One of the major Spanish protest groups highlighting the negative effects of booming mass tourism has faced pushback from local officials, after an attempt to swarm a major national park that attracts millions of visitors each year.
Protesters ‘Canarias tiene un límite’ (Canary Islands have a limit) have organised many of the demonstrations that have caused chaos at popular locations for tourism on the Canary Islands in recent years, where holidaymakers came face-to-face with signs telling them to “go home”.
Yet, a stunt planned by the group on Saturday failed to go ahead, after the local government on the islands told them that they needed to have a permit to protest and would be breaking the law if the event went ahead. By the time organisers were informed of this requirement, it was too late to get the permit.
In a fiery social media post, ‘Canarias tiene un límite’ said they had been “forced to postpone the act” after the actions of local officials. However, small pockets of protesters still took to the national park surrounding the vast Mount Teide volcano on Saturday, testing how authorities would react to their presence.
This follows ‘Canarias tiene un límite’ warning in their post that the pushback from authorities would not stop them from their planned summer of protests. They stated: “We delay, but we don’t quit.” The group said the real threat to the UNESCO World Heritage site was not their protest, but “the institutions which treat Teide as an amusement park.”
So inevitably, “small groups” of protesters still turned up at Teidi National Park this weekend, CanarianWeekly reported, waving banners and highlighting the impact of quad bikes and trail-straying tourists on the area’s ecology. The angry Canary Islands residents said they would “circumvent” the “institutional blockade” against their movement.
“We are here at Teide, despite the authorities having prohibited the demonstration. We have come in small groups to bypass the institutions’ attempts to silence us, but so far, they’ve achieved the opposite. We’ve managed to highlight the situation at Teide, which reflects a broader crisis in all of the Canary Islands’ protected areas,” the group said.
They slammed the “clumsy” attempt by the president of Tenerife’s council, Rosa Dávila, to shut them down, with the political leader worried about their protest’s impact on the protected natural wonder. Yet, the group argued that “thousands of quad bikes”, tourist wandering where they shouldn’t, and illegal sporting events were more damaging to the 47,000 acre site.
Mount Teide is a towering volcano and is ranked as the third largest in the world, if measuring its 7500 metres from the seafloor. The national park surrounding it draws around 3 million internal and international visitors each year, eager to see Spain’s highest point and its jaw-dropping vistas.
Despite the pushback from politicians, ‘Canarias tiene un límite’ said the disagreement had drawn attention to the national park’s plight and motivated them to keep up their protests. The activists said in a warning shot to authorities: “There are other officials responsible for managing Mount Teide who are comfortably sheltered by Rosa Dávila’s ineptitude.
“Start warming up, we’re coming for you too. Let it be clear, we won’t stop,”