What changes for holidaymakers and owners in the south?

Nothing changes for now, because the Cabildo has only finished the preliminary document (documento de avance). The 1991 plan stays in force until the new one is approved.

In the south, Los Charcones in Playa Blanca stands out. According to Jesús Machín, the island councillor for territorial policy, nothing may be built there in future: “In the Los Charcones zone nothing may be built; the surroundings and habitat will be protected.”

The Cabildo has published nothing concrete on bed numbers, land prices, building rights for individual plots or holiday lets. Property owners therefore cannot yet tell whether their own plot is affected.

Owners and regular visitors can comment during the public consultation. By Friday the Cabildo had named no application route or online portal.

What is in the draft Plan Insular?

The Cabildo wants to raise the protected share of the island from 42% to 60%, Machín explained. He said these areas would stay outside the procedures used to open land for building.

More than 90% of the coast is to be protected, according to Machín. The draft also removes more than 110,000 square metres of land earmarked for hotels and adds it to nature protection.

Under the draft, farming and livestock would get three times as much land as today. The Cabildo gave no figure in hectares.

The brake on hotel growth therefore lies in the building land that has been struck out. The details available contain no cap on beds, hotels or places.

Why does Lanzarote need a new plan?

The current island plan dates from 1991 (Decreto 63/1991), and Machín considers it outdated. “We are working with outdated planning,” he said.

The process had to restart because the earlier one was annulled in 2022, according to Machín. No court source is available, and Machín says six preliminary phases are now complete.

On 16 December 2024, Cabildo president Oswaldo Betancort and Machín presented an earlier draft that protected 59.46% of the island. According to La Voz de Lanzarote, the Cabildo gave final approval on 11 February 2026 to the “documento de alcance” (scoping document), a step in the strategic environmental assessment.

Courts overturned several hotel licences on Lanzarote in the years around 2006 to 2011 because they breached the 1991 plan. The Canary Islands' supreme court (TSJC) had individual hotels and one holiday complex in view.

How crowded is Lanzarote already?

Lanzarote counted 3,455,200 tourists in 2025, according to ISTAC (the Canary Islands statistics office), up from 3,406,911 in 2024. That is 1.4% more and, per ISTAC, the most restrained growth of any Canary island.

Britain sent 1,685,496 guests, up 0.9%. From Germany there were 259,517, down 3.2% from 268,077.

A Cabildo study on carrying capacity counted around 92,000 beds in 2023, 31,000 of them in holiday flats. According to the report, the then president María Dolores Corujo had no doubt that the island should be declared a saturated tourism zone.

The Fundación César Manrique is critical. It filed objections to a draft in October 2025, sees serious gaps and demands respect for the island's ecological limits.

What happens next, and what remains open?

Machín expects the document at the Consejo de Gobierno (governing council) next Tuesday. The Cabildo named no calendar date by Friday.

A 45-day public consultation follows, in which citizens and administrations can comment. The start and end of the period are unpublished, as is a date for final approval.

Other affected zones besides Los Charcones remain open, as does any bed figure. The cost of the plan and its infrastructure is also unknown.

The 2024 draft planned no new roads but a doubling of the LZ-40 and LZ-2. The Cabildo has not said whether that still holds in the new document.