The High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has dealt a strategic blow to the interests of the Lopesan Group, the archipelago's largest tourism corporation and the main cash operator in the private sector of southern Gran Canaria. A ruling issued on May 6, 2026, upholds the court order dismissing the enforcement action brought by Dehesa de Jandía, SA, a company controlled by Eustasio López, against the Pájara City Council in Fuerteventura. The ruling puts an end to the Gran Canaria hotel giant's latest legal offensive for control of the land in the SUP-3 sector of Morro Jable, also ordering it to pay court costs and preventing the vacant land on the neighboring island from becoming a financial escape route for the holding company.
The legal dispute resolved by the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) and the Administrative Court No. 5 of Las Palmas stems from the landmark Judgment 43/2022, which annulled a supplementary land occupation deed from 2020 after finding that the Fuerteventura council had irregularly included land not covered by the sector plan in an expropriation. Lopesan's headquarters sought to exploit the loopholes in that judgment to force a multi-million euro rectification and exclude from the expropriation process the plots classified as urban land under the 1989 regulations. The High Court upheld the opinion of Judge Ángel Teba García, determining that the procedural route of judgment enforcement is not suitable for rewriting agreements or circumventing established administrative acts.
The legal setback suffered by the Lopesan Group in the Las Palmas courts transcends the borders of Fuerteventura and is being interpreted in strictly financial terms in the offices of San Bartolomé de Tirajana and Mogán. The tourism holding company has based its latest major land claims on the regulatory paralysis plaguing the archipelago's outlying municipalities, where the annulment of revisions to the General Urban Development Plans forces them to maintain outdated regulations from the late 1980s.
Eustasio López's corporate strategy consists of challenging the forced expropriation files by reactivating extinct urban development rights, a modus operandi that the construction company in southern Gran Canaria intended to consolidate as favorable jurisprudence for its large-scale accommodation projects in Meloneras and the Maspalomas dunes.
The ruling by Court Number 5 halts this maneuver, noting that enforcement proceedings do not allow for substantial modifications to administrative actions to suit the private developer. The order, ratified by the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC), emphasizes that the appellants should have sought the complete annulment of the corrected supplementary deed, alleging a presumed fraud or attempt to circumvent the law by the city council, instead of requesting a selective rectification that altered the expropriated boundary for their own economic benefit. The court costs imposed on Dehesa de Jandía represent a severe reputational and financial warning for the Gran Canaria-based firm, which is seeing its ability to prolong litigation over rural and urban land limited by the courts.
The court's decision to halt Lopesan's claims has brought certainty to local authorities in the province of Las Palmas, who feared a wave of property claims based on procedural flaws in municipal planning. The legal team of the Gran Canaria-based holding company, led in this case by attorney Elena Henríquez Guimerá, has encountered a procedural obstacle that protects public expropriation processes as long as they strictly adhere to the original rulings. The actions of the construction and real estate company in southern Gran Canaria are now subject to the ordinary legal process, a scenario that delays development and increases the cost of holding its tourist reserve assets.
The outcome of this separate case weakens the business group's negotiating position with public administrations at a time of intense public debate regarding the tourism moratorium and land use control in southern Gran Canaria. The definitive rejection of the Dehesa de Jandía development project consolidates the power of local councils to implement planning schemes without the constant threat of retroactive amendments based on 1989 legislation. The holding company has thus exhausted one of its most aggressive legal options, incurring a direct financial cost and seeing its influence on land-use planning in the main tourist areas of the Canary Islands province limited.
