Tenerife’s authorities have drawn up a €80m (£70m) plan to clean up the island’s coastlines and “correct its sanitation deficit”.
Tenerife’s island council met on Wednesday, 25 February, to discuss a multimillion-euro plan in cooperation with all the island’s municipalities, focusing on the management of water and sanitation.
The Vice President of the Island Council, Lope Afonso, has asked all the municipalities to work together to achieve “zero waste” on the island.
Mr Afonso hopes that if Tenerife’s sanitation improves, it will “project the island onto the national and international stage as a territory that controls its waste environmentally.”
Councillor Sonia Hernández said that the “ambitious” plan will be largely focused on achieving zero waste on the island’s coastline.
If the draft programme, which is to “correct the sanitation deficit that Tenerife suffers”, is approved by all municipalities, works on the island’s sanitation networks will be carried out over four years until 2030.
Tenerife and other Canary Islands have been slammed in recent years for poor sanitation on their seafronts.
Many families flock to the Canaries for winter sun weather, large beach resorts and kid-friendly hotels, but there have been occasions where beaches have been forced to close due to health concerns.
In their most recent annual report for 2025, Ecologistas en Acción (Ecologists in Action) revealed their rankings of the Spanish beaches in the most serious environmental conditions.
Each year, the Banderas Negras (Black Flags) report hands out 48 black flags to beaches it believes are polluted or have poor environmental management.
Out of the 48 black flags,12 were handed out for spills, deficiencies in sanitation systems and serious wastewater treatment problems; nine for impacts on biodiversity and five for the accumulation of rubbish, plastics and microplastics on the coast.
In Tenerife, the organisation called out Playa Jardín, which it said was polluted from wastewater discharges due to the poor management of waste infrastructure.
Swimming at the popular beach was closed for almost a year due to health concerns following a detection of high levels of E coli, but eventually reopened in June 2025, the Canarian Weekly reported.
They also call out Puertito de Adeje, currently undergoing a controversial tourism development, which is seeing luxury villas being built along the seafront.
Ecologists in Action says the large-scale project is affecting bird and plant species, some of which are endangered.
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