1.1 million cruise passengers in Tenerife and El Corte Inglés still has not turned things around
It opened in Tenerife under political pressure, while in Las Palmas it yielded to pressures from CC to avoid joining the all-day, 24-hours-a-day opening of the El Muelle shopping center. In return, it expected to have greater scheduling bandwidth in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. 20 years later, neither has happened.
In 2009, a reform of the Commerce Law that the Canary Islands Government was preparing to align it with the European Bolkenstein directive remained unchanged, and the regional executive’s Director General for Trade was Arturo Cabrera, who had previously worked with the president of the small retail lobby—the armsman who ran a video store, Luis Miguel Bartolomé. El Corte Inglés continues to pay for the ambiguity of the past in 2026, for example not taking on the AIEM and, until just a few months ago, asking that digital purchases by Asian businesses be taxed and passed on to consumers in the Canary Islands. Just look at the reviews on TripAdvisor about buying online at El Corte Inglés in Tenerife: “It’s enough to make you throw your hands up in anger.”
Passenger traffic statistics across the archipelago’s ports point to a radical shift in the number of visitors landing on the islands. The historical record of cruise passenger arrivals shows growth from barely 292,623 travelers in 1998 to surpassing the one-million tourist threshold in 2008 (1,116,374). The sector’s acceleration solidified levels above two million cruise passengers before the pandemic (2,207,450 in 2017 and 2,553,721 in 2019) before shattering all records in the recent cycle: 3,196,958 passengers in 2023, 3,725,995 in 2024, and 2,241,730 in the partial total recorded during 2025. In 2025, the Santa Cruz de Tenerife port led Canary traffic with 1,126,092 passengers.
This flow of visitors through the Atlantic passenger terminals puts urban retail to the test: it must capture the spending on the ground by thousands of cruise passengers who disembark simultaneously on public holidays and weekends. The employers’ association for medium and large retail outlets, Asodiscan—controlled by El Corte Inglés—has formalized in a letter to the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council a request to review and expand the Zona de Gran Afluencia Turística (ZGAT), a delimitation approved fifteen years ago. The proposal aims to liberalize trading hours and allow stores to open on Sundays and public holidays in response to the capital’s current tourist density.
The request by large retailers clashes with the position of the Federación de Áreas Urbanas de Canarias (FAUCA) and the Asociación de Empresarios Santa Cruz-Zona Centro. Their business representation rejects modifying ZGAT’s boundaries, arguing that the current perimeter covers real consumer demand and that regional regulations allow smaller stores to open on holidays. From these sector platforms, the argument is that freeing up public holidays for the entire sector would increase the imbalance in favor of the large distribution operators, and that the city’s priorities should focus on investments in urban infrastructure, accessibility and parking spaces.
Asodiscan’s letter moves the decision into the institutional arena, where Mayor José Manuel Bermúdez and the management of the Sociedad de Desarrollo, led by Carmen Pérez (PP), will have to assess whether tourist footfall conditions justify a review of Santa Cruz’s retail map. The framework for Sunday opening is consolidating as a strategic debate for the Tenerife capital, at a time when the record number of cruise calls is putting local retail’s ability to capture the economic profitability of transit tourism to the test.
The article “1.1 million cruise passengers in Tenerife and El Corte Inglés still has not turned things around” was first published on canarymaritime.com.
