The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, warned at the time that the economic success of commercial nodes in emerging and peripheral economies is not measured by the physical volume of goods that cross their borders, but by the real added value that each ton leaves in the local financial fabric. This maxim strongly resonates in the analysis of the first four months of 2026 for the port system of the Canary Islands, where the official data from Ports of the State reveals a dangerous asymmetry.
The Port of Las Palmas is left with the heavy and hyper-competitive work of moving boxes, while the Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is stealing the premium business of selling fuel. If the trend consolidates throughout the current year, the eastern province will suffer an irreversible erosion of its operating income that its increase in container volume will not be able to compensate.
The accumulated balance between January and April 2026 exposes the exhaustion of the traditional model of the Port of Las Palmas in its most profitable segment. The supply of liquid fuels (bunkering), a technical service that generates high commercial margins from product sales, docking fees, and auxiliary services to the vessel, recorded a severe contraction of 7.4% in the docks of La Luz.
Collapse
The Gran Canaria enclave saw its volumes decrease from 928,110 tons in the first four months of 2025 to 859,782 tons in the current period, leaving behind more than 68,000 tons of fuel oil. The collapse was particularly alarming in the strictly monthly behavior of April, the month in which supplies in Las Palmas plummeted by 18.9%, dropping from 274,068 tons to just 222,152 tons.
The gravity of the macroeconomic scenario in Gran Canaria is directly accentuated by the performance of the neighboring province. The Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife achieved an exponential growth of 39.9% in accumulated bunkering during the same four months, aggressively raising its figures from 231,036 tons to 323,216 tons. Supported by an extraordinary month of April that approached 80,000 tons (78,410 t compared to 65,978 t the previous year), Tenerife demonstrates a commercial and tariff flexibility that has begun to shift the center of gravity of refined supply in the Mid-Atlantic, capturing opportunity traffics that flee from the cost rigidity of La Luz.
Volatility
Faced with the loss of the fuel business, the management of Las Palmas places all its financial resilience on the segment of direct transit cargo, a market characterized by fierce international competition and extreme volatility of shipping alliances. The movement of containers measured in TEUs at the Gran Canaria port increased by 7.5% in the accumulated four-month period, reaching 288,953 units compared to 268,698 in 2025.
The apparent dynamism was also reflected in April, a month in which Las Palmas handled 66,792 TEUs in international transshipment, surpassing the 62,703 units from the previous year. This technical growth, however, masks a structural profitability problem: the container in transit generates low local added value, saturates the terminals, and demands millions in investments in stowage infrastructure that do not translate into stable long-term income.
TEUs
Simultaneously, the performance of Tenerife in container traffic confirms a strategic reassessment of its port assets. The transshipment of TEUs in the Tenerife docks suffered a collapse of 44.3% in the four-month period, reducing its activity to a mere 20,942 TEUs accumulated compared to 37,590 in 2025. The drop in April was drastic, counting barely 1,043 units compared to 4,749 in the previous cycle. Far from representing an operational failure, this renunciation of low-margin container traffic has freed up docking lines and space at the dock, allowing Tenerife to quickly attend to merchant vessels looking to refuel without undergoing the waits and congestion that penalize overloaded ports with metal boxes.
Weakness
The reconfiguration of Atlantic routes at the beginning of 2026 demonstrates that major shipping corporations are optimizing their calls in the archipelago by clearly dividing their operational needs. The shipping companies concentrate their physical operations for loading and unloading containers in Las Palmas, taking advantage of its crane infrastructure, but systematically divert their high-profit bunkering operations to Tenerife to avoid congestion at the La Luz docks.
This loss of market share in heavy fuel weakens Las Palmas’ position against other competing nodes in the surrounding area of West Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, which take advantage of the stabilization of freight rates after disruptions in the Red Sea to adjust their supply rates. If this transfer of premium traffics to the western province persists, the overall revenue of the Port Authority of Las Palmas will enter a path of diminishing returns that threatens the expansion plans of its terminals.
