A German TV station attacking a tourist destination dominated by German money. This is the summary of a TV documentary broadcast in Germany that provoked Spanish diplomatic protests in Bonn. The journalist came to do his job when tourism was in low season, and everything was empty then. The German documentary broadcast on RDE, "Concrete Suicide," shook the Canary Islands in 1990 by portraying the contradictions of the tourism boom and the urban footprint in southern Gran Canaria. Three and a half decades later, our gaze inevitably returns to the relationship between Germany and Gran Canaria: no longer as a mere source of tourists, but as a resident community and a reflection of social transformations that have shaped an entire generation.
According to official data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), 14.475 German citizens reside in the province of Las Palmas, and of these, 5.615 are concentrated in San Bartolomé de Tirajana, the epicenter of tourist life in the south of the island. This enclave not only houses hotels and resorts, but also East and West German communities who brought their own biographies and memories with them after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These differences, which shape life trajectories in Germany, are also reflected in the German communities in southern Gran Canaria. Among the residents, it is not unusual to find families who came to the island seeking a future less constrained by the lack of opportunities in their homeland. In contrast, West Germans tend to occupy more stable positions as retirees with high purchasing power or entrepreneurs in the tourism sector.
