Just as the southern coast of Spain became a popular destination in the 1970’s and 80’s with the growth of the package holiday, the same was also true of the Canary Islands. Prior to this, during the 1960’s, visitor numbers to Lanzarote were so low as to be negligible, even whilst the neighbouring islands of Gran Canaria and Tenerife were beginning to enjoy an influx of tourists, with 316,500 visitors recorded on both islands by 1965.
Over the following five years, up to 1970, Lanzarote began to be a tourist destination, notching up 25,000 visitors by that year and by 1975, it was receiving 81,000 visitors annually.
The popularity of the larger islands, Tenerife and Gran Canaria, was probably influenced by the way that tourism developed across the archipelago during the nineteenth century. As it was Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and La Orotava in Tenerife where foreign travellers, most often convalescents of respiratory illnesses from northern Europe, would spend their recuperation in the sub-tropical all year round climate.
Certainly, the earliest hotels to be found were concentrated in these two areas. Whilst the smaller islands of Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and La Gomera were principally used for agricultural cultivation and to provide a labour pool during this period.
But it was in the twentieth century that modern tourism really took off, with the coastal areas of Gran Canaria and Tenerife being the first to experience mass tourist development during the 1950s. When hotels and apartment complexes began to be constructed, often with capital investment from Scandinavian companies, who were amongst the earliest tourist visitors to the Canaries.
Later, in the 1970’s there was a considerable influx of investment from German companies, thanks to the creation of the ‘Strauss Law’, which allowed a twelve-year tax exemption to German companies investing in Spain.
The energy crisis of 1973-4 hurt the developing tourist economy of the islands considerably, causing many smaller investors to bail out and allowing bigger operators, such as foreign tour companies and investors from mainland Spain to step in and sweep up tourist accommodation cheaply.
During the 1980’s a sustained period of economic growth was registered in the Canary Islands, as further investment brought more hotel beds and property construction to the islands. By 1988-89, more than 300,000 beds or 10% of Spain’s total holiday accommodation could be found in the archipelago. Paving the way for tourist figures to double during the 1990’s, with visitor numbers to the region rising from 5.8 million per year to 11.4 million, a rise of 95.2%.
Over the same period, the number of hotels in Lanzarote owned by foreign companies, including those from mainland Spain or the Balearics, increased to account for nearly 75% of the total.
The effects these developments had on visitor numbers, specifically to Lanzarote, meant that by 1980, 174,709 tourists were arriving annually, an increment of 215% over the five intervening years since 1975.
This incredible rate of increase continued over the next fifteen years, as figures went from 388,216 (1985) to 734,018 (1990) and then to 1,348,700 visitors in 1995. With the highest number of visitors recorded in 2003, when 1,946,775 holidaymakers came to Lanzarote. This has since fallen back a little, with 1,618,215 visitors registered in 2007.
The composition of those visitors also makes for interesting reading, as statistics from the Centro de Datos (the Statistics Department for the Government of Lanzarote) indicate that in the last eight years the British tourist has dominated the tourist market, with nearly 1 million visiting in 2003 (926,284 in total). In fact, since 2001, British visitors have not dropped below 800,000 per year, suggesting that Lanzarote is now well established as a favourite holiday destination for UK residents.
Over the same period, visitor numbers from Germany have gone into serious decline, from a high of 474,756 visits in 2000 to only 313,680 in 2007. A decrease which could be partly the result of the introduction of the Euro in 2002, making Lanzarote more expensive for German visitors, whilst the favourable exchange rate between the pound and the euro worked in British tourists favour, until very recently.
