In Breña Baja, a small town on La Palma, council officials and representatives of the island’s Cabildo sat down with a delegate from the regional government to work through, item by item, how to apply a law that has changed the rules of the game for thousands of property owners. It wasn’t a one-off meeting. For months, the Canary Islands’ Department of Tourism and Employment has been touring municipalities across the archipelago in what it calls an “informational round”, helping local authorities apply Law 6/2025.
The law, passed by the Canary Islands Parliament on December 10, 2025 and in force since the day after its publication in the region’s official gazette, replaced a system of free-market vacation rental licensing with one built around municipal urban planning. In practice, a property can only be rented out to tourists if the local council has expressly zoned it for that use, and the general rule caps tourist housing at 10% against 90% residential use per municipality, a threshold that rises to 20% on the so-called green islands, El Hierro, La Gomera and La Palma, where tourist pressure has historically been lower.
One of the most debated provisions restricts newly built properties, which can’t be listed as vacation rentals until ten years after construction, five on the green islands and in municipalities facing depopulation. Officially protected housing is permanently excluded from tourist use. Anyone who keeps operating a property as a vacation rental after its licence expires risks fines ranging from €15,000 to €150,000.
The regional government has repeatedly denied that this amounts to a blanket moratorium, as some property owners’ associations claim, insisting that local planning will determine, town by town, which already-saturated areas become zero-growth zones and what growth is allowed elsewhere. In practice, though, until a municipality finishes adapting its urban plan, no new licences are granted at all, a process the law itself allows to take up to five years.
Nine months in, according to Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, the regional government’s director-general for tourism planning and promotion, speaking at the April session in Breña Baja, the meetings with local authorities have cleared up “practically all” of the technical questions municipalities have raised, with a few exceptions tied to the special regime for the green islands. Meanwhile, several amendments to the law have been put forward in Parliament, some backed across party lines and others not, a sign the debate is far from settled.
For vacation rental owners, the bottom line is that the era of automatic approvals is over. For town halls, the ball is now in their court: how quickly they finish their planning instruments will determine how long new homes stay effectively locked out of the islands’ tourist market.
