January is a month of promises, of planning getaways for the coming year and dreaming of wonderful places to discover. It's important to know where to travel in 2026, but even more important is to know where not to go. For this reason, travel experts 'Fodor' have drawn up a blacklist of destinations and a corner of Spain has been included in it.
The (sadly) winners are the Canary Islands, which received the immeasurable number of 14.2 million visitors in 2025. This record is not something to celebrate, because it is a very stressed territory: the fragile ecosystem, the rise of holiday homes and the natural limits given by the sea and protected areas call into question how much more the islands can withstand.
This situation is increasingly unsustainable, leading to demonstrations against the mass tourism system under the slogan 'The Canary Islands have a limit', which many international media criticized as tourismphobia. However, they did not bother to delve deeper into the message: the threat of the very island life that attracts such tourists so much.
Although tourism accounts for 36.8% of the Canary Islands' GDP and employs 44% of the population, this success comes at a very high price. The increase in housing prices is the most notable, with an increase of 12.6% annually that has led many residents to live in motorhomes or far from urban centers, separated from life in their own towns and cities. This inevitably leads to the loss of a community, culture and identity that is diluted by gentrification.
With so many people disembarking on these paradisiacal islands, traffic has skyrocketed, water scarcity is increasingly serious and natural spaces are being degraded and disappearing, taking away from the Canary Islands its main tourist attraction. It is the whiting that bites its tail, a model of predatory tourism that squeezes our islands to the extreme. For this reason, the Canary Islands need a break in 2026.
