Council in talks to legalise individual tourist apartment rentals
The San Bartolomé de Tirajana council in Gran Canaria has announced it is negotiating an agreement with the Canary Islands Government’s Department of Tourism to permit the individual commercialisation of tourist apartments. The deputy mayor, Alejandro Marichal, made the statement during an interview on the programme ‘A buenas horas’ with José Luis Martín, which is broadcast on digital platforms and reported by Europa Press.
Criticism of the “one-size-fits-all” tourism law
“A law was promoted to which we already submitted our objections during the consultation phase,” Marichal observed. “We do not agree with the approach the Department was taking because the housing problem is not solved by approving a law and, unfortunately, without understanding that the Canary Islands are not a single, uniform territory.”
He gave the example that Gran Canaria has a different reality to Fuerteventura and that, even within the island itself, in San Bartolomé de Tirajana 90% of the tourist apartment supply is in the tourist zone and not in San Fernando de Maspalomas, El Tablero, or Castillo del Romeral.
Key flaws in the current legislation
The deputy mayor argued that the law, by not classifying apartments as dwellings, is excluding all the holiday homes that exist in San Bartolomé de Tirajana. “That is the first mistake, in our view. It is true that during the parliamentary processing phase, an additional or transitional provision could have been secured to consolidate their existence,” he emphasised.
For Marichal, the second problem is that under both the current and the previous law, an apartment in a tourist zone cannot be rented out for holidays, even if it is not being run as a tourist business. “Therefore, it was not possible before either. So what are we negotiating with the Department? Well, there is a willingness to approve a new decree law that allows individual commercialisation,” he concluded.
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