St George’s flags are not hard to spot around Playa de las Americas in southern Tenerife. From sports bars like Lineker’s to the cafes serving full English breakfasts, the distinctive red cross can constantly be seen fluttering in the wind.
But tucked beneath the bars and clubs popular with the many British tourists, another St George’s cross can be found serving a very different purpose: it is part of a shack’s back wall.
The uneven wooden structure is one of several dwellings dotted across the ravine beside one of the island’s most popular resorts.
Composed of repurposed bits of rubbish, like the flag, these shacks vary in their level of sophistication. One features a security system where a locked gate forces anyone approaching to somehow cross a dangerous section of spiked rocks, another has a staircase that travels beneath a pipe diverting effluence from a petrol station above.
“I have been here 10 months,” Gordy, the Nigerian man living in the St George’s flag shack explained.
“I picked all of this outside,” he added, gesturing to the broken bike wheels and pieces of fabric.
Gordy, who declined to be pictured, spoke whilst sitting on a mattress propped above wooden pallets half covered with a blanket.
Asked how he ended up in the spot, sandwiched between the two main roads in and out of Playa de las Americas he replied: “I was walking because I had a problem in another place. I got here and people helped me with money and food.”
Gordy said the spot was unsafe at night. Located only a short walk from the road with bars and strip clubs, the migrant said it was not uncommon for drunk tourists to invade his home.
“It can be dangerous. They come and take my stuff,” he added.
Although he said the welcome in Playa de las Americas had been positive, it was not his intention to remain in the tourist area.
“I want to go somewhere else to find a job,” he said. “Every day I’m lying here, going to find food. I’m just wasting my life. I want to be working and paying tax to the government.”
Despite other people in similar dwellings being evicted by the police Gordy said he’d had “no problem” with the authorities.
He didn’t know the other residents of the ravine beside Playa de las Americas, but said the people inside its homes changed quite often.
Gordy’s shack on the fringes of a major tourist resort is far from an anomaly in Tenerife. During a trip to the island the Express saw many similar dwellings in locations that ranged from rocks by the sea to caves in the desert.
Local activists claim they have been “sounding the alarm about homelessness for years” but that new makeshift homes keep popping up across the Canary Islands.
