The sustainable paradox of the Canary Islands: 129 pledges with no legal force

The Sustainable Paradox of the Canary Islands Traps the Archipelago’s Main Economic Engine in a Contradiction That Now Has an Academic Name

A study published in Cuadernos de Turismo reveals that the thirteen Plans for Modernization, Improvement, and Increased Tourism Competitiveness (PMM, by its Spanish acronym) approved in the islands between 2011 and 2015 accumulate 129 mentions of the terms “sustainable,” “sustainability,” and “sustainable development” in their explanatory reports. The same research confirms that in the binding regulatory provisions of those same plans, the figure plummets to zero.

While the Canary Islands maintains through May 2026 the historic records for foreign tourist arrivals reached in 2025, more than 15 million annual visitors, according to the Canary Islands Institute of Statistics (ISTAC), the planning demonstrates that sustainability does not function as a limit, but as a rhetorical embellishment. The question that should concern investors, public managers, and citizens is not whether the model is sustainable, but whether the governance instruments themselves are designed not to be.

The Gap Between Discourse and Regulation

The study, led by Moisés Simancas, Professor of Human Geography at the University of La Laguna (ULL), analyzes the documentary architecture of the PMMs with surgical precision. These plans, designed to renew mature tourist destinations and improve their competitiveness, are structured in two distinct parts: an explanatory report, which sets out diagnoses and objectives, and regulatory determinations, which contain the mandatory rules.

The researchers tallied 129 appearances of sustainable rhetoric in the reports. In the determinations, the search yielded an irrefutable result: zero. “In the documentation we have analyzed, there is a declaration of intent, a diagnosis. But when it comes time to establish the determinations, the term sustainable disappears,” Simancas explains. The gap is not a technical oversight: it is a choice of institutional design that reveals the real priorities of Canarian tourism planning.

This disconnect is not trivial. PMMs are instruments with legal standing that can modify municipal and regional land-use planning. Their capacity to impose environmental conditions, carrying capacity limits, or energy efficiency requirements is absolute. That they have chosen not to do so is a political and technical decision that the study defines as a “sustainable paradox”: the contradiction between a discourse that justifies intervention and obligations that fail to materialize it.

The Sustainable Paradox: Rhetoric Without Teeth

The paradox takes on its full dimension when placed in the current context. The Canary Islands receives over 15 million visitors annually, a figure that exceeds its resident population by more than six times and follows an upward trajectory without binding mechanisms in place to modulate its impact.

The PMMs analyzed correspond to a period (2011-2015) when the global economic crisis still conditioned public priorities. However, their validity has extended throughout the subsequent decade, coinciding with the sector’s recovery and the post-pandemic explosion in demand. During all that time, the regulatory determinations incorporated not a single operational limit linked to sustainability. The result is that Canarian tourism growth has occurred without the very plans designed to modernize the destination acting as floodgates.

Simancas is blunt in his assessment of this practice: “All of this is green marketing, as the Anglo-Saxons call it. That is, including the word sustainable in any document or title, even when applying for subsidies.” The statement is not an opinion, but the conclusion of an empirical analysis demonstrating that the language of sustainability functions as a resource for legitimation, not as a framework of obligations.

The Consequences of Toothless Governance

The absence of binding sustainability determinations in the PMMs has concrete implications that transcend academic debate. Without regulatory limits, pressure on scarce resources such as water, energy, and land continues without mandatory correction mechanisms. The carrying capacity of destinations, a central concept in any responsible tourism planning, is reduced to a theoretical reference in the reports, without regulatory translation.

The systemic risk is evident: if the regulations that govern the Canary Islands’ main economic sector do not incorporate environmental and social restrictions, the current growth model is unsustainable by definition. This is not a matter of future political will, but of present institutional design. The sustainable paradox implies that the existing instruments are not failing in their execution: they are exactly fulfilling what their determinations require, which is to require nothing in terms of sustainability.

For the Canarian business community, this situation generates a paradoxical uncertainty. On the one hand, the absence of restrictions allows maintaining growth rates that maximize short-term revenue. On the other hand, it erodes the destination’s value in the medium term: infrastructure saturation, environmental degradation, and deterioration of residents’ quality of life are factors that, sooner or later, penalize tourism competitiveness. Investors betting on the Canary Islands should ask whether the current regulatory framework protects their investment or exposes it to a sharp correction when the costs of unsustainability materialize.

The Need for Planning with Consequences

The study by Simancas and his team does not limit itself to diagnosing the problem; it implicitly points to the solution. If sustainability is to be more than a slogan in Canarian tourism plans, it must move from the explanatory reports to the regulatory determinations. This implies defining specific indicators, establishing quantifiable limits, and designing sanction mechanisms for non-compliance.

Comparative experience offers examples. Destinations like the Balearic Islands have incorporated moratoriums linked to carrying capacity, specific taxes on tourist stays, and requirements for rehabilitation over new construction into their tourism planning. The Canary Islands, with comparable tourist pressure and greater ecological fragility, especially in island ecosystems like La Gomera or El Hierro, lacks equivalent instruments with mandatory regulatory rank.

The sustainable paradox, therefore, is not a problem of a lack of diagnoses. The Canary Islands knows what it needs to do. The problem is that its tourism plans have systematically chosen not to do it, using sustainability as rhetorical cover while growth continues without binding restrictions.

A Reflection for the Future

The research published in Cuadernos de Turismo should be read not as just another academic critique, but as a warning about the institutional fragility of the Canary Islands’ main economic sector. While official discourse insists on the need for sustainable tourism, the planning instruments show that sustainability is an ornament, not a condition.

The future of the Canarian tourism model does not depend on new declarations of intent, but on the ability to translate those intentions into rules with teeth. The sustainable paradox is only resolved when promises cease to be 129 and the law begins to be one. Until then, the Archipelago will continue sailing toward record growth that, paradoxically, may be undermining the very foundations of the destination that makes it possible. For investors, managers, and citizens, the question is no longer whether the model is sustainable, but when and how the bill will be paid for not having made it sustainable in time.