El Médano Short-Term Letting Rules: What Property Owners Need to Know

If you own — or are thinking about buying — a property in El Médano with a view to letting it out short-term, the rulebook has changed a lot in the last two years. What used to be a fairly simple "get a VV number and you're done" process is now a three-layer system, and El Médano specifically has become one of the more tightly watched spots in Tenerife.

Here's a plain-English breakdown of where things stand.

Three Layers of Regulation

Short-term letting in El Médano is governed by rules at three levels, and all three apply at once:

1. Regional (Canary Islands) — the Canarian government's own housing and tourism law
2. Municipal (Granadilla de Abona) — El Médano's own town hall has its own local ordinance
3. Community of owners — your building's own bylaws can now override both of the above

Missing any one of these layers can mean an unregistered, non-compliant, or simply illegal listing — even if you've done everything the letting platform asked for.

What Counts as a "Vivienda Vacacional" (VV)

Under Canarian rules, a property is legally a vacation home (VV) when it's fully furnished and equipped for immediate use, and it's rented out in full (not by the room) to different guests on a recurring basis through tourism channels — think Airbnb, Booking.com, or a local agency. If that description fits your letting activity, VV rules apply to you.

The New Regional Law

In December 2025, the Canary Islands government passed Ley 6/2025, a major new law regulating the tourist use of housing across the archipelago. It sits alongside the older Decreto 113/2015 framework, and together they set out requirements that matter for anyone letting — or planning to let — in Tenerife:

• Minimum floor area, energy efficiency and accessibility standards now apply, including a lift requirement for newly registered properties
• New builds can't be registered as a VV within their first 10 years
• Whole apartment blocks can no longer be registered wholesale as vacation accommodation
• VV licences must now be renewed every 5 years, rather than being a one-time registration
• Each municipality has a cap on how much of its residential floor space can be used for tourism — 10% in most municipalities (20% on the so-called "green islands" — La Palma, La Gomera, El Hierro — which doesn't include Tenerife). Once a municipality hits its cap, no new VV licences are issued there until the percentage drops

Existing registered properties get a transitional period to adapt, but the direction of travel is clear: tighter standards, and a licence that has to be actively maintained rather than obtained once and forgotten.

Granadilla de Abona's Local Ordinance

This is the part that's specific to El Médano, since El Médano sits within the municipality of Granadilla de Abona. In late 2024, Granadilla became the first municipality in Tenerife to pass its own dedicated ordinance on vacation letting, finalised in early 2025.

The headline restriction: new vacation lets are only permitted on ground floors, first floors with independent (non-communal) access, or standalone houses that aren't part of an apartment complex.

Properties that can only be reached via shared building access — communal entrances, stairwells, or lifts — are explicitly excluded from new registration under this ordinance. Since a large share of El Médano's apartment stock is exactly this type of building, this rules out a meaningful chunk of properties from new VV registration.

The ordinance also excludes properties that are:

• Built without proper planning permission or otherwise non-compliant with urban planning rules
• Under any public housing protection or subsidy scheme
• Located in an area formally declared a "zona tensionada" (stressed housing zone) — and Granadilla de Abona has already applied to the regional government for this designation for parts of the municipality

The Reality on the Ground in El Médano

Local reporting from early 2026 gives a sense of scale: El Médano, with a population under 10,000, is estimated to host around 8,500 tourist beds spread across nearly 2,000 registered vacation properties. A local residents' association has been actively flagging what it describes as widespread non-compliance — pointing out that a VV registration number alone doesn't guarantee a property is actually legal, since the regional registration system is based on a self-declaration ("declaración responsable") that isn't automatically checked against the actual building.

In practice, this means enforcement is increasingly community- and complaint-driven, not something you can assume will never catch up with an improperly registered property.

Your Community of Owners Can Now Block You

Since April 2025, a community of owners can vote — with a 60% majority — to prohibit or restrict vacation letting within the building, unless it was already explicitly permitted in the community's founding bylaws (estatutos). This is a genuinely new power, and it means even a property that's fully compliant with regional and municipal rules can still be blocked at the building level if your neighbours vote for it. In El Médano and nearby Costa del Silencio specifically, several communities have already been moving in this direction.

A Practical Checklist

If you own, or are considering buying, a letting property in El Médano:

• Check your building's access type — ground/first floor with independent access, or standalone house, is required for new registrations
• Check your community's bylaws — has vacation letting been explicitly permitted, and could a 60% vote change that?
• Check whether your building or area might be declared a "zona tensionada"
• Don't assume a VV number equals legality — the registration itself doesn't verify compliance
• Budget for renewal — VV licences now need renewing every 5 years, with evolving standards to meet
• Register guests through SES.Hospedajes, which has been mandatory for all owners since December 2024

Not Legal Advice

This post is a general overview to help you understand the landscape — it isn't a substitute for advice from a local gestoría or lawyer who can check your specific property against the current ordinance text and your building's statutes. Given how fast this area of regulation is moving, and how localised El Médano's rules have become, that check is genuinely worth doing before you list — or relist — a property.