One day after the traditional National Lottery draw and the top prize in Spain, the The Official State Gazette published on December 23rd Law 6/2025, of December 10th, on Sustainable Planning of Tourist Use of Housing, approved by the regional Parliament and promulgated in accordance with article 47.1 of the Statute of AutonomyWith this publication, the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands activates the legal framework that seeks to reorganize one of the greatest structural tensions of the Archipelago: the balance between tourist and residential use, especially visible in tourist municipalities such as Maspalomas, in the south of Gran Canaria.
The law, officially published in the Official State Gazette, is based on a stark diagnosis. At the start of the legislative process in 2023, the number of tourist accommodation places offered already represented a very high proportion of the resident population on several islands: El Hierro (16,10%), Fuerteventura (22,53%), La Gomera (16,68%), La Palma (7,39%), Lanzarote (21,22%), Gran Canaria (6,43%), and Tenerife (9,72%). Since then, the law emphasizes, these figures have increased significantly, exacerbating the imbalance between residents and tourists in the holiday rental sector.
The legal text delves into provincial and municipal details, where Maspalomas emerges as one of the critical hotspots. At the time of the analysis, tourist accommodations represented 4,37% of the total registered accommodation in the province of Las Palmas and 3,78% in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. At the local level, the percentages were even more revealing: Yaiza (22%), La Oliva (21,50%), San Bartolomé de Tirajana (10,62%), Adeje (13,35%), Hermigua (10,72%), Frontera (8,06%), and Fuencaliente de La Palma (8,35%). The law itself acknowledges that all these thresholds have been exceeded, reinforcing the urgent need for regulation in mature destinations like Maspalomas.
The legislator links this growth to another structural fact: the drastic drop in housing construction in the Canary Islands since the 2008 financial crisis. In 2022, only 2.782 homes were built, compared to 3.011 in 2021, 1.341 in 2020, 3.103 in 2019, and 2.192 in 2018. Added to this is a key fact for strained tourist municipalities: in 2018, 2020, and 2021, no social housing was built in the Canary Islands; in 2019, only 60 were built, and in 2022, 208.
Given these circumstances, the law presents a scenario that is difficult to correct in the short term. To convert the 60.146 homes currently used for tourist accommodation back to permanent residential use, and maintaining an average of 3.000 new homes per year, would require at least twenty years, not counting additional population growth. At the same time, the text warns that a 25% annual increase in tourist accommodation, coupled with low new housing production, would add almost 7.000 homes per year to the housing deficit.
The diagnosis is clear and especially relevant for Maspalomas: the housing supply is not elastic in the short term, since most tourist accommodations are not created through new construction, but rather by converting existing homes into new ones, thus reducing the availability of housing for regular residents. Law 6/2025, already published in the Official State Gazette (BOE), was therefore created with the ambition of regulating growth, protecting the right to housing, and redefining the tourism model in areas where the pressure, such as in southern Gran Canaria, has reached structural levels.
