Nearly 9,000 illegal holiday lets in the Canary Islands are removed from rental platforms
The Spanish Ministry of Housing has demanded the withdrawal of 8,698 illegal holiday rental listings in the Canary Islands from online platforms, after determining that the properties failed to meet the legal requirements for registration.
According to the Ministry, these properties had applied for the mandatory registration number but were refused because they did not comply with regulations. Their applications have since been marked as revoked.
Since January 2025, more than 336,000 applications for property registration have been submitted across Spain, nearly 79% of them for holiday rental properties. Of these, 53,876 were deemed illegal nationwide, including almost 9,000 in the Canaries.
This crackdown follows the introduction of the Digital One-Stop Shop, launched in August, which enables registrars, the Ministry, and online platforms to share data to curb fraud in the short-term rental sector.
Tenerife tops the list
Among Canary Island municipalities, Adeje (Tenerife) leads with 765 rejected applications, followed by San Bartolomé de Tirajana (Gran Canaria) with 637, Puerto de la Cruz (Tenerife) with 531, La Oliva (Fuerteventura) with 484, Yaiza (Lanzarote) with 442, and Santa Cruz de Tenerife with 259.
The Canary Islands is now the second Spanish region with the most revoked applications (16.1% of the national total), behind only Andalusia.
Political reaction
Ángel Víctor Torres, Secretary General of the PSOE Canarias, welcomed the measure as a “concrete, effective, and real” step to improve access to housing. He argued that blocking thousands of properties from being used as illegal tourist rentals will “help young people and families in the Canary Islands find a home.”
Protecting housing for residents
The Ministry of Housing stressed that the goal is to preserve the social function of housing and to combat the spread of illegal holiday lets, which it says “push families out of their neighbourhoods and distort the character of towns and cities.”
With holiday rental listings in Tenerife already approaching the number of traditional hotel beds, the move marks a significant tightening of controls in one of Spain’s most tourism-dependent regions.
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