Official data from the Container Port Performance Index (CPPI) 2026, prepared by the World Bank, expose a crisis of institutional management without mitigations, condemning the Canary port to the lowest positions in the international ranking. Administrative paralysis and bureaucratic rigidity have consolidated as the main structural ballast of the Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, completely neutralizing its fiscal and geographical advantages in the Central Atlantic. While global maritime trade demands immediate flows, the capital of Tenerife is moving in the opposite direction to modernization dynamics, aligning with the same parameters as the chaotic Umm Qasr (Iraq), Conakry (Guinea), Songkhla (Thailand), Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port, Kolkata (India), Berbera (Somalia), Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea), or Damietta (Egypt).
The inefficiency of bureaucratic management in Santa Cruz de Tenerife has led to a continuous decline in the overall efficiency ranking of the CPPI, where the port has accumulated five years of constant erosion. Tenerife started with a score of 45 points in 2020, dropped to 48 in 2021, fell to 43 in 2022, and to 38 in 2023, until plunging in the latest measurement to a negative overall balance of -1 points, relegating it to position 232 in the world. Dakar, benefiting from an administration free of paperwork stallers and regulatory bottlenecks, soars much higher as it ranks 108th globally with a global performance of 23 units, leaving an insurmountable gap of 124 positions in the global ranking from the Tenerife facility.
The technical isolation of Tenerife is particularly striking when considering that the port underutilizes the socioeconomic umbrella of the group of high-income economies it belongs to, whose global average is at 4.0 points, and falls far behind the average of its own subregion of maritime services in the Atlantic Islands, fixed at 9.5 points. The bureaucratic stagnation in Tenerife, placing the facility at position 238 globally in the administrative management ranking, demonstrates that excessive regulatory zeal and the lack of real customs digitalization serve as an effective deterrent for major global logistics chains, which prefer to divert their routes to the African continental coast rather than submit to the bureaucracy of the Canary dispatches.
The collapse of Tenerife reaches critical dimensions when analyzing its Administrative Index, a sectoral indicator that specifically measures bureaucratic agility and regulatory delays. The port of Tenerife plummets in this area with a devastating score of -4 points, a record that exposes the severe operational frictions experienced by shipping lines due to paperwork, slow issuing of licenses, and lack of agility in customs clearances. This bureaucratic collapse contrasts with the performance of the Port of Dakar, an African infrastructure that operates under a medium-low income environment but processes its documentation with impeccable efficiency, achieving 30 positive points in the same indicator.
This dense network of administrative obstacles and regulatory delays in the offices of Tenerife mathematically translates to the physical activity of its docks, severely penalizing productivity by scale. The time vessels spend in the Tenerife docks (Berth hours in % of port hours) reaches a concerning 0.88, meaning that ships spend 88% of their time on the island completely immobilized, caught in waits for inspections and regulatory processes instead of conducting loading and unloading operations. Once again, the comparison with Dakar highlights the island model: the Senegalese node dispatches its fleets with much superior agility, setting this immobilization ratio at an efficient 0.66 (66%).
