The territorial (de) regulation of the growth of tourist accommodation. The example of Lanzarote, The Canary Islands (1991-2008)

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the first measures regulating tourism in the Spanish
archipelagos began to be approved. In the Canary Islands, these measures were delayed until the
end of that decade, except in the case of Lanzarote, where the tourism growth had been tried to be
regulated by the Insular Plan of 1991 and its revision of 1998. Despite the achievements, the
measures have not achieved the desired results. Moreover, their non-compliance has uncovered a
generalized scenario of urban corruption. The objective of this paper is focused on the analysis of
the regulatory processes developed in Lanzarote in 1991 and 1998, with the tourist moratorium
approved in this last year. In particular, we will analyze the case of canceled urban planning licenses
that were granted after this last year and which were a flagrant breach of the tourist moratorium.
Several sources have been used to carry out this study: normative documents, reports, territorial
planning and urban planning plans, official statistics, society registration information and
journalistic sources. The analysis shows the inability of planning to reorient the tourist and
territorial model on the island, always overrun by the interests of owners and economic agents; the
disaffection of the touristic activity and its administrative management with the urban discipline
and, finally, the heterogeneity of interests, from the local to the international scale, which underlies
the non-fulfillment of the tourist moratorium of the island.