In one building in Las Palmas, a family hangs laundry on the third-floor balcony while a wheeled suitcase rolls across the landing every three days on the fourth. That daily overlap is more or less what the new decree being drafted by the Canary Islands’ Tourism Ministry is trying to sort out.
Tourism minister Jéssica de León describes it as an attempt to reconcile three groups that rarely sit at the same table: residents struggling to find affordable housing, owners of tourist apartments asserting their right to profit from their property, and businesses in the sector asking for stable rules to invest by. The text, as reported by Radio Televisión Canaria, is still a working draft, though the regional government insists it wants full consensus before taking it to the Council of Government.
The starting point is Law 6/2025, in force since last December, which already reshaped the holiday-rental map across the archipelago. Only 10% of the units in a residential building can be used for tourist purposes, a share that rises to 20% on the so-called green islands — El Hierro, La Gomera and La Palma — where tourism pressure is lower and the economy needs more room to diversify. Anyone who keeps operating as a tourist rental once their license has expired faces fines of between €15,000 and €150,000. Since August 15, 2026, a seasonal rental contract can also be treated in the Canary Islands as a tourist lease, a technical tweak that in practice closes off another loophole.
The new decree tackles a different, thornier front: the so-called unity-of-operation principle, the rule requiring 100% owner consent before an entire building can be managed as a single tourist property. It is a model the Ministry itself admits is failing precisely because of that rigidity, and one the government wants to loosen with targeted incentives to convert tourist flats back into ordinary housing, or the reverse.
Reactions came fast. Doris Borrego, president of Ascav, is demanding full freedom for owners to decide whether to rent their property short-term or hand it to a tourism operator. On the other side, Maribé Doreste, who leads PALT, is defending the non-tourist status of residential buildings, worried that any opening becomes the crack everything else slips through.
Underneath it all sits a structural fact that’s hard to ignore in the Canary Islands: tourism is the archipelago’s economic engine, but it is also the explanation most often cited when housing prices climb out of reach for people born here or who moved for work. It’s no accident that protests under the banner “Canarias tiene un límite” have, over the past couple of years, pushed the issue back to the center of public debate, prompting institutions to legislate in ever finer detail.
It’s unclear when the final version of the decree will land, or whether it will find the “total” consensus the Ministry has set as its goal. For now it remains a work in progress, with owners and residents waiting to see which way the balance finally tips.
