The Municipal Tourist Information Office (OMIT) of La Orotava is on track to recover in 2022 the visitor numbers of the years prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. After a few years 2019, 2020 and 2021 very marked by the health emergency, in the first eight months of 2022 symptoms of a significant recovery begin to be noticed, with “almost as many users in this period as in all of 2021”, as noted yesterday the mayor of Tourism, Delia Escobar (CC)during the presentation of the memory of this municipal service.
Some 20,000 people have passed between January and August by the OMIT office, on Calle Carrera, and by the information kiosk located in front of the Parroquia de La Concepción. In all of 2021, 23,140 visitors passed through both locations (only 1,927 were served at the secondary venue). This figure for 2021 represented an increase of 49% compared to 2020. The last four months of the year are considered high season in terms of visits to the Villa, so it is expected to close 2022 much closer to the 42,000 tourists in 2019 than the 15,000 in 2020.
the village mayor, Francisco Linares (CC), highlighted the good trend of the data collected by this office and stressed that it is an incentive for a “different and differentiated” tourism model that aims for visitors to “spend more time enjoying the town in a quiet way.” The president recalled that La Orotava It is the only locality in the Canary Islands, and one of the ten in Spain, with the stamp Cittaslowand claimed that his municipality “meets all the requirements to be considered a tourist city, although with a different and alternative model without thousands of beds or large hotels.”
“The new PGO It will prevent the construction of large hotels because we focus on protecting our landscape and on renovating the buildings in the historic center to create small hotels. There is already interest from private initiative in this regard, with three or four projects for small quality hotels that hopefully will become a reality in the coming years,” Linares said. In his opinion, it is unfair that La Orotava have to develop its tourism model and its promotional tools “only with funds from the council”.
Delia Escobar He pointed out that the four main nationalities of users of this service are Spanish (12,737), which account for 60%; French (3,898), 18.38%; Germans (1,779), 8.39%, and British, with 3%. The rest, 10.19%, comes from more than 40 different countries.
Influx by months in 2021
The month with the highest influx of visitors in 2021 was August, with 3,442 users served at the branch, followed by November (2,652), September (2,606), July (2,457) and October (2,362). At the Plaza de Casañas information point, 456 users were served in August, 326 in July, 243 in November and 180 in September.
