Picture the bin in a hotel kitchen once breakfast is over: peelings, leftovers, garden prunings. Normally it makes one trip, to a treatment plant. In southern Tenerife, for 39 hotels, the trip ends on a farm.
The project is called Comunidades Turísticas Circulares, or Circular Tourist Communities, and began in 2022 on the initiative of Ashotel, the hotel association, and Asaga Canarias, representing farming. On 25 June 2026, at the project’s first conference held at ITER (the Renewable Energy Technological Institute) in Granadilla de Abona, results were presented: 39 hotels across Adeje, San Miguel de Abona and Arona, 3,600 tonnes of separately collected biowaste and about 1,300 tonnes of quality compost. According to the figures presented, that compost fertilises 115 hectares of crops a year. About 70 people attended, from technicians and officials to hoteliers and farmers.
The next day a visit to the Mar y Sol organic farm in Icod de los Vinos covered compost quality and the link between hotels and local producers.
The mechanism is simple in outline. Collection is door to door and selective. Waste from kitchens, gardens and other operational areas is transported and treated until it becomes an agricultural soil improver. On 20 June, Diario de Avisos reported six more Arona hotels joining: Arona Gran Hotel, Coral Suites & Spa, Parque Santiago 3 y 4, Gran Oasis Resort, Paradise Park Funlifestyle Hotel and Marylanza Suites & Spa. That piece cited more than 3,500 tonnes separated over four years, a slightly different figure from the conference one. They are compatible but not identical.
Enrique Padrón, Ashotel’s director of innovation and sustainability, says the model shows waste can stop being a problem and become a resource for the territory. Theo Hernando, Asaga’s secretary general, stresses the link between hotels and local producers, with products of “identity, quality and differential value”.
Some things the sources do not settle, and readers would want to know. What does the service cost a hotel? How much of what grows on that compost returns to the same hotels’ tables? We don’t know. What is documented is that the project won a Premio Islas Canarias in 2025 and that June’s sessions also covered decentralised community composting and digital tools for waste management.
For people living in the south of Tenerife the concrete question is whether the model can move beyond hotels to restaurants and households. The June conference left that door open without announcing dates.
