The Adeje council are poised to approve a major tourist development project tomorrow, Friday, including a new golf course, 1,680 hotel beds, and 140 luxury villas in the south of Tenerife, despite the region being in the midst of a serious water crisis.
The project, known as the Partial Plan of Hoya Grande, spans over one million square metres, with the golf course alone covering 445,000 square metres.
The move has sparked fierce criticism from environmental groups and local opposition parties, particularly Podemos Adeje, which has labelled the initiative a “speculative attack” on public resources.
The proposed golf course is expected to consume water equivalent to the daily use of 16,400 people, a figure that opponents find alarming given the current emergency. A municipal report from last year revealed that Adeje already suffers a daily shortfall of nearly 2.9 million litres of water.
“While Mayor Fraga asks residents to conserve water, he greenlights a mega-resort that will consume as much water each day as a third of the town’s population,” Podemos Adeje stated in a press release. The party accuses the Socialist mayor of serving the interests of tourism and ignoring the needs and voices of local families.
The project is also under scrutiny for what critics describe as serious planning flaws. Gabriel González, a councillor for Podemos, claims the development exceeds the accommodation density permitted under Tenerife’s island-wide planning regulations. He also points to insufficient protection of local heritage sites, including recently discovered Guanche petroglyphs on the site, and inadequate infrastructure for transport.
“This is yet another urban development scheme that potentially violates Tenerife’s primary planning framework, the Island Spatial Plan,” said González. “We flagged these issues, but the local government chose to ignore us.”
The environmental organisation Ben Magec–Ecologistas en Acción has echoed these concerns, highlighting that Tenerife already has nine golf courses, each consuming on average of 2.1 million litres of water per day, vastly more than the 128 litres typically used per person. The group described the project as “an unsustainable waste that appropriates a scarce and essential public resource for purely commercial gain.”
This latest development follows controversy over another large-scale project in Adeje, Cuna del Alma, which was also promoted by Mayor Fraga and has drawn widespread condemnation for its environmental impact.
As the water crisis deepens, opponents of the Hoya Grande plan are calling for urgent public mobilisation to halt what they see as a flagrant misuse of resources and a further step toward the overdevelopment of the island.
