On paper, more than a fifth of the sea surrounding the Canary Islands carries some form of legally binding protection. In practice, according to the first scientific study to measure its real effectiveness, less than 1% is under strict protection, and nine out of ten marine protected areas lack active management.
That’s the headline finding of the report “Estado de las Áreas Marinas Protegidas en Canarias 2026,” produced under the MPAs Canary Islands project by a research team that includes the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. For the first time in the archipelago, researchers applied The MPA Guide, an international methodology developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature alongside other organisations. The result is a far more precise picture than the raw extent of protected areas suggested: only 11% has an active management system, and just 1% has strict protection.
The Canaries aren’t an ordinary stretch of sea. The report describes one of the northeastern Atlantic’s major marine biodiversity hotspots, the combined effect of the archipelago’s volcanic origin, the Canary Current and Saharan upwelling. Researchers have recorded 7,618 species, including at least 30 cetacean species and five of the world’s eight sea turtle species. Canarian waters also host the world’s main refuge for the angel shark, a critically endangered species. Seventy-six exotic marine species have been logged too, the highest figure in the region, a sign of the pressure the ecosystem is under.
“Expanding the surface area of marine protected areas isn’t enough on its own,” says Eva Meyers, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change and head of the Angel Shark Project, who led the study alongside Héctor Toledo and Carolina Bousquet. “Its real value depends on effective management, continuous monitoring and periodic evaluation of the measures in place, to make sure they deliver genuine conservation results and can be improved over time.”
Among the proposals now under discussion are two new marine national parks: one for the Mar de Las Calmas, off El Hierro, and one for Guguy, in Gran Canaria. In parallel, Spain’s Ministry for Ecological Transition has opened a public consultation on a proposal to add 21 marine sites to the Natura 2000 network as Sites of Community Importance, plus two new Special Protection Areas for birds. Seventeen of those twenty-one sites are in the Canaries, within the Macaronesian biogeographic region.
The European Union requires member states to protect 30% of the sea by 2030, with at least a tenth of that under strict protection. Spain has committed to the target, and the study’s authors note that the Canaries can cover much of the remaining 5% the country still needs, thanks to the extent and quality of its waters. But the report is blunt on one point: declaring new protected areas on a map isn’t enough. What’s needed is stronger governance, updated management plans that have gone stale, and closer regional cooperation with the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde, Morocco and Mauritania, the other territories that share the same sea.
