**4. Real Estate Boom in the South of Tenerife**

Tenerife's south, with its emblematic tourist hotspot LC-LA, is a prime example of tourism-based real estate growth during Spain's boom years 1998–2007 [96]. In order to gain a more comprehensive picture of the regional dimensions of dispossession and displacement, it is crucial to retrace the genesis of its contemporary accumulation regime, based on tourism and real estate. Before that, though, I will briefly situate the research area in its insular context.

Regional planning policy divides Tenerife into different zones (*Zona Norte*, *Zona Metropolitana*, *Zona Sur*) which themselves are comprised of different municipalities (*municipios*), i.e., local government units. In the southern zone, the most southern municipality of Arona is located. Arona, in turn, is comprised of different population units (*unidades poblacionales*), i.e., distinct cities, towns, places, or villages within a municipality. In Arona, there are 15 population units that can be grouped regarding their distinctive functions in the urban hierarchy [97]. Starting from the higher altitudes, first, the population units north of the highway, Arona, Buzanada, Cabo Blanco, La Camella, Chayofa, and Valle de San Lorenzo, resemble traditional agricultural villages that settled around the more fertile soil in medium altitudes but lost their regional importance throughout the years, given the general reorientation towards coastal tourist areas. Second, Cho, El Fraile, Guargacho, Guaza, and Las Galletas constitute peripheral settlements near the coastal areas but outside the tourist agglomerations. With the exception of Las Galletas, which still is mainly a traditional fisher village, those settlements generally shelter the local population working in the coastal tourist cities. Those are, third, Costa del Silencio, Los Cristianos, Playa de Las Américas, and Palm-Mar. While Palm-Mar is mainly a recent real estate project with holiday homes, Costa del Silencio and LC-LA are bigger agglomerations with ports, shopping centers, hotels, shops, bars, restaurants, and other vital facilities of the tourist industry. Already, this short overview of the urban hierarchy of Arona should give an idea about the drastic shifts from agriculture towards tourist real estate that the economy of the archipelago experienced in a relatively short period of time.

For many decades now, the Canary Islands have been an important pillar of Spanish real estate growth. During the boom years, increases in construction volume and property prices significantly exceeded national dynamics [17] (p. 27). This stems largely from a territorial reorganization of the archipelago since the 1960s, in which the political elites promoted new tourist accumulation regimes, especially in the south of Tenerife. Once an arid region, the introduction of agricultural irrigation systems modernized the island's southern municipalities in the 1950s. Given widespread expectations of higher profitability in tourist destinations, water supply then gradually shifted from agricultural to tourist land use on the coastal areas. This meant, in other words, "the exploitation of spaces which had been hitherto undervalued" [98] (p. 30). New investments in fixed capital were then necessary as these new economic activities "required the creation of a physical infrastructure adequate to the needs of production and circulation of capital" [98] (p. 37). To this end, large local landowners cooperated closely with municipal administrations, which steered and promoted tourist real estate projects on the coastal areas and legally secured the planning and implementation of these projects via new zoning regulations. Particularly the *Plan Insular de Tenerife* (1969), commissioned to the planning agency Doxiadis Ibérica, set the tone for the following decades; it placed all the major upcoming infrastructure projects (autopista del Sur, aeropuerto Reina Sofia) in the south of Tenerife and designated Los Cristianos in the municipality of Arona as the future tourist center of the island [99]. Until 1980, real estate actors opened a total of 2967 hectares of land for tourism—1099 hectares in Arona alone. This close collaboration of owners and the municipal agents illustrates how the production of tourist spaces constitutes a "spatial fix" of capital in the built environment in which the state plays a key role in terms of its adapted regulations, its planning practices, and its ideological backing of capital interests [100]. Tragically, however, for many local landowners, while the initiatives for capital-switching came from local capital, in many cases, only joint ventures between big landowners from the Canary Islands

and peninsular or foreign investors proved to be successful. Given their lack of capital, smaller local landowners often could not establish themselves as tourist developers, forcing them to sell their plots to their wealthier competitors. Worth mentioning in particular is the joint venture between Antonio Domínguez Alfonso and the Catalan entrepreneur Rafael Puig Lluvina, who implemented the 281-hectare project Playa de Las Américas Fase III, thereby linking Los Cristianos morphologically with the previously completed Fase I and Fase II. In a nutshell, in less than three decades, this alliance of urban planning, large landowners and foreign investors managed to fundamentally redirect the accumulation regime from agricultural yield to tourist and real estate yield. As García-Herrera puts it, urbanization in the Canary Islands "took place without industrialization [98] (p. 36). This led to the configuration of LC-LA as Tenerife's tourist epicenter, determining—besides the metropolitan area Santa Cruz/La Laguna—the economic and spatial orientation of the island [99,101]. As a side effect of this fast reorientation of the accumulation regime, however, severe structural deficiencies in the urban process became apparent: housing shortage was very common among low-income families who, prior to the 1990s, needed to rely on self-help housing [98]. This type of housing then became the dominant morphology that constituted the new emerging peripheral settlements near the coastal areas. In the boom years of the 1990s, Spain's entry into the EU led to a further intensification of real estate investment, with German capital in particular participating in new tourism projects. Most recently, real estate development comprised the rest of the island, especially including peripheral settlements [102]. Despite all this, locals and non-EU migrants working in tourism and construction apparently have not been involved substantially in the profits of real estate growth. On the contrary, employment in these industries, which usually required no or very low qualifications, was highly precarious and characterized by temporary employment and low income [103]. In addition, social benefits and social housing policies were weak in the Canary Islands, even by national standards, so that raising a mortgage was often the only viable option to access housing [17,23]. In this sense, private mortgage debt took a firm hold in the quotidian life of the population [1] and further fueled social polarization.

Thus, the bursting of the real estate bubble only exacerbated pre-existing structural precarities and vulnerabilities. The construction volume stagnated from 28,798 newly initiated construction projects in 2006 to only 394 in 2014; at the same time, unemployment and insolvency erupted [17] (p. 29). On an interregional level, the subsequent waves of foreclosures affected the social fabric of the Canaries archipelago most severely, alongside Catalonia: in the period 2007–2012, on average, 8.8 foreclosures per 1000 inhabitants materialized [104] (p. 6). On an intraregional level, the tourist islands Fuerteventura and Lanzarote on a whole and the tourist regions in the South of Gran Canaria and Tenerife proved to be particularly affected [23]. One can get a first glimpse of the scope and magnitude of these events in the south of Tenerife by examining the variations in population growth in the municipality of Arona—given the absence of real estate-related indicators on an infra-municipal level (see Table 1). In my interpretation it is fair to assume that the very high population growth until 2008 accounted for excessive real estate growth during the boom years, while the declining and partly negative trends from 2008 onwards—especially in the coastal conurbations like Costa del Silencio and Los Cristianos—pointed to crisis-related housing losses.

Contrary to a widespread perception of real estate recovery in recent years, lowincome residents are still struggling to gain a foothold in the housing market. On the one hand, as a result of defaulted assets and restrictions in mortgages, they depend more than ever on the rental sector. On the other hand, the penetration of the rental market with global investment funds and short-term rentals has led to significant rent increases, also in the Canary Islands. In this context, tenant evictions are on the rise since the outbreak of the housing crisis, as the cases of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Santa Cruz de Tenerife illustrate [4,24]. For urban agglomerations outside the island capitals, there are no conclusive studies in respect thereof yet. However, the massive concentration of Airbnb

offers in the hands of a few professional hosts in Arona and Adeje indicates that recent displacement dynamics are again affecting mainly the tourist destinations [105]. Especially in Los Cristianos, short-term rentals seem to pile up outside the hotel strongholds, i.e., in the residential areas [106] (p. 24). In the following empirical sections of this paper, I will explore these linkages in more detail.

**Table 1.** Population growth in % in the municipality Arona (2000–2017).


<sup>1</sup> INE. Nomenclátor: Población del Padrón Continuo por Unidad Poblacional. Own elaboration.
