A map built from official data cubes
The number is not newly surveyed but newly assembled. Canarias Bajo Presión lays tourism, housing and population data onto municipal boundaries. Herrera told Canarias Ahora he wanted to take the statistics "to the street" and that anyone should be able to "trace where each figure comes from and how it is calculated".
The method is set out openly on the site: the pressure index weights beds per resident at 35 percent, bed density at 25, the holiday-let share at 20 and the change in capacity since 2019 at 20. By that index it is not Pájara but Adeje that is the most strained municipality – 95.1 out of 100 points, without ever having been declared a strained zone.
Recalculated: two bed counts, two results
The resident figures match exactly: Pájara 21,570, Yaiza 18,842, Mogán 21,172. For the beds there are two official counts, and that is where the single divergence lies. The published 165, 149 and 132 rest on register entries – listed hotel and apartment places plus listed holiday-let places. Take the ISTAC survey instead, meaning the places open in July 2026 plus the holiday-let places offered on platforms, and the result is 178.3 for Pájara, 177.2 for Yaiza and 167.4 for Mogán. Both routes are far above 100; the published one is the more cautious.
| Municipality | Island | Residents | Beds | per 100 | Tourists per 100 (2025) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pájara | Fuerteventura | 21,570 | 35,517 | 164.7 | 112.3 |
| Yaiza | Lanzarote | 18,842 | 28,124 | 149.3 | 89.3 |
| Mogán | Gran Canaria | 21,172 | 27,963 | 132.1 | 104.3 |
| Adeje | Tenerife | 50,021 | 61,018 | 122.0 | 71.8 |
| S. B. de Tirajana | Gran Canaria | 54,291 | 63,151 | 116.3 | 91.4 |
| Tías | Lanzarote | 21,613 | 24,258 | 112.2 | 88.4 |
| Antigua | Fuerteventura | 14,164 | 14,268 | 100.7 | 60.2 |
Sources: map (beds, July 2026), INE padrón (residents).
What 165 does not mean
A bed is capacity, not a guest: Pájara does not carry 165 visitors per 100 residents through the day. The map provides its own measure for that, the notional tourists present per 100 residents averaged over 2025. On that measure only Pájara at 112.3 and Mogán at 104.3 pass the mark; the other five lie between 60.2 and 91.4. The gap between the two is the measure of vacancy and low season.
High summer looks different: with the 75.77 percent occupancy ISTAC reports for July 2026, Pájara comes out at roughly 125 occupied beds per 100 residents (our calculation). That holds only so far – the rate does not cover holiday lets, and a peak month is not a year.
Why these seven
The stock is old, not new. From July 2019 to July 2026 tourist capacity fell in five of the seven municipalities according to the map's data, by 11.4 percent in San Bartolomé de Tirajana and 6.9 in Mogán; it rose only in Adeje by 1.8 and in Antigua by 16.8 percent, while across the islands it dropped 3.6 percent. The ratios therefore come not from fresh building but from inherited stock on a narrow resident base. The 2003 law on spatial and tourism planning guidelines froze new hotel authorisations; owners of 36 plots already zoned for tourism sued. The government settled in 2026 for around 500 million euros and now leaves the use of the plots to municipal plans, Onán Cruz, director general for spatial planning, told Canarias7 on 19 August 2026 – new hotels remain possible there.
Politics has since codified the finding. On 8 July 2026 the Canary parliament passed the law on tourist municipalities: a municipio turístico de excelencia is one meeting two of three conditions – an annual tourist population five times the registered residents, at least 4,000 tourist beds including holiday lets, or five-star beds equal to ten percent of the resident figure. Canarias7 lists 14 municipalities that could qualify; all seven from the map are among them. Where the staff live no statistic says: ISTAC counts 7,355 employees in Pájara's hotels and apartments, not their place of residence.
The number in dispute
The ratio has long been an argument. On 13 May 2026 the platform Canarias Tiene un Límite asked the tourism department for the "paralización de nuevas plazas turísticas en cualquier modalidad" in the coming tourism law – a halt to new beds in any form (eldiario.es).
The employers' associations are currently speaking to a different point. FEHT, Ashotel, Asofuer and Asolan warned, according to Diario de Avisos on 21 September 2026, against a general release of uses in tourist buildings: "One thing is to modernise the model and provide legal certainty, quite another to permit indiscriminate liberalisation." A study by the University of Las Palmas put the consequences at 3.586 billion euros in revenue, 943 million euros in tax and 88,000 jobs. None of them has commented on the map itself; we did not ask.