“I would like to see some changes”: Tourism as perceived by Canarians

Abstract

This article focuses on tourism in Gran Canaria as experienced by residents working within or in relation to the tourism industry. We locate the voices of our interlocutors in a geopolitical context, using critical theoretical perspectives that have called for more engagement with inequalities entangled with tourism and produced by tourism mobilities. The COVID-19 crisis was instrumental in changing our research participants’ perspectives on the future, as reflected by the recent mobilization against mass tourism in the Canary Islands. Our research participants reflect an intersecting discontent with touristification, often highlighting structural issues that, as scholars have noted—show overtourism is not merely about visitor numbers but also about structural and geopolitical inequalities and questions of justice. Participants stressed that many pre-existing problems intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic, such as housing issues and everyday living costs.

Introduction

The first author, Kristín, is at a small restaurant in Triana, a busy shopping street in the old town of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. After Kristín praises the food, the waiter proudly shares that the restaurant belongs to his father and that he was born and raised on the island but does not usually work there. He lives in Madrid and only occasionally visits his parents due to poor pay, an unstable job market, and widespread insecurities in the Canary Islands. When Robert, the second contributor, met Kristín in 2019, he was also working abroad and merely passing through the island, much like the waiter. As a young archeologists, he had to emigrate after finishing his studies, working abroad for 4 years until he finally got an opportunity to work in his field on the islands. Alvaro’s situation was similar. After finishing his studies in archeology, he was forced to emigrate and work in several cities in the United Kingdom. Upon his return to Gran Canaria and after months without finding qualified work, he opted to register as self-employed, although the experience was precarious and the opportunities scarce. Fortunately, after those years of uncertainty, he got a job as an archeologist in a local company. These three cases express the lived reality of many young people in the Canary Island, where economic precarity is part of everyday life—even as the islands remain one of Northern European travelers’ most important tourism destinations. Many who visit the islands celebrate the affordable hotels, inexpensive food, and budget-friendly accommodation as key elements of the destination’s appeal. However, the powerful protests in the Canary Islands that started in spring 2024 against “mass tourism” highlight the disconnect between the perceived benefits of tourism and the lived experience of locals (see, e.g. Thousands Rally in Spain’s Canary Islands, 2024). The title of our article—quoting one of our interlocutors—reflects the sentiment of many that tourism has not delivered the promised benefits to the majority of the island’s residents.

This article focuses on how tourism in Gran Canaria is experienced by those living and working in the tourism industry across the Canary Islands. We ask how people whose lives and employment are shaped by the tourism sector perceive and experience tourism mobilities. How do they see tourism shaping their lives and living conditions? We situate their voices in a larger geopolitical context and ground our analysis on critical theoretical perspectives that have called for a deeper engagement with the inequalities entangled with and produced by tourism mobilities (Bianchi, 2018; Gant, 2016; Milano and Koens, 2022). Tourism is frequently described as part of the “hospitality industry,” a term that captures only a fraction of its multiple effects on everyday life and the economies of people worldwide. Scholars such as Bianchi (2018) have long emphasized the need for a stronger political economy perspective in tourism studies—an approach now increasingly echoed in the critical emphasis on touristification and overtourism (Jover and Barrero-Rescalvo, 2024). In the Spanish context, the concept of “overtourism” is less commonly used than the concepts “touristification” and “massification” which are more prevalent (Milano et al., 2024). These terms should not be understood solely in relation to tourist numbers, but rather as capturing the inequalities and exploitation embedded within the tourism industry (Milano et al., 2024), along with the financialization of people’s everyday lives and negative impacts on the climate emergency (Milano and Koens, 2022). Critical scholarship has demonstrated that calls for tourism reforms or more sustainable tourism often fail to address fundamental issues of equality, exploitation, and power dynamics within the tourism sector (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020). Our paper reflects growing concerns among Canary Islands residents working in the tourism industry, particularly regarding the structural inequalities and hierarchies that shape their experiences.

Furthermore, tourism studies tend to lean on neoliberal perspectives where growth often becomes perceived as an end in itself (Gössling et al., 2021), reflecting a dominant idea of progress as growth (Wortman et al., 2016). As criticized by Bianchi (2009), tourism studies frequently overemphasize cultural representations and ignore power relations (Movono and Scheyvens, 2022), thus dismissing that in reality, discourses and cultural images are always already embedded in wider capitalist relations and global inequalities (Bianchi, 2009). As Milano and Koens (2022: 225), tourism certainly creates new meanings and places, but it also destroys others that are equally valid, within unequal power relations. Tourism can become something that local people get “stuck with,” in the words of Azcárate (2020), as it creates short-lived improvement for people’s precarious conditions and, additionally, residents often become submerged in the dominant discourse emphasizing modernization advocated by the government and other supranational actors (Wortman et al., 2016), 2016). Several authors have pointed out through concepts such as “anthropocentric worldling” (Azcárate, 2020) and “regime” (Milano et al., 2024) how tourism creates a particular naturalized path that becomes unquestioned and is seen as in need of protection at all cost, silencing other ways of relating to natural environments or other ways of creating economic activities.

Our theoretical approach aligns with anthropological perspectives stressing the importance of relationality (Thomas, 2021; Wolf, 1982), intertwined with holistic and transnational perspectives (Loftsdóttir, 2021: 68; Salazar, 2011). As such, tourism can be positioned as a form of mobilities, where some movements are seen as natural and valuable while others are viewed with suspicion and even criminalized (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013). Simultaneously, tourism mobilities intersect with various other boundaries and movements where the boundaries between residents, lifestyle migrants, and tourists are fuzzy and blurred (Hannonen, 2018) and where lifestyle migrants can have issues in common with less privileged immigrant communities (Olsson and O’Reilly, 2017).

Mobilities draw attention to the different hierarchies within Europe and how these hierarchies have intersected with the geopolitical division of Europe. Mobilities also draw attention to the global south-global north division and Europe’s continued racism and colonial legacies (Loftsdóttir et al., 2023). Tourism takes part in the process of racialization, associating geographical areas such as the Nordic countries with whiteness (Loftsdóttir, 2024). This association is in line with touristification shapes imaginaries, simultaneously as it reproduces structural inequalities (Ojeda, 2024), that can be based on imperial legacies of unequal wealth distribution and autonomy (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2022). Geopolitical inequalities between the South and North of Europe (Loftsdóttir et al., 2023) became particularly visible after the 2008 economic crisis, with the southern part of Europe being hit exceptionally hard (Knight and Stewart, 2016). Transnational tourism and lifestyle mobilities from higher-income countries in Western Europe led to the transformation of residential areas and displacements in Southern Europe. This means that the mobility of people from the north caused great precarity for many living in major Spanish cities (Cocola-Gant and Lopez-Gay, 2020; Jover and Díaz-Parra, 2020). Tourism is thus embedded in mobility justice, as it shapes people’s everyday lives and precarities (Milano and Koens, 2022: 225). Justice can also be extended beyond humans, as Córdoba Azcárate (2024) draws attention to, exposing the Western- and anthropocentric dimensions of tourism where nature becomes reduced to objects to be exploited by humans (p. 816). Ojeda (2024: 874) speaks of the tourism capacity of “undoing and remaking worlds,” which captures the transformative power of tourism.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were hopes that the pandemic would create transformative opportunities to radically rethink tourism (Benjamin et al., 2020; Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020). While this largely did not happen, the COVID-19 global pandemic further underscored the vulnerability of many economies heavily reliant on tourism (Adey et al., 2021; Bianchi and Milano, 2024). COVID-19 raised questions regarding labor justice and the sustainability of the relentless growth of the tourism economy (Milano et al., 2024). Furthermore, the pandemic brought the positionality of different stakeholders into sharper focus, as larger tourism companies received large government bailouts, while smaller businesses generally lacked access to such support (Milano and Koens, 2022: 224). More broadly, the pandemic illustrated—as phrased by Cheer (2020: 521)—what a “drastic degrowth” scenario might look like in terms of environmental sustainability and economic risk posed by heavy tourism dependence. Even though it did not lead to systematic change, the pandemic and its associated impacts prompted “transformative thinking” (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2021: 566) among some critical academics. This occurred alongside other transformations, including post-COVID protest movements and the strengthening of platforms for diverse forms of discontent—developments that our paper explores more closely through the voices of our interlocutors.

The empirical material for this article is based on semi-structured interviews with 22 people (10 men and 12 women) living in Gran Canaria who work in or are connected to the tourism sector. Most occupations are directly related to tourism—for example, cleaners, waiters, receptionists, guides, and salespeople. Two individuals worked in professions not typically categorized as part of the tourism sector. However, they were employed in tourism-intensive areas and were therefore seen by these research participants as part of the tourism economy. One was a real estate agent, and the other was a police officer.

The majority had held diverse types of jobs within the tourism industry. Research participants were between 23 and 62 years old and were selected through purposive sampling. They were required to have either lived in the Canary Islands for a long time or to be from there and to have worked in tourism-related occupations. We used snowball sampling and relied on existing networks to recruit research participants. As the interviews were semi-structured, questions were open, and participants were encouraged to communicate what they themselves felt was important. Core questions addressed how they perceived the tourism sector shaping the Canarian economy and society and what types of economic opportunities it provided. Some other questions revolved around how participants perceived tourists visiting the Canary Islands and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism in the island.

Various intersubjective and ethnographic insights enrich our research material: The first author is a privileged mobile subject whose stay in the islands was due to the research; she shared living conditions with privileged tourists while residing as well outside of tourism-dense areas, interviewing tourists and people working in tourism. The second and third authors shared socioeconomic conditions with many interviewees while systematically observing and monitoring discussions on tourism in Gran Canaria and conducting interviews with tourism workers. These different experiences proved invaluable in conceptualizing and analyzing the material presented in this paper. ¹

The interviews analyzed for this article were conducted during 2020–2024. As several were carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic influenced both the focus of the interviews and the reflections shared by research participants. All research participants were assigned pseudonyms, and the interviews were analyzed using Atlas.ti, a computer-assisted qualitative data software. Key themes were identified by the authors prior to coding.

Canary Islands—an economy of tourism

The Canary archipelago comprises eight islands in the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 92 km from mainland Africa and about 940 km from mainland Europe. Its total population is around 2 million, in addition to millions of tourists who visit each year. The islands were originally settled by North Africans around the turn of the first millenium. After almost 1500 years of settlement, they were conquered by the Crown of Castile in 1496. From that point onward, the archipelago became closely linked to Spain’s history, the country it currently belongs to.

Scientific and health tourism in the Canary Islands dates to the mid-18th century and was carried out by wealthy elites, particularly from European powers such as the United Kingdom. A significant rise in visitors occurred in the late 19th century, spurred by UK tourist guides promoting the islands (Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2011; Sánchez and Santana, 2008), with visitor numbers steadily increasing throughout the 20th century. Massive growth in the 1960s, driven partly by air advances in traffic, as well as increased disposable income, and free time among the emerging European middle class (García, 2013). This growth was accompanied by significant investments, particularly foreign capital from Germany, the United Kingdom, and Holland, to give some examples, in conjunction with national investments. Urban development initially began in the southern regions of Gran Canaria and Tenerife. Islands, such as Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, experienced more modest growth. From the 1960s and onward, tourism expansion in the Canary Islands was exponential (García, 2013). While Spain was affected by global economic disruptions such as the oil crisis of 1973 and 1989, the impact of the later crisis stabilized by the late 1990s. Since then, mass tourism has been consolidated both nationally and within the Canary Islands. As Fernando Sabaté-Bel and Alejandro Sabaté-Bel and Armas-Díaz (2022) noted, the Spanish state has promoted the idea that increased tourism is essential for general prosperity (p. 215).

In the late 20th century, concerns over overexpansion and environmental degradation led to the implementation of construction limits (sp. moratoria) in new areas. However, exceptions were made for projects considered high quality or deemed exceptional in some sense (Santana-Jiménez and Hernández, 2011). Canary people have a strong history of labor migration. Throughout the 20th century, the Canary Islands were a source of emigration, with many locals—particularly young people—continuing to leave for other European countries (Marichal, 2024), seeking a better future.

Tourism in the Canary Islands today

In 2018, the Canary Islands had 2,127,685 inhabitants (ISTAC, n.d.a), with Gran Canaria and Tenerife being the most populated islands. Most tourists arrive from Spain, the United Kingdom and Germany, with significant numbers also coming from the Nordic countries. While these nationalities share certain characteristics, such as high purchasing power, notable demographic differences exist. German visitors to the islands are generally older and tend to prefer hotel accommodations. British tourists are more likely to book their accommodation directly, whereas Spanish tourists are typically younger and often travel to the island for work or family reasons (Turégano and Marrero Rodríguez, 2008). The largest groups of visitors continue to be retirees or those nearing retirement, who frequent the islands during winter. In contrast, younger visitors with lower purchasing power are often attracted by the comparatively low cost of the Canary Islands relative to Northern Europe and typically spend their summer holidays there (Domínguez Mújica, 2008).

Tourism in the Canary Islands is primarily coastal, focusing on “sun and beach” experiences. Although accommodation is distributed across the islands, the majority of hotel beds on the larger islands are concentrated in the south. In Tenerife, for example, 66.5% of tourism accommodations (by bed count) are located within just 1% of the island’s southern surface area (Hernández-Martín et al., 2016: 774).

In 2023, the majority of tourists came from the United Kingdom (5.6 million), followed by Germany (2.5 million) and the Nordic countries (Statista, 2024). That year, the Canary Islands received more than twice as many tourists as Brazil in 2019, despite being a much smaller territory (Datosmacro, n.d.).

Overdependence on tourism is economically risky because the industry is inherently unstable and highly volatile, easily affected by international events and economic changes elsewhere (Santos, 2004). The COVID-19 pandemic dealt a severe blow to the Canary Islands’ economy, highlighting the danger of such dependency. Island tourism, in general, is also more vulnerable to market fluctuations than tourism on the mainland, due to its heavy reliance on air travel, making international tourism particularly significant (Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2011). Scholars have pointed out the economic precarity of the Canary Islands, which is marked by lower GDP than the rest of Spain, higher unemployment rates, and low wages (see Inchausti-Sintes and Voltes-Dorta, 2020). In 2022, for example, the Canary Islands had the third lowest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) among the Spanish autonomous communities ² (ISTAC, n.d.b), and it continues to rank among the regions with the lowest average salaries in Spain (Delgado, 2024).

Concerns about environmental degradation have also been raised in relation to beaches and the expansions of tourism infrastructure (Máyer Suárez and Pérez-Chacón, 2006). Pollution is evident in coastal waters, stemming from the massive construction of hotels and tourist development, as well as degradation and disappearance of natural spaces, such as regarding the Maspalomas dunes in Gran Canaria (Hernández-Calvento et al., 2003). In recent decades, there has been increasing public participation in environmental protests related to tourism on the island, often raising questions of alternative ways of developing the island (Sabaté-Bel and Armas-Díaz, 2022). In addition, and as discussed below, city gentrification has also been linked to the tourism industry in the islands (Herrera et al., 2007). Not only large cities are affected, but all over the islands, people’s everyday lives are shaped by different infrastructures, encounters, and images of the tourism industries (Hernández, 2024).

Post-COVID and the Canary Islands

Increased dissatisfaction with the arrival of various external populations to the archipelago has characterized the post-pandemic times. This discontent can be grouped into three areas: (a) the arrival of new residents (mainly from Europe), (b) the continued influx of large numbers of tourists, and, finally, (c) an unease regarding irregular migrants arriving by boats from the African continent.

The first point of contestation concerns the arrival of new, wealthier residents, mostly from continental Europe. The arrival of a foreign population with high economic resources clashes with a population with low salaries and significant challenges in securing housing—whether for rent or purchased (Blanco, 2024). As previously noted, the average salary in the Canary Islands is low even compared with the rest of Spain (Delgado, 2024). During the pandemic, digital nomads became increasingly visible with the facilitation of digital work (Vagena, 2021). These nomads, often from higher-income countries, tend to benefit from geopolitical wage disparities (Holleran and Notting, 2023). ³ The regional government in the Canary Islands has actively sought to facilitate the arrival of digital nomads by promoting virtual communities (Parreño-Castellano et al., 2022). However, as Parreño-Castellano et al. (2022) note, digital nomads often do not engage with the local communities where they stay, do not identify with the places, keep a degree of social distance, and remain unaware of the impact their stay may have on resident’s lives (p. 15). This observation indicates that the discontent cannot be reduced to economic factors only, that is, disparities of wealth, isolated from social ones, but rather a combination of various factors, making this a structural issue. It should be noted that gentrification processes linked to touristification began long before the pandemic, as evidenced in cases like Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Herrera et al., 2007).

Although there was a temporary drop in tourism during the pandemic, tourism visitor numbers surged in its aftermath. Interviews conducted for this research prior to 2020 reveal that tourism was already a contested issue, but this tension intensified during and especially after the pandemic. Tourist numbers remained high, as reflected in the 14.1 million visitors received by the Canary Islands in 2023 (Blanco, 2024). On April 20th, 2024, a mass demonstration took place across the archipelago in protest against the prevailing tourism model (Palacious, 2024), followed by a series of other such demonstrations. This reflects the growing frustration of Canary Islands residents. Similar protests have since emerged in other Spanish cities and regions, such as Barcelona, Mallorca, and Madrid, suggesting that this sense of discontent is not confined to the Canary Islands (Grito de guerra de Barcelona contra el turismo masivo, 2024; Milano et al., 2024). These widespread protests are not surprising, as Spain currently ranks as the second most visited country globally, receiving 71 million arrivals annually (Luján, 2024). Many grassroots organizations are not targeting tourists as such but rather the policies implanted at various levels of government (Milano et al., 2024: 4).

In the Canary Islands, dissatisfaction is also evident on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, where certain posts gain significant traction, are reposted, and receive numerous likes. Accounts such as Canarias se Agota [e. The Canaries are sold out], Canarias Resiste [e. Canarians Resist], Islas de Resistencia [e. The Island of Resistance], El País Canario [e. The Canarian Country] are examples of internet pages. There are also pushbacks from economic agents linked to the tourism sector. An example of this is the Chamber of Commerce of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which stated:

An isolated action with an impact that could have serious consequences. Tourism phobia in the Canary Islands, "orchestrated" by minority groups, would affect a sector that represents 35% of GDP and 40% of employment in the archipelago (. . .) (Camara de Comercio de Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 2024).

This tension was reacted to by the international media, particularly in countries from which the tourists originate, such as the UK. Programs like Good Morning Britain echoed this situation, with some commentators being quite critical of the protest—even offended—while others pointed out the need for self-criticism in light of the pressures of mass tourism (Good Morning Britain, 2024).

There have also been demonstrations in the Canary Islands against illegalized migration, though these have received less support and have, in some cases, even been denounced as hate crimes (Vargas, 2024). These protests must be contextualized within a broader geopolitical framework, where in the beginning of 2020, arrivals from West Africa increased due to the EU hindering migration through the Mediterranean route and the economic precarity that was part of the COVID-19 pandemic. These migrants were contained in the Canary Islands in alignment with broader EU border policies (Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2022; Fradejas-García and Loftsdóttir, 2024). Many Canarians and NGOs have organized and helped these migrants through various formal and informal means, often framing their actions within the islands’ own history, where mobility has been an important way of coping with hardship (Fradejas-García and Loftsdóttir, 2024). Although this migration is not the topic here, it was mentioned by several research participants, one of whom described the prevailing Canarian attitude as that of a ‘people of solidarity.’

Living in and with tourism

In this section, we turn to how our research participants have experienced tourism in the Canary Islands. We begin with general reflections on the significance of tourism, then examine how research participants related “sun and beach” tourism to the kinds of relationships formed between tourists and locals. Finally, we explore how most research participants identified a clear break between past and present where the crisis initiated by the pandemic created a shift in their perception of tourism. Many did not want to return to the “old model” of tourism.

While academic literature emphasizes the complexity of the term tourist and its entanglements with different mobilities (Benson and O’Reilly, 2016), our research participants usually talked about a wide range of northern Europeans as “tourists.” This perception was seemingly regardless of whether they were staying for a few days or could be classified as “lifestyle migrants” or “residential tourists,” that is, living for a few months every year in the Canary Islands or for several years.

Tourism saturated economy

When asked how tourism affected the Canarian economy and society, all participants—unsurprisingly—clearly emphasized its centrality. Laura remarked that “all jobs are related to tourism, directly or indirectly,” a phrase echoed by several interviewees to convey tourism’s deep embeddedness in the islands’ economy. Jorge noted, “The bad part is that everything is tourism,” while Isabel stated bluntly, “without tourism, we [in the Canary Islands] have no economy.” Cristina underscores this dependency by referencing to a commonly heard question in the islands: “If it weren’t for tourists, what would we live on?”

The insights of Milano et al. (2024) are helpful here, particularly their conceptualization of overtourism as a “regime,” then referring to a system that “exerts control over urban landscapes, economics and social dynamics,” where this system becomes the primary source of income (p. 6). The framing emphasizes how tourism-related activities not only replace but become prioritized over alternative economic options that seem to disappear entirely from public imagination as viable options (see Córdoba Azcárate, 2024: 816). As Sabaté-Bel and Armas-Díaz (2022) pointed out, the Spanish State has advocated growth in tourism as the same as prosperity (p. 215).

Research participants still had conflicting feelings about tourism in the islands. Some were openly critical, while others stated directly that tourism was positive for the islands. However, a positive stand toward tourism did not mean an uncritical stance, just as criticism and a negative stance did not reflect hostility toward individual tourists or all aspects of tourism as an industry.

Although acknowledging the economic importance of tourism for the Canary Islands, there was a shared sense that tourism had reached a critical threshold. Miguel emphasized that the effects on land were the most pressing issue for Canarian society, noting that land was already limited and criticizing “the use of public services, health, the environmental impact which is brutal.” Similarly, Daniela speaks about how the island had been mistreated by tourism, the extensive building frenzy, and the strain on infrastructure. These concerns align with broader understandings of overtourism, which refers to the entanglement of different issues, including environmental concerns, privatization of public spaces, financialization of the housing market, and overreliance on foreign investment (Milano et al., 2024: 2). Landscape, as phrased by Jover and Barrero-Rescalvo (2024), is remade as a commodity (p. 1175) in tourism-driven development.

Some interviewees indirectly echoed what Eriksen (2016) has referred to as overheating, that is, the sense of the world as being too full. After describing her deep connection to the Canary Island, Laura remarked: “Tourism and people, there is just too much. The number of people from outside has grown very fast.”

Josefina, in her early 30s, has spent eight years in the tourism sector, performing various jobs, often in souvenir shows. She highlights how tourism tends to generate low-paying jobs and the difficulties of securing well-paid employment in the industry. Her experience reflects how salaries in Spain’s tourism sector have persistently lagged behind the national average. In 2019, they were 17.4% lower than the average Spanish wage (Bianchi and Milano, 2024: 7). Robinson et al. (2019) similarly argue that tourism employment is often characterized by hostility toward trade unions, as people are hired on short-term contracts, leading to unstable employment and general precarity.

Although many of our interviewers had secured long-term contracts at the time of the interviews, several described previous periods of vulnerability and instability. Raul exemplifies the prolonged situation that many have found themselves in. At 37, he had obtained a permanent contract for the first time. Despite a low salary and occasional unpaid overtime, he described feeling content due to the sense of stability, unlike his previous experience, which he describes as “complete precariousness.”

Participants also described the limited diversity of employment opportunities in the sector. Josefina noted, for example, how many of the available roles felt repetitive or, as she put it:

They are so similar, so similar to each other, that it’s like. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like everything is so much the same. They’re all receptionists, they’re all waiters, they’re all like that.

Some research participants also discussed the limited prospects for upward mobility within their workplaces. Several noted that the larger hotel chains mainly wanted to promote people from their own country of origin. Laura shared the following example:

I know a reception manager and he is from here, but he will never be promoted because the chain is Swedish, and the senior manager is from the mainland and the person above him is Swedish. The senior managers are always from the country of origin.

Rocío is also in her early 30s and has worked in the tourism sector her entire adult life, across various roles. Despite holding a university degree, she expressed frustration with the lack of mobility, stating bluntly:

We entered the career with the illusion of being a hotel manager, but in the end, you realize that the most you are going to get is to be a receptionist, and maybe with the passage of time, you become a reception manager.

Josefina observed that many higher-paying positions tend to go to individuals from continental Europe. She also noted that the mainland Spanish accent is valued more highly than Canarian pronunciation, even when people speak Spanish. Similarly, Rocío expressed a sense that discrimination against people from the Canary Islands is present within the industry, reinforcing the perception that locals are often overlooked for advancement or more desirable roles:

The idea that we Canarians are not good enough to hold management positions, for example, in the tourism sector, and that we have to take on people who are supposed to be more highly trained because they studied in Madrid, has to change.

Through fieldwork and everyday interactions, we—the authors of this paper—have also experienced that Canarian people feel stereotyped by individuals from mainland Spain and other parts of Europe, as more relaxed or laid-back, which they believe works against them in a professional context. Several of our research participants stated that they are perceived as “lazy” and, as Daniela explained, “do not like to work.”

These stereotypes intersect with broader perceptions that our research participants often felt characterized the Canarian Island’s position in Europe. Juan’s statement exemplified this, “it is a secondary country, [economically] at the service of what the Germans, and the British and the French say.” These views and relationships they refer to reflect geopolitical dynamics within Europe and evoke an imperial past that scholars have pointed out is important to recognize as a part of tourism (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2022). These comments above also recall racializing discourses that have historically positioned Spain as inferior due to its closeness to the African continent (Loftsdóttir et al., 2023; Persánch, 2018). Some of the conceptions of Canarians were still positive. For example, they are more open-minded, friendly, or “super-friendly,” as Antonio puts it, which overlaps with Canarian conceptions of themselves.

Some research participants mentioned concerns about housing, particularly in interviews conducted after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While housing was not a dominant theme in interviews taken at the beginning of the pandemic, it became more important in later interviews. Casandra reflected on the growing difficulty of everyday life in the Canary Islands, stating that even though life was difficult before COVID, it became even more so after COVID, and that housing costs have risen like “foam.”

Several other research participants argued that this spike in housing prices was driven partly by Northern Europeans’ increased interest in the islands after the pandemic. Christina, 28, highlighted in 2023 that one of her biggest obstacles in continuing to live in the Canary Islands was the difficulty of renting on her current salary. As a result, she continued to live with her parents while saving money, hoping to buy her own home later.

As earlier pointed out, cities such as Las Palmas de Gran Canaria have become popular destinations for digital nomads. The city is perceived as attractive due to its pleasant climate and vibrant cultural and sports environment. It has been ranked highly on platforms that assess cities for remote workers (Parreño-Castellano et al., 2021). For example, on January 1st, 2016, Las Palmas was ranked second in Nomadlist.com. From the personal experience of some of us, the authors, the impact of the arrival of digital nomads and remote workers is remarkable in cities like Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. One of the most significant effects is the rise in rent, as highlighted by our interlocutors, as these remote workers have higher salaries and can pay much higher rent, which leads to a rise in rental prices.

In addition, local people perceive that these digital nomads do not relate to the people of the islands, which reflects what has been argued by Parreño-Castellano et al. (2022, p. 15). This could be because they are only going to stay a few months, or perhaps digital nomads simply organize their lives around other digital nomads, feeling that they share more in common with them.

Gentrification has taken place in more broad sense. Cocola-Gant (2020) points out that tourism tends to be integrated in already gentrified areas, which offer a much more appealing environment for tourists and lifestyle migrants’ consumption. In Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, this has become evident in neighborhoods such as Guanarteme, a historically low-income working class. The ongoing construction of new apartment buildings is pushing out the single-family houses (RTVC, 2024). The target groups for these apartments are lifestyle migrants, middle-class Canarians, and people from mainland Spain.

Jorge expressed this dynamic when he stated: “The neighborhoods—as we see—are being destroyed,” referring to the role of Airbnb and similar short-term rental platforms in inflating rental and purchasing prices. He echoes the sentiments of many in Southern Europe, where tourist-driven housing market pressures have become intense (see e.g. Gant, 2016). As Jover and Barrero-Rescalvo (2024) argue, not only is the natural landscape commercialized by touristification, but so too is the social landscape. In this process, class relationships become often hidden or rendered invisible within the neighborhoods, and long-term residents are pushed out (pp. 1175–1176).

Relationships with tourists

The relationship with tourism must be contextualized within a geopolitical context, in which many of those who come to vacation or as lifestyle migrants arrive from more affluent countries in Northern Europe. Visitors from mainland Spain also stand in a particular power relation with the Canary Islands, as discussed earlier, given the Canary Islands’ more economically precarious position. Historically, many Canarian people have migrated temporally to continental Europe for work, driven by low salaries and precarious living conditions in the Canary Islands.

All research participants emphasized that the majority of tourists came for the “sun and beach” and recreational activities associated with mass tourism. Rocío said, “There is nature tourism but above all, sun, and beach. Mostly sun and beach.” Many others stressed that it is also for the “party” or “drinks” or, as phrased by Antonio, for the tourist, Spain in general is “party, rest, wine, paella.” Laura elaborated on this perception concerning the Canary Islands:

[T]hey come here for a weekend for little money and they go on a big binge. They go back to the plane, still drunk. They don’t leave the pool and the bar, and they don’t interact with us; that’s not what they want. They want to do what they can’t do at home because it’s cheap for them here.

Antonio critically stresses that this dominant image of the islands is not surprising, considering that it is what is marketed to the visitors. In some cases, our research participants refer not only to short-term tourists but also to lifestyle migrants who tend to stay for longer.

Some of our research participants shared experiences of abusive interactions with customers, especially when there was a lot of alcohol or partying involved. Jorge recounted an incident involving a sexual harassment of his partner, situating it within a broader exploitation in the tourism sector. He explained that some tourists seem to think that:

[. . .] by paying, they can do whatever they want [. . .] Maybe you’re going to say something or yell at the client, and the hotel manager catches you and makes your life impossible to kick you out. Because you are giving the hotel a bad image, no matter how right you are. [. . .] bad publicity is not allowed here.

Casandra talks about racist hiring practices, stating that Black individuals are less likely to be hired or, in her words, “many times you don’t even see black employees because the owners of that bar, restaurant or hotel are not interested.” She also stresses the presence of sexism, referring to her mother’s experience as a hotel cleaner. Casandra described the abuse that her mother must endure from men from Western Europe, explaining that it is “quite hard, this does not happen often, but we still have to work on this.”

When discussing interpersonal relationships with tourists, most research participants made clear that the relationship they form with tourists are just “labor relations.” Sergio is one of those who uses that phrase:

I think they are mostly labor relations. I do not see canaries having friendship with tourists; that is very rare. Tourists also do not try to make friends with local people. I know that there are tourists who have been living in the Canary Islands for more than 10 years and do not even know Spanish. They focus more on the area where they live and interact with people who are just like them. I hardly ever see tourists in Canarian food restaurants, for example.

Sergi’s comment highlights the lack of genuine interest of tourists and lifestyle migrants in the actual life of people in the Canary Islands. This, along with how research participants stress their relationship with tourists being primarily “labor relations,” underscores the importance of paying attention to power dynamics in tourism (see Bianchi, 2009; Movono and Scheyvens, 2022). One of our interlocutors, María, a chambermaid, attributed this distance partly to structural issues, explaining that she is invisible to the tourists in her line of work. However, Sergio feels that tourists see Canarian people as intellectually “inferior,” which has partly to do with residents’ limited proficiency in foreign languages, thus hinting at the racialized discourse toward Canarian discourse that was discussed earlier.

Few of our research participants shared more positive experiences. Antonio claimed that older people were interested in how locals live. Federico felt that some created a good relationship with Canarian people even though many stay within close circles and do not integrate. In a survey conducted in Gran Canaria in 2012 on residents’ views on tourism, the general behavior of tourists was seen as “nice” by almost 70% of respondents (Moreira Gregori et al., 2022).

These survey results do not contradict our results. People can find that a majority of tourists are nice in interpersonal interactions while critical of their behavior as a group. Also, as scholars have pointed out, the protest against overtourism and touristification does not revolve around individual tourists and their personalities but policies and structural issues that go beyond particular persons (see Milano et al., 2024: 4).

COVID changed everything

The Canary Islands were among the regions of Spain most severely affected by COVID-19, primarily due to their reliance on tourism. During the second quarter of 2020—the first year of COVID-19—the region’s GDP plummeted 21% compared to the same period in 2019. Tourist arrivals decreased 61.4% during the first 7 months of 2020 (Moreno-Luna et al., 2021: 11–12).

Globally, the pandemic expedited growing concerns about the environmental cost of tourism and the moral aspects of tourism embedded in mobility justice of who can move and why (Adey et al., 2021: 14). These questions revolved both around whether things should return to a pre-COVID “ normal” (Gössling et al., 2021) but also highlighted the ethical aspects of mobility during a time when surveillance related to the COVID pandemic brought more clearly to light the inequalities of who could travel and why (Adey et al., 2021). These intersect with justice in relation to labor issues (Milano et al., 2024: 11) but also justice regarding what voices are heard and the need to give local voices more space (Rastegar and Ruhanen, 2022). As stated by Gössling et al. (2021), success in tourism has been historically defined by all major tourism organizations by “growth in tourism numbers” (13).

Our experience is that in the Canary Islands, there was this sense of hope as described by Gössling et al. (2021), of things not going “back to normal” but becoming better. This hope was not shared by all our participants and quickly faded for many. A prevailing sentiment emerged that the Canary Islands were stuck in the same situation or worse. The demonstrations and vivid discussions on social media discussed earlier demonstrate continued dissatisfaction and a push for change. Several of our research participants felt that the COVID crisis was a catalyst in opening their eyes to the Canary Island’s vulnerability due to its over-dependence on tourism. This shows that while COVID-19 did not lead to a top-down systematic transformation, it can be seen as transformative in some sense (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2021: 566), then more in creating alternative ways of imagining the future.

Rocío directly emphasized how the pandemic period was a turning point in people’s conception regarding expectations of the future: “COVID made a difference in what people came to consider important in life and the importance of time. Yes, so it’s the people who have changed.” When asked whether she hoped to see changes after the COVID pandemic, Carmen replied firmly: “I sincerely hope that things don’t go back to how they were before.” She explained that the global crisis revealed things were “not quite right.” She claimed, furthermore, that she thought that tourism was positive for the Canarian economy, but the pandemic opened her eyes to the over-dependency on tourism, and that it “is a negative to depend so much on tourism” and that she “hope[s that] the world changes a bit.”

While our research participants aspired for a change in the future, they were not necessarily optimistic about its likelihood. Laura’s perspective reflects this when she states, “We have learned nothing, after the pandemic, instead of learning to put money into other areas, what we have done is to invest more in the same. [. . .] Same staff, same salary, and more tourists.”

Discussion and conclusion

The attention to broader geopolitical power dynamics is often absent from important contributions to tourism mobilities, where tourism is seen as an isolated phenomenon, disconnected from social dynamics, and reduced to narrowly defined economic indicators. Consequently, tourism’s financialization of people’s everyday lives becomes as well invisible (Milano and Koens, 2022: 3), in addition to inequalities and economic and environmental exploitation (Bianchi, 2018; Córdoba Azcárate, 2024; Jover and Barrero-Rescalvo, 2024). As Higgins-Desbiolles (2020) argues, even sustainable tourism discourses often fail to acknowledge and address issues relating to exploitation and equality within the tourism sector. Even some of the discussion of overtourism that focuses on perceptions of local people (see, e.g. an otherwise excellent article by Hübscher and AndRingel (2020)), lack attention to power relations, and structural inequalities.

The voices of our research participants reflect insecure working conditions and a sense of over-reliance on one sector of the economy. Their accounts reveal intersecting discontent with various effects of touristification, including environmental concerns, low salaries, monotonous jobs, limited upward mobility, and concerns with the ability to live in the Canary Islands. Informal discussions conducted as part of the same project also echo this vividly in different instances experienced by [name of first author] and experienced by [second and third author], who moved out of the Canary Islands to seek better conditions temporarily due to precarity in the Canary Islands. This can be seen as reflecting what scholars have pointed out regarding touristification and overtourism: The problem is not simply the number of tourists (Milano et al., 2024: 6)—and therefore cannot be solved simply by reducing tourist arrivals alone—but we have to recognize a much deeper structural problem revolving around inequalities and injustice. Rastegar and Ruhanen (2022) point out that scholars have long debated the negative and positive aspects of tourism, but it is necessary to frame the issue as well as revolving around justice and injustice (p. 10).

It is also relevant to think about these tourist and lifestyle mobility in relation to one another, as mobility scholars have urged (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013). Canarian people have a long history of mobility in the form of labor migration, which further captures the hierarchies at play in the tourism economy. Many research participants felt that tourists showed little interest in the Canary Islands’ people or culture and characterized their own relations with the visitors as simply “labor relations.” This depiction shows a way of distancing themselves from the tourism economy, which can be contextualized within Hernández’s (2024) insights that local people’s lives in many or most places in the Canary Islands are surrounded by not only hotels and infrastructures related to the tourist economy, but also ruins and failed projects related to it. As stressed by scholars, the mass protest’s main targets are policies rather than tourists (Milano et al., 2024: 4). Our interlocutors’ understanding of their relations that they have with the tourists and lifestyle migrants supports this and reflects how simple it is to reduce the current protest to touristphobia (Rodger, 2024), rather than acknowledge the structural issues at play and the ineqalities that are clearly evident throughout the interviews. The participants in the research criticize policies concerning tourism, but their experiences also reveal deep-seated racism against people from the Canary Islands.

During post-COVID, the main criticism has been low salaries, with people feeling they cannot afford basic necessities, housing concerns regarding renting and buying, and a sense of being pushed out of particular areas due to gentrification. In addition, many also felt looked down upon, which can be contextualized as part of hierarchies within Europe where Southern European inhabitants are often stereotyped negatively by Northern Europeans (Loftsdóttir et al., 2023b). This critical outlook that resists returning to things as they were prior to the pandemic can be understood as a part of both increased agency and resilience of local people as stakeholders in the direction of where tourism should be heading ( Movono et al., 2023).

Resistance to tourism development is not new in Gran Canaria. Two early examples are the development by Maspalomas in the south of the island, where the land acquisition by foreign investors in the early 1970s was met by opposition from some of the local population (Domínguez-Mujica et al., 2011) and another is protest to early large scale investment in Gomera (Macleod, 1999). Protest to different land developments was already growing in the Canary Islands before the pandemic (Armas-Díaz et al. 2020; Macleod, 1999). The resistance, however, after the COVID-19 pandemic may signal a paradigm shift, where during the crisis, our research participants seem, along with many others, to have re-evaluated the past and future of the islands. Many felt that things should not go back to “normal.” An ambivalence is reflected in how participants simultaneously speak of tourism as central to the local economy, captured by the phrase “What would they live on if not on tourism,” while criticizing it harshly. It is tempting to think of Azcárate’s (2020) words that tourism is something people become “stuck with,” which highlights the need to create new ways of imagining the future.