With banners reading "This hotel is illegal" and slogans such as "Our water is in your pool," the activists aimed to raise awareness among guests about the hotel's unlawful operation and the water shortages plaguing the island.
The protest group, known as Lanzarote Tiene Un Límite, filled jugs and buckets with water from the hotel's pools, symbolising the residents' frustration over the weekly water cuts.
They later posted on Instagram, declaring: "Full pools, illegal hotels, and villages without water. We won’t stop." They are also encouraging everyone to participate in a larger demonstration on October 20th across the Canary Islands, opposing the region's tourism model and the overexploitation of local resources. In Lanzarote, the protest will take place at midday on the streets of Puerto del Carmen, one of the island’s busiest tourist areas.
During the protest at the Papagayo Arena Hotel, activists distributed flyers to hotel guests, informing them that the establishment operates without a valid license and violates key land-use regulations. The flyers stated: "Now that you know, if you stay at the Sandos Papagayo, you are complicit in this environmental crime."
Despite its illegal status, the seven-story hotel, featuring 485 rooms, continues to operate on the beachfront in Yaiza. Its urban planning licence was annulled by the courts after it was revealed that it had been granted illegally by former mayor José Francisco Reyes, who is currently serving a prison sentence for corruption.
Reyes allegedly took bribes from developers in exchange for speeding up the approval of licences, bypassing essential legal requirements such as obtaining proper legal and tourism authorisations.
To enable the construction of the Papagayo Arena, the Yaiza Town Council merged two plots of land, covering a public access road to the beach. The hotel exceeds the maximum height and number of floors permitted in Lanzarote, and it violates setback regulations that apply to separate parcels of land. The court ruling condemned these actions, stating that they "caused a total alteration of Yaiza’s urban reality."
Canarian Weekly
