canary islands tourism employment record july

Canary Islands tourism employment hits record in July

Compiled with the help of artificial intelligence, based on Spanish-language information. Source below the article.

A different tourism calendar

Tourism in the Canary Islands operates on its own calendar, unlike other destinations. While elsewhere they wait for summer to fill hotels and airports, the Islands begin to pick up pace when the cold sets in across Europe. Winter has traditionally been the peak season, but this year the thermometer of tourism employment has revealed a possible shift in trend, or rather the confirmation that seasonality is now a thing of the past.

Record figures for July

July closed with 236,330 affiliations linked to the sector, the highest historical figure ever recorded for a seventh month of the year, according to data from the Canary Islands Institute of Statistics (Istac) on tourism employment in the archipelago. And that is not all. On the face of it, coming after years of records, this figure might not raise eyebrows. However, it takes on particular significance because July is traditionally considered a low season period in the Islands, falling outside the main winter tourism cycle.

The Canary Islands tourism calendar works, to a large extent, in reverse to that of other Spanish destinations. While much of the country concentrates its greatest activity in the summer months, the Islands experience their most intense period between October and March. This is when the cold begins to take hold in some of its key source markets, such as the United Kingdom and Germany, and thousands of visitors seek out a milder winter in the Canaries.

Summer closes the gap on winter

However, this year’s data paints a picture that is largely different from what has traditionally defined that calendar, or at least what defined it before the outbreak of the covid crisis. Summer has not fallen far behind winter. In fact, the gap with the most recent winter campaign is almost non-existent. Between October 2025 and March 2026, the engine of the regional economy and its associated activities maintained an average of 236,072 workers registered with social security, meaning that July just gone exceeded that figure by 258 workers.

As if that were not enough, the comparison becomes even more telling when looking back at recent years. July 2026 surpasses the monthly average of every complete high season available since 2020. Between October 2024 and March 2025, for example, the Canary Islands recorded an average of 229,560 tourism-related affiliations. July’s figure stands 2.9% above that. Likewise, the 2023-2024 high season recorded an average of 219,833 affiliations, 7.5% fewer than those reached in July 2026. In the 2022-2023 campaign, the average stood at 207,530 affiliations, 13.9% fewer than those registered in July this year. The 2021-2022 season dropped to 188,900, while in 2020-2021, marked by restrictions and the impact of the pandemic on tourism, the average fell to 165,872 affiliations.

A sustained upward trend

In just five years, the gap between the current volume of tourism-related employment and the average of what is traditionally considered high season has continued to widen. The 236,330 affiliations achieved this summer are 25.1% above the average for the 2021-2022 campaign and 42.5% higher than the dismal 2020-2021 high season. The comparison shows a sustained upward trajectory. Each new high season has raised the ceiling of tourism employment in the Canary Islands, with figures that, campaign after campaign, have left the previous winter behind.

But July 2026, a theoretically ‘bad’ month, has managed to position itself above all of them. Only the most recent campaign, that of 2025-2026, has come close, with an average of 236,072 affiliations – those 258 fewer than registered in the middle of summer. The difference is minimal but significant: a month traditionally far removed from the great peaks of activity has ended up matching, and even surpassing, the average level of the six months that concentrate the Islands’ greatest tourism intensity.

National context

The Canary Islands record is not an exception on the national stage. Tourism-related employment also reached an all-time high in July across Spain as a whole. According to figures released this Monday by Turespaña, the country registered 3.1 million people affiliated to social security in tourism-related activities. In year-on-year terms, tourism added more than 100,000 workers across the country. Growth extended to practically every autonomous community, and the Canary Islands was no exception.

The archipelago ranked as the fifth community with the greatest growth in affiliations in hospitality, travel agencies and tour operators, with 4,957 more than in July the previous year, behind only Andalusia, which once again acts as the main driver of the tourism labour market in summer, the Valencian Community, Catalonia and the Community of Madrid. The difference is that, while those national figures reflect the push of tourism during one of the central months of summer, in the Canary Islands the record coincides with a moment that traditionally falls outside its main period of activity. At least on paper.

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