A silver lining in Arona’s urban planning
Every cloud has a silver lining, even in the complex world of urban planning in Arona. If anything positive can be salvaged from the disastrous urban management of the last 30 years—including corruption investigations, political and corporate wars, and a general plan frozen by court order since 2015—it’s that this Tenerife municipality now finds itself with a tremendous opportunity at precisely the right moment. The unblocking of development units, stranded for so long in political neglect, now allows Arona to lay the foundations to lead housing creation in the Canary Islands, just when it’s most needed amid a full-blown housing crisis.
Arona’s ambitious housing plan
The Arona government, led by Mayor Fátima Lemes, calculates there is sufficient urban land to build over 4,000 homes of all types in the coming years, both private and social housing. No other municipality in the Canary Islands has such potential. Lemes and the Councillor for Urban Planning, Javier Baute (PP), have indeed made it a priority to recover these pockets of land already declared urban and suitable for development to alleviate the acute housing shortage not just in the South, but across the entire island.
El Mojón: Canarias’ largest urban development
The first major step has just been taken. Last Monday, the City Council and the El Mojón Compensation Board signed the partial reception act for the largest urban land parcel in the Canary Islands, located just above Arona’s main population center: Los Cristianos. This move by the local government unblocked nearly one million square meters, 40 years after this partial plan was first created. El Mojón alone will contribute 5,400 residential beds—meaning between 2,000 and 2,500 homes—that developers can finally begin constructing.
Solving decades of administrative chaos
According to Councillor Baute, what the Urban Planning Department has done is fix an administrative problem stemming from the historical chaos in municipal management. This will now allow the City Council to grant licenses and activate all these lands. “The uses for El Mojón were already decided, the land was already consolidated, and what we’ve done now is finally unblock most of this partial plan,” emphasizes Javier Baute.
Beyond El Mojón: hidden development potential
However, the councillor places greater importance on the other development sites scattered throughout Arona that have received little media attention, overshadowed by the staggering figures of El Mojón—which is not only the largest urban parcel to be developed in the Canaries but the third largest in Spain. According to calculations by Urban Planning technicians, among the 21 paralyzed development units—for reasons similar to El Mojón—there are over 350,000 square meters of urban land waiting to be brought to market, with the potential capacity to generate at least another 2,000 homes.
Cho-Parque de la Reina: affordable housing hope
The most significant case is that of Cho-Parque de la Reina, private plots that have been waiting to be built on for 40 years. Javier Baute assures that there are expectations to resolve this other urban conflict shortly so the City Council can grant licenses, thanks to advances in negotiations with the owners. Unlike El Mojón, which envisions high-construction-quality buildings with low density, Cho-Parque de la Reina plans for more affordable housing accessible to middle-class residents, with higher occupancy. In this area, located next to one of Arona’s most popular residential zones, Guaza, there is potential to build around 1,000 homes. In addition to residential buildings, there will also be supermarkets and other services, the councillor highlights.
Valley San Lorenzo, Cabo Blanco, Buzanada and La Camella
The other sites mentioned by Baute, on which the City Council has set its sights, are distributed across four neighborhoods and would contribute another thousand homes: Valle San Lorenzo, Cabo Blanco, Buzanada, and La Camella. These are areas populated mostly by workers linked to tourism with great residential potential, as they are development units that still contain unbuilt plots. In Valle San Lorenzo, there are three parcels of 18,000, 26,000, and 27,000 square meters, with between 70% and 90% still virgin land. In Cabo Blanco, there are two parcels of 88,000 and 52,000 square meters where the land available for construction exceeds 70%. In Buzanada, there is one parcel of 69,000 square meters with 80% free. The case of La Camella is a clear example of the consequences of the calamitous handling of urban planning in Arona, to the point of absurdity.
La Camella: a symbol of past failures
There, a building with 35 social housing units was constructed 15 years ago but has never been occupied due to an urban and legal mess—just one of many. In 2021, the City Council was ordered to pay 2.7 million euros to the public company Visocan of the Government of the Canary Islands for this construction, whose building permit was declared void because the plot was developable but lacked all the necessary elements to be built on. The ruling states that the property falls to the City Council. Javier Baute’s team is now working to definitively resolve this entanglement so these homes can finally be occupied under favorable conditions by residents with limited resources.
The urgent need for housing solutions
In a municipality where the official population is 87,000 inhabitants—though it’s believed that over 100,000 people actually live there if unregistered residents are counted—real estate portals currently offer only 190 rental options. None are below 700 euros per month, and most exceed 900 euros. Even for a room in a shared house, prices can be over 400 euros. Faced with this scenario and ever-rising purchase prices—the average square meter in Arona currently costs 3,700 euros—the recovery and construction of housing is an urgent and non-negotiable objective.
Canary Islands’ unique challenges
The Canary Islands in general, and Tenerife in particular, face significant disadvantages: a lack of available urban land in a very limited island territory, the fact that half of it is protected—as is the case with Tenerife—due to its high natural value, and a population that continues to grow, especially in the South, which also bears the greatest tourist pressure. The island will surpass one million inhabitants within seven years if it maintains the demographic growth rate of the last decade.
Arona’s unique position in Spanish context
Hence, the case of Arona is so striking, with significant development bubbles still pending beyond El Mojón itself. There is no other place in the Islands with the option to increase the residential park by over 4,000 homes in the short to medium term. Only in Madrid are there urban plans under development larger than El Mojón. And this is despite the fact that the availability of territory on the mainland is in no way comparable to that of the Archipelago. The 45 million square meters of new neighborhoods planned in the southwest of the national capital (Valdecerros, Berrocales, Los Ahijones, Los Cerros, Cristo Rivas, and El Cañaveral) or the 3.2 million of the Madrid Nuevo Norte project stand out. In this ranking of the largest urban parcels, El Mojón would take third place with nearly one million square meters, equivalent to 140 football fields. In fourth place would be the Integrated Action Program (PAI) of El Grao, in Valencia, with 380,000 square meters.
