The Canary Islands Minister for Tourism and Employment, Jéssica de León, has received threats after passing regulations to crack down on tourist flats on the islands.
Reporting in the local press suggests that the Minister has had stones thrown at her property and her car.
There has also been a AI-generated video circulating online depicting the minister in an apocalyptic setting burning locals’ homes with a flamethrower, and later on fire herself.
Advertisement
These calls for her to be “burnt alive” have been echoed on social media for the past months.
Manuel Domínguez, president of the centre-right People’s Party in the Canary Islands, de León’s party, revealed the threats in an interview on Radio Sintonía on Wednesday.
“The last message calls for the councillor to be burnt alive! She doesn’t want me to talk about it, but this had to be reported. It’s already in the hands of the police because it wasn’t an isolated incident.”
READ ALSO: Spain’s Canary Islands approves long-awaited legislation to regulate tourist flats
De León, for her part, stated publicly that “I have never wanted to play the victim over this”, but confirmed that she had filed “two complaints” with the police for what she called “veiled threats”.
Judging by the videos’ tone and the lyrics to the song heard in the background (“they are our children’s bread/future” in reference to holiday lets), the creators must be tourist flat owners who will be negatively impacted by the new legislation.
The Canary Islands Law on Sustainable Management of Tourist Use of Housing, also known as the Holiday Rental Law, was approved by the regional parliament on November 12th.
Reforms had been in the pipeline for several years before approval and were pushed by de León.
The bill is, according to government sources reported in local media Canarias 7, principally “a law that orders and regulates holiday rentals” rather than a total ban.
However, the general consensus is that it will limit new holiday lets on the islands until at least 2030.
The bill gives town halls and councils greater powers to control where tourist accommodation can be and put limits on it as a proportion of housing compared to residential buildings.
Advertisement
The wide-ranging reforms also include land considered residential being reserved largely for permanent housing, with 80 percent destined for long-term use.
The legislation also includes regulations to create limits of 10 percent on tourist accommodation relative to the total housing stock in particularly touristy areas such as La Palma, La Gomera, and El Hierro.
At that time, de León, admitted that it had been a law that was “difficult to internalise, difficult to explain, and difficult to manage”.
The backlash against the law and the threats against de León highlight that even though many are opposed to the knock-on effects of mass tourism in the Atlantic archipelago, there are many families who rely economically on their Airbnb-style lets.
The Canary Islands Holiday Rental Association (Ascav) has issued a statement regarding the attacks against de León saying that they can “understand and even share the unease, despair, fear and indignation suffered by tens of thousands of Canary Island families and residents” due to the recently approved Law on Sustainable Planning of Tourist Use of Housing, but that in “no case do they justify violence”.
The Canary Islands was one of the hotbeds of Spain’s anti-tourism protest movement in 2024 and several islands, like many major provincial capitals on the Spanish peninsula, have come under strain from a post-pandemic proliferation of tourist flats that locals say has inflated the local rental and property markets.
There are reportedly over 72,000 units registered as holiday homes in the Canary Islands, and it is estimated that with the new regulation the figure could fall to around 9,500. The number of unlicensed or illegal holiday lets is unknown.
READ ALSO: