Canary Islands’ top regional court voids the ordinance that made Mogán the pioneer of tourist taxes in the archipelago. La Oliva had been building its own tax around the same legal model, with a launch planned for later this year. Puerto del Rosario / Las Palmas — July 13, 2026
Canary Islands’ High Court of Justice (TSJC) has declared void the ordinance that created Mogán’s pioneering tourist tax, ruling in favour of the Federation of Hospitality and Tourism Employers of Las Palmas (FEHT), the hoteliers’ association that took the town hall to court. The ruling, dated July 9 but made public this week, strips Mogán of the legal framework it had used since March 2025 to charge overnight visitors — and removes the main precedent La Oliva was relying on to launch a nearly identical tax in Fuerteventura this year.
What the court actually found
The three-judge panel concluded that Mogán’s ordinance failed on multiple legal fronts. According to the ruling, the services the tax was supposed to fund were described in terms so vague, imprecise, and abstract that it was impossible to determine what the tax was actually financing. The court also found that Mogán had effectively disguised a tax it had no legal authority to levy, using the “ecological fee” label as a general revenue-raising device rather than a genuine service charge. On top of that, judges ruled the amount charged failed to meet the “equivalence principle” that requires a fee to correspond to the actual cost of the service it funds.
Mogán has also been ordered to cover part of FEHT’s legal costs, capped at €3,000. Crucially, this isn’t Mogán’s first brush with the courts over the tax. The ordinance was suspended just one day after it took effect in March 2025, reinstated two weeks later, and finally struck down on the merits now — a year-long legal back-and-forth that generated real revenue in the meantime: Mogán collected roughly €1.4 million in the tax’s first year, charging €0.15 per person per night. Facing the pending court decision, the town hall had already frozen both the annual review of the fee and the use of that money, pending the ruling that has now gone against it.
Why this matters for Fuerteventura
La Oliva has spent over a year building its own tourist tax using Mogán’s ordinance as the template — the council itself has described Mogán as the reference point for its proposal. The plan, championed by tourism councillor David Fajardo and finance councillor Juan José Rodríguez, would charge visitors roughly €0.52–0.59 per person per night, collected directly by hotels, apartments, and holiday rentals at check-in. Council estimates put the tax on track to become the municipality’s second largest source of income after the IBI property tax, with the money earmarked for public services — security, waste collection, environmental upkeep — rather than infrastructure investment.
The numbers explain the urgency: La Oliva absorbs around 40% of Fuerteventura’s roughly three million annual visitors, with an average stay near ten days, giving the council one of the strongest revenue cases of any municipality on the island. It would also be the first tourist tax in Fuerteventura and only the second in the Canary Islands after Mogán’s. But the plan was already contested locally before this ruling. La Oliva’s opposition party, the PP, has criticised the government for booking the tax’s projected income in the 2026 budget before the ordinance was even approved, calling the move reckless. Finance councillor Rodríguez had also acknowledged publicly that the legal basis is disputed: some interpret it as a legitimate municipal fee, others as a tax the town hall has no authority to create — precisely the distinction the TSJC has now ruled on, against Mogán.
What happens next
The TSJC’s ruling does not ban La Oliva — or any other municipality — from creating a tourist tax in the future. What it does is eliminate the specific legal template the town hall had been following, and it sets out clear criteria that any future ordinance would need to satisfy: precise identification of the services funded, and a fee amount tied to real costs. Mogán can still appeal the decision. The ruling also lands amid a wider, unresolved debate about how the Canary Islands should tax tourism at all. Fuerteventura’s regional tourism councillor, Marlene Figueroa, has argued that the Canary Islands government should lead a coordinated, region-wide tourist tax with guaranteed returns for individual destinations — but warned that if the regional government doesn’t act, Fuerteventura will have to find its own formula regardless.
La Oliva, for its part, has also been pushing a separate and more radical idea: a tourism moratorium for Fuerteventura, arguing the island’s carrying capacity has already been exceeded. For now, La Oliva’s tourist tax is left without its legal blueprint, its opposition already questioning the numbers, and a court precedent stacked against the very structure it planned to copy.
