What a solar is – and what this figure counts
A solar is a parcel of urban land that meets the conditions for being built on. The INE carries such parcels as a category of their own, "Fincas urbanas: solares", and the unit is the finca. What is counted is how often one of them changed owner and was recorded – whatever the legal title: purchase, inheritance, gift and exchange all sit in the same total. The INE breaks down by legal title only for urban properties as a whole (table 6153), not for solares. The figure is therefore not a stock: it does not say how many building plots exist, how many planning permissions were granted, or how much land could be built on.
Four flat years – and the comparison that spoils the easy explanation
The low point of the series is 2015, with 1,802 transfers. Since 2022 the figure has moved within a band about 200 plots wide, an average of just over 3,100 a year. The obvious reading – the Canaries cannot get their land market going – does not survive the comparison. Spain-wide the figure is 54.2 percent below 2007, by our calculation from the same table: a Spain-wide post-bubble pattern, not a Canary failure. There is a genuine difference, but it is recent and small – in 2025 Spain rose by 9.6 percent while the Canaries fell by 1.5 percent. And the archipelago figure is itself an average of two opposite movements: Las Palmas lost 10.2 percent, Santa Cruz de Tenerife gained 7.7 percent.
Why this counts in a housing emergency
The housing emergency is the Canary legislature's own wording: the preamble of Law 7/2026 of 31 July, in force since 15 August 2026, speaks of the "emergencia habitacional" in which the islands find themselves. Plots change hands before anything is built, so this series sits earlier in the chain than permissions, completions or home sales. That is a statement about what it represents, not a forecast: the INE publishes no lead time, and the date of registration is not the date of a building start. Of the 66,395 urban transfers recorded for the Canaries in 2025, 40,086 were dwellings and 3,183 were building plots – the part of the statistic that sits before building is the small one.
The land side: what can be evidenced
There is evidence, but no straight chain of cause. Law 19/2003 on the Directrices de Ordenación for territory and tourism – the tourism moratorium – halted licences and development schemes on tourism-zoned plots; most of those Directrices have been repealed since 2017 by the land law 4/2017 (BOE). Out of the halted schemes came a legal dispute that the Consejería de Política Territorial, according to Canarias7 of 19 August 2026, closed early in 2026 with a settlement: around 485 million euros for 36 files, approved by the Canary high court. In exchange the plots, in San Bartolomé de Tirajana, Mogán, Yaiza and Pájara, are not automatically reclassified as rural; municipal planning decides their use. One qualification matters: this is tourism-zoned land, not housing land – according to Canarias7, new hotel beds could be built on some of it. On housing, reservations run the other way: Mogán's new general plan reserves 75 percent of the residential floorspace of its new development areas for protected housing, and article 17.3 of Law 7/2026 requires "at least half the buildability" of new building on vacant urban plots.
Three readings – and what is evidenced for each
A series this flat can be read in three directions, and none of them can be settled with the data. First, landowners holding back: the INE publishes nothing on ownership structure, concentration or holding periods for solares – there is no evidential base here in either direction. Second, planning and administration: the Obvia report names slow procedures, difficulties in planning law and missing basic infrastructure, and says the main problem is not a shortage of land but the difficulty of turning it into homes. The preamble of Law 7/2026 calls the thin staffing of licence offices a "significant obstacle". Third, costs: the same report cites rising construction costs. Which of the three explains how much is in none of the sources.