Lanzarote has shared details of a new campaign aimed at encouraging visitors to respect the destination and help to preserve it.
The island’s President Oswaldo Betancort said he wanted to ‘send the message that in Lanzarote we need not just any tourist, but a tourist who loves and enjoys the island’.
The campaign will run in partnership with the Lanzarote Foreign Promotion Society (SPEL-Turismo Lanzarote). Its CEO Héctor Fernández said the initiative is one of the most important the society has undertaken and called it ‘an awareness campaign towards the search for ethical tourism’, La Voz de Lanzarote reports.
He said: “The objective is to promote a more conscious tourism model, respectful of the territory and committed to the common welfare.”
He added the idea was to make ‘people understand that, from before landing, you enter a deeply fragile and beautiful territory that must be conserved and promoted’ and said the campaign will include working with airlines and tour operators ‘to reshape how tourism is viewed on the island’.
However, opposition party General Secretary and former President María Dolores Corujo said the government should instead be addressing concerns about overtourism and lack of local housing.
“While residents do not have housing and hotel places skyrocket, the President responds with marketing campaigns asking tourists for affection instead of acting,” she said.
“It is not about asking the tourist for affection, but about exercising government responsibly. And that means declaring stressed areas, limiting tourist beds, curbing speculation and betting on a model that puts people at the centre.”
Ms Corujo hit the headlines two years ago when, as President, she said she wanted Lanzarote to move away from high-volume British bookings, so the island wasn’t so reliant on ‘mass tourism’.
Her comments upset Jet2 boss Steve Heapy and the island’s tourism chiefs, but she later said British tourists would always be welcome in Lanzarote.
