Activists glue combination locks for Airbnb apartments on the Canary Islands and then share the videos on the Internet. Image: screenshot instagram
June 8, 2026, 6:14 p.mJune 8, 2026, 6:14 p.m
The images of last year’s protests against mass tourism in Barcelona went around the world. Angry residents sprayed holiday guests in cafes and restaurants with water guns and chanted “Tourists go home”. The trigger for the locals’ dissatisfaction was the rapidly increasing rental prices in the popular travel destination. Barcelona has experienced an increase in rents of around 70 percent over the last ten years, as the city reported.
A development that is not just limited to Barcelona. The question of affordable rental apartments concerns the entire country. A survey by the Spanish opinion institute Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) of 2025 shows that the housing issue is cited by the population as the biggest social problem in the country, ahead of economic and political problems or migration issues.
Holiday apartments are intended to further increase the housing shortage
Popular tourist destinations such as Barcelona, Madrid, the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands are particularly hard hit. Large providers of holiday apartments such as Airbnb and Booking.com are particularly criticized here, as they are accused of making the already tense housing situation even worse by withdrawing vacant apartments from the real estate market and renting them out as holiday apartments. It was only last December that the Spanish Ministry of Consumer Protection imposed a fine on Airbnb a fine of 64 million euros due to renting unlicensed holiday apartments in Spain.
Around 20 percent of the 65,000 unofficially licensed apartments were on the Canary Islands, according to the online portal Tenerife News reported after the punishment was announced. In a survey by the official statistics authority of the Canary Islands Two years ago, around 80 percent of those surveyed completely or partially agreed with the statement that holiday homes drive up rents.
Glued locks and sealed showers
This growing discontent is now prompting some activists in Lanzarote to take action against the Airbnb accommodation business, as the British newspaper “Daily Mail” recently reported. Videos on Instagram show how holiday apartment combination locks are glued together with glue. In addition, well-known tourist attractions were marked with caution tape and symbolically declared closed.
However, the protests appear to be doing little damage to the ongoing tourism boom on the Canary Islands. According to the Daily Mail, 5.7 million foreign tourists visited the island in the first four months of this year. Last year the Canary Islands had around 15.7 million visitors, an all-time record.
In addition to the lack of affordable housing, the water shortage on the island is also causing problems for the residents. Since the island itself has no major natural rivers or lakes and the winter months are becoming increasingly drier, isolated bottlenecks in the water supply are not uncommon, especially in smaller, more remote villages. In 2024, the Canary Islands government even had to declare a drought emergency.
Back then, the group that was now sticking up Airbnb locks was already drawing attention to itself with acts of sabotage. They glued up and closed showers on the beaches of the Canary Islands to protest against the tourism industry’s water consumption. The stickers they attached to the sealed showers read: “No water for the local people no water for the tourists.”
Tourism as a “double-edged sword”
Tourism on the island is a “double-edged sword,” the owner of a clothing store tells the Daily Mail. While on the one hand it is dependent on tourism and therefore the majority of its customers, this also presents it with fundamental problems: “Recruiting new employees is a nightmare due to the lack of housing; no one can afford to live nearby anymore.”
The authorities on Lanzarote are now telling the Daily Mail that they want to better manage tourist flows in the future and increasingly focus on a more upscale tourism segment. (July)