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A town in Gran Canaria has announced they are introducing a tourist tax for visitors staying in the area, with the profits being reinvested into the local tourism industry and infrastructure.
Authorities in Mogán, a town 93 kilometres outside the capital, Las Palmas, and one of the best beach resorts across the Canary Islands, said on Thursday they plan to approve the tax in a plenary session on 12 December.
The fee will be set at €0.15 per person per day for those staying at a tourist establishment. Mogán City Council said the profits will be used exclusively to finance activities, services or infrastructure in the popular tourist area, as well as promote tourism in the municipality.
However, the €0.15 may not be set in stone, as the rate could fluctuate annually, depending on the costs derived from tourist activity foreseen in the council’s budget.
Onalia Bueno, the mayor of Mogán, said that the tax policy will be brought to the plenary session next week, but will be enacted sometime in January 2025.
The council said it will become the first tax in Spain at a municipal level. At present, autonomous tourist taxes have been applied in the Balearic Islands and Catalonia for overnight stays.
The tax will extend to those staying in tourist accommodation within the municipality, such as hotel complexes and holiday homes. However, it will be the owners of these properties that must pay the tax to the Mogán Town Hall for six-month periods.
This is due to local councils not having the power to impose overnight stay taxes, so it will be imposed as a charge for local services instead.
The level of the tax arose from a study that looked at which services and activities had been underfunded and affected by the amounts of tourism the area received, which amounted to over €2.7m (£2.2m).
The tax amount was then calculated by dividing this number by how much was being generated by tourists visiting the area, and setting the price according to roughly how much each person was costing the area per day.
Bueno said in a press conference last week that this rate is born from the “disgust of having to bear the economic overexertion” that the local administration has to make “to maintain services, public spaces and tourist infrastructures in optimal conditions and also to be able to create new ones and adapt to the demands and preferences of tourists to continue being a competitive destination.”
“All this, while also preserving and improving residential areas,” she added.
The council said that the benefits generated by tourism across the whole of the archipelago – which is around 35.5 per cent of its GDP, or amounting to €20m (£16.56m) in 2023 – do not revert back to the tourist municipalities.
“This situation leads us to be underfunded” Bueno pointed out, stating that Mogán has now decided to take “a firm step to seek extra funding” that will allow “reducing or ending the budget deficit derived from tourism action.”
The mayor added that tax currently comes only from residents in the area, but it is not just them who enjoy Mogán’s public services, as 44.75 per cent of the total population of the municipality are tourists who stay in Mogán.
The objective is that “the tourists who stay in the municipality contribute to paying what proportionally corresponds to them for the services and activities they enjoy during their stay.”
“Under no circumstances do we want the residents to assume all the tax pressure through an increase in rates.”
“Mogán does not turn its back on tourism but quite the opposite. We embrace it and expect it with quality services,” Bueno added.
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Source: independent.co.uk
