Finally it’s official, any bar, restaurant or business owner could have told you that Tenerife tourism has been on the slide for the last few years, now official government figures confirm that.

The number of foreign (non Spanish) tourists for the first 6 months of this year was down by 4.3% for the whole of Tenerife. That’s a drop of 94,000 less visitors made up of 51,000 Brits, 23,000 Scandinavians and 19,000 Germans. Breaking that down in the main resorts of the south, that’s a loss of 3.8% in Adeje and 3.7% in Arona. Even now the Cabildo (Tenerife government) is complacent. The minister for Industry, Tourism and Commerce, Jose Manuel Bermudez, tried to put some spin on the figures by saying that they looked bad because there were record highs for the same 6 months last year.

The picture is the same across the 7 Canary Islands with a drop of 200,000 overall and only Fuerteventura bucking the trend with a rise of 32,000.