The vice president of the Tenerife Cabildo and insular Tourism Councilor, Lope Afonso (PP), this Monday opened the door to implementing a fee for accessing the Teide National Park in order to help conserve the environment and regulate the flows of visitors.
“It is an approach that must be seriously evaluated, it does not seem absurd to me,” he indicated in an interview given to ‘Radio Club Tenerife’ and collected by Europa Press in which he recognizes that it is already practiced in other tourist destinations.
Afonso has pointed out that “it is not a question of improvisation” but of opening a “calm debate”, but at the same time he indicates that it must be studied “quickly” so that it could come into force throughout 2024.
The vice president understands that it is an “opportunity” to improve the experience for visitors and obtain additional income to reinvest in the park itself, and does not hide that the decision was already on the table during the processing of the Teide PRUG.
Thus, he has indicated that these works are going to be “resumed”, while he has stressed that it is difficult to make “exemptions” in the payment for residents although their use will have to be “qualified.”
Afonso has also said that “it is not the same” to charge a fee for access to the park as a general ecotax “without criteria of opportunity and knowing that it can reduce the competitiveness of the destination” and when the autonomous community has had to return money because it did not has had the capacity to carry out tourism infrastructure works.
In that sense, he has commented that it is better to “exercise” current powers and “not open melons” such as the ecotax.
