60 beaches closed in the Canary Islands — and now a map where you can look up your own

What the map shows

The site is usable without registering; the map sits at vertidoscanarias.org/mapa. At the top a search field — “¿A qué playa quieres ir?” — and below it the list sorted by island, “Playas a evitar hoy”. Red means “Pegada a un vertido”: beside a discharge point, with rain or current pushing towards it today; yellow means a discharge point nearby under milder conditions; green means expressly only “sin señal hoy” — which the legend says is not the same as clean water. Switchable layers add drift arrows, a modelled sewage plume with a time slider and the official quality layer; a white rim on a point means unauthorised. Weather and currents come, by the map's own source note, from Open-Meteo.

How to check your own beach

First, the official measurement, the only one that counts legally: NÁYADE, the bathing-water system of the Ministerio de Sanidad, freely accessible at nayadeciudadano.sanidad.gob.es. Search for the official bathing zone, not the name everyone uses — it is often called something else, for instance “PLAYA MEDANO (EL)-CHICA”. It shows apta or no apta, the sampling date and the values for E. coli and intestinal enterococci. The Servicio Canario de la Salud, on its page about the state of the beaches, points to exactly this.

Second, the Canary map layer. Grafcan runs, in IDECanarias, the service “Zonas de aguas de baño y Puntos de muestreo” and the “Censo de Vertidos desde tierra al mar”: there you see whether a discharge point lies nearby and whether it is authorised. Both are free.

Third, the municipality. The prohibition sign, the red flag and the public notice are at the beach and on the ayuntamiento's website — closures often apply to a single access point.

Fourth, and only then, the map. It fills the gap between two samplings: each bathing zone, the platform states, is sampled only nine to twenty-one times a year, and the culture takes one or two days. A burst pipe from yesterday appears in no official figure.

What “closed” means legally

The basis is Real Decreto 1341/2007: article 9 allows the competent authorities temporarily to prohibit bathing or to advise against it, article 12 a permanent ban after five years of insufficient classification. In the Canaries the Dirección General de Salud Pública runs the surveillance. A current case: in Güímar on Tenerife, in September 2026, the Servicio Canario de la Salud ordered the bathing ban for Playa El Cabezo (access B) and Playa de Perros, as Diario de Avisos reported, after a sample of 9 September 2026 returned 410 cfu per 100 ml of intestinal enterococci against a municipal reference value below 200. The same body decides on lifting it.

The scale behind it

The figure of 72 per cent survives checking, pronounced correctly. Grafcan announced on 24 July 2025, on the census by the Dirección General de Transición Ecológica, that the Canaries counted 403 discharge points; 112 had a valid authorisation and 291 did not. That is 72.2 per cent without a valid authorisation — not 72 per cent illegal in the narrow sense: three days earlier Canarias7 broke the same data down into 216 unauthorised points and 75 procedures under way.

On 18 December 2025 the Court of Justice of the European Union condemned Spain for breaching the urban waste water directive 91/271/EEC; according to eldiario.es of 19 December 2025 the ruling names twelve agglomerations on Tenerife. Between January 2019 and July 2023 the region paid 8,220,941.35 euros in EU penalties, per an Atlántico Hoy account reproduced by the Cámara Insular de Aguas de Tenerife.

What the administrations say in reply

Mariano Hernández Zapata, regional minister for Transición Ecológica, said in Canarias7 of 21 July 2025 that most unauthorised discharge points are in public hands — municipal installations for which an application was never filed. The aim, he said, is to have 85 per cent inside the procedure by 2027 and 60 per cent fully authorised.

On construction there is documented progress: for Tenerife, the Cámara Insular de Aguas de Tenerife reported on 22 May 2026 that of the 233.5 million euros in the sanitation agreement between ACUAES, the Cabildo and the Consejo Insular de Aguas, 158 million had been executed, 67 per cent, and that the Depuradora del Oeste and Los Letrados plants had entered testing. A permit is not a treatment plant, and a treatment plant in testing is not yet cleaning any sewage.