Positive coverage of demonstration

Yesterday’s protests about the effects of mass tourism on the Canary Islands have received wide coverage in the British and international press.

The BBC, Sky, Reuters, the Guardian, the Independent, Euronews and several other organisations all reported on the protests, and coverage was generally fair, stressing that the marches were not against tourists or tourism, but the effects of the island’s current model of mass tourism.

Even the Mail Online produced a balanced report, although it did not miss the opportunity to reprint photos of the rare examples of anti-tourist graffiti that popped up in Tenerife a few months ago.

The Daily Telegraph published a strongly supportive opinion piece by senior travel writer, Greg Dickinson which described the protests as “entirely sensible”.

Dickinson wrote that tourists can also “be part of the solution rather than the problem.”

“What this looks like, in practice,” he wrote “is staying with locally owned hotels. It is eating in independent, family run restaurants and cafes. It is tipping the waiter. It is travelling in the shoulder season, where possible. It is limiting our water usage while on holiday. It is using one towel. It is behaving in a way that we would behave in our home town (and, hell, maybe even calling out those who aren’t doing so).”