For forty years, the Canary Islands' coastline has been governed by a bureaucratic geometry that ignores Atlantic tides and volcanic rocks. The new Canary Islands Coastal Law is an act of administrative civil disobedience: a piece of paper that claims that, in an archipelago, the boundary between water and concrete is a matter of identity, not just easement. Nine thousand marine species observe, from their biological silence, how humans attempt to legislate the chaos of the Canary Islands' ocean. The balance sought by the CC government is a bureaucratic chimera: protecting biodiversity while maintaining the all-you-can-eat buffet of tourism, a harmony that exists only in the preambles of draft bills.
In the Canary Islands, relocating a coastal town is a euphemism for exile. With no space inland, the shoreline becomes the only possible refuge. The Canary Islands' coastal law was created to legalize the longing to live where the waves break, a luxury that the central government routinely mistakes for an administrative infraction. Thus, the Canary Islands Government has set in motion the process of drafting its first Coastal Management Law, a legislative move that seeks to emancipate the islands from the "continental rigidity" of national regulations. After decades of administrative clashes with Madrid, the Ministry of Public Works, Housing, and Mobility has begun the preliminary consultation for a draft bill that promises to be the definitive shield against the "unqualified" application of the 1988 Coastal Law, a law designed for the Mediterranean or the Cantabrian Sea that, according to the regional government, systematically ignores the reality of an archipelago with 1.126 kilometers of fragmented coastline.
The report from the Directorate General of Coasts, signed by Antonio Manuel Acosta, justifies the urgency of this law based on a principle of territorial survival. Unlike the mainland, the Canary Islands cannot afford a "general retreat inland" to free up public land, simply because the islands' topography and size force most of the population and economic activity to coexist with the salt air. The official document highlights the "ecological fragility" of an ecosystem that is home to 9.000 marine species—many of them endemic—but emphasizes that achieving balance should not involve displacing residents, but rather managing the islands with "local knowledge."
One of the most striking and politically sensitive points of the document is the explicit recognition of existing population centers along the coast. The proposed law aims to protect, regulate, and, only when strictly necessary, relocate these settlements, many of which live under the constant threat of demolition ordered from offices 1.500 kilometers away. The Canary Islands Government considers it "untenable" to continue applying an abstract regulatory framework that ignores the geographical discontinuity and the historical connection of the islanders to their coast, asserting its exclusive jurisdiction granted by the Statute of Autonomy.
The regulations will not only focus on the land; they also aim to regulate the "Canary Islands maritime space," the waters that connect the islands. The objective is to regulate growing activities such as marine hydroelectric power generation and fishing, avoiding regulatory chaos. The regional government has ruled out proposing a reform of the national law in the Spanish Parliament, calling it an "uncertain" process that would dilute the Canary Islands' needs in a national debate. With this law, the Canary Islands join the path taken by Catalonia, Galicia, and Valencia, seeking "regulatory simplicity" that guarantees environmental health without stifling the islands' right to continue living in harmony with the sea.
