Canary Islands (AMTC). For decades, insufficient funding for maintaining critical areas such as street cleaning, beach safety, and coastal infrastructure has strained the finances of these southern municipalities. Marco Aurelio Pérez, AMTC representative and mayor of San Bartolomé de Tirajana, points out that the law allows for the legal adaptation of municipal organization to the actual demographics of the tourist destinations they serve, overcoming the limitations of the resident census.
The law eliminates the previous generic classification of tourist territory and establishes a classification model based on auditable macroeconomic variables. The regulations establish the categories of Municipality of Tourist Excellence and Municipality of Tourist Uniqueness. To achieve the status of Excellence, destinations in southern Gran Canaria must certify that tourism generates more than 15% of their local economy. Furthermore, the text requires simultaneous compliance with two of three objective criteria: a specific volume of annual floating population, a substantial accommodation capacity, or a significant density of high-end four- and five-star hotels.
The new legal framework entails strict operational obligations for the beneficiary municipalities. Local authorities that assume the status of excellence must design and implement a mandatory municipal tourism management plan. The text defines a comprehensive catalog of minimum mandatory services that exceeds the traditional powers of the local government framework law. The municipalities of southern Gran Canaria are legally obligated to undertake environmental monitoring, noise control in leisure areas, enhanced waste collection, the creation of urban climate shelters, and the permanent deployment of lifeguards along the coast.
The institutional counterpart to this demand is the direct inclusion of tourist municipalities in the governing bodies of the autonomous community. Mayors of southern Canary Islands will have a voice and a vote in strategic planning committees and in the forums for the distribution of public funds by the Government of the Canary Islands, a space where traditionally representation depended on residential population rather than on contribution to the regional gross domestic product (GDP). This co-decision-making capacity aims to redirect infrastructure investments toward the renovation of degraded public spaces in Playa del Inglés and Puerto Rico.
The law includes a principle of flexibility in access thresholds for the islands of El Hierro, La Gomera, and La Palma, protecting smaller economies and territories affected by demographic challenges. This adjustment to the text ensured unanimous consensus among parliamentary groups in a session that AMTC managers described as historic for balancing the Canary Islands' administrations. Following the approval of the bill, the association of fourteen tourist municipalities is focusing its efforts on drafting the implementing regulations that will establish the final financial transfers.
The hotel sector and international investment funds operating in the Meloneras resorts view the regulation as a guarantee of the destination's long-term sustainability. The viability of the tourism model in southern Gran Canaria required a tax compensation mechanism to prevent the deterioration of public services in exclusive tourist areas. The budgetary protection promised by the new law on land and tourism revenue stabilizes the municipalities' finances, ensuring that the maintenance of the Maspalomas dunes and their service infrastructure does not depend on the volatility of ordinary tax revenue.
