President Marga Prohens has been in Brussels. She addressed the European Committee of the Regions on Tuesday. Tourism leadership, she observed, “can no longer be measured solely in numbers, because having more visitors, more hotel beds, or more flights is no longer synonymous with success”. Hallelujah!
Someone not obsessed with numbers and reaching for records year after year. Not that it was ever thus. Where was she in 2023 when an additional 1.3 million tourists were a matter for concern, not for boasting about records? The Damascene conversion occurred the following spring.
Congested roads and the natives protesting in the Canaries brought the horrified realisation that all the rot about sustainability is just that if another 900,000 tourists are heaped on; as they were to be in 2024.
And so the president told the committee, members of which were unlikely to have been intimate with the realities of these islands, about the “unprecedented participatory process ... open to all citizens, to transform our model towards sustainability and the well-being of our residents”. Hmm. “Until now,” she went on, “we have let tourism shape our destinations”. It’s time to “define the tourism we want”. Yes, and this is something most of us agree with. But we have thus far seen precious little evidence.