La Laguna pioneers holiday rental control plan
San Cristóbal de La Laguna town hall has taken a pioneering step by approving a new Municipal Plan for the Inspection and Control of Holiday Rentals, becoming one of the first municipalities in the Canary Islands to complete this process under the recent Law 6/2025 on the Sustainable Regulation of Tourist Use of Housing in the Canaries.
The technical analysis carried out by the town planning department, after cross-referencing official data from the regional government, has revealed a striking statistic: of the 1,179 holiday rentals registered in the Canary Islands General Tourist Register within the municipal area, 92.7% (1,093 properties) lack the mandatory prior municipal communication for classified activities – a procedure that is essential for operating legally.
Only 86 properties have completed the paperwork
Just 86 properties have started or processed this procedure with the local administration. Of that number, 41 have already received a favourable report, 14 are awaiting the initial inspection, and 31 are in the process of correcting their documentation.
To address this inherited administrative imbalance, the plan drawn up by the Tenerife council sets out an action protocol divided into several implementation phases:
Phase 0: Deregistration of properties
The town hall will send the files of the 1,093 properties without municipal authorisation to the Cabildo of Tenerife. The island authority will then process the cancellation of the tourist declaration of responsibility on the grounds of essential omission, which will result in the loss of the registration number and make it legally impossible for the properties to be marketed on holiday rental platforms.
Phases 1 and 2: Inspections and correction
Pending files will be closed following technical visits to the properties.
Phase 3 and priority inspections
In coordination with the Cabildo, individual inspections will be carried out on properties that continue to operate clandestinely, prioritising those that have accumulated complaints from neighbours, belong to large-scale landlords, or present safety risks.
Mayor calls for regional support
The Mayor of La Laguna, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, emphasised that this instrument will make it possible to “bring order to an area that has generated social concern and provide legal certainty”, while calling on the Canary Islands Government to provide technical support and resources so that councils do not have to shoulder the burden of inspections alone.
Meanwhile, the housing councillor, Adolfo Cordobés, stressed that the measure seeks to clean up the register and curb clandestine activity in order to protect access to residential housing.
Currently, the 1,179 registered holiday rentals represent 1.57% of the 75,000 homes in the municipality. Although the regional law sets a maximum ceiling of 10%, the town hall will incorporate quantitative limits more closely aligned with the social, zonal and heritage reality of La Laguna into the drafting of the new General Town Planning Plan (PGO).
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