The Canary Islands wants Madrid to make ten years of island residence a condition for buying a home there. The regional president, Fernando Clavijo, restated the plan in the regional parliament on Tuesday 20 October, telling the chamber that his government is preparing a document to limit property purchases by foreigners, a group he said accounts for close to a third of transactions in the archipelago.
The text behind that announcement went to the Spanish government in the middle of October. It carries nine measures and reserves the purchase of homes to people who can show a decade on the municipal register, as eldiario.es set out on 15 October and El País reported the following day. Nothing is law. The region needs Madrid to turn the text into a decree, and it needs Brussels to accept that a residency test can sit inside the EU’s single market for an outermost region.
What the Canaries sent Madrid and what comes next
The Canary government, a coalition of Coalición Canaria and the Partido Popular under Clavijo, sent its proposal to Madrid in the week of 13 October. It is framed as an urgent answer to a housing emergency: the islands combine some of the lowest salaries in Spain with a market where outsiders buy a large share of the stock, and the archipelago was the starting point for the anti-tourism and housing protests of the past two summers.
The timetable is what matters to anyone with a deal in progress. The regional government wants the Spanish cabinet to approve the measure before the general election on 29 November, and then to have it ratified by the Diputación Permanente, the standing committee of Congress that keeps working while parliament is dissolved for the campaign.
The political reading is more complicated than the regional announcement suggests. The PP governs the islands in coalition with the nationalists, but its candidate for the Spanish premiership, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has campaigned on cutting property taxes rather than restricting buyers, and the PP’s Canary leadership has publicly rejected the residency limit, as Canarias7 reported on 15 October.
Ten years of residence before you can buy a home
The core test is blunt. A buyer would have to prove ten years of uninterrupted registration on the municipal register, the padrón, in any Canary municipality. The draft also opens a second route for people whose time on the islands was broken: fifteen years of residence, counted without the continuity requirement.
The criterion is residence, not nationality, and that is deliberate. A Spanish citizen from Madrid or Valencia would face the same test as a British or German buyer, which is how the region hopes to survive a legal challenge under EU rules on free movement of capital. In practice, a household that has owned a holiday home in Tenerife for twenty years but never registered as living there could not buy another property on the islands.
Proof would come from a certificate of registration on the padrón, the document a town hall issues for exactly this kind of check. The requirement would extend to rent-to-buy arrangements, so a scheme that ends in ownership would need the same ten years behind it.
Two homes per buyer and companies pushed out
The draft goes well beyond the headline rule, and the details are where agents will find the commercial impact.
- A single buyer could hold a maximum of two homes on the islands, and they would have to sit in different municipalities.
- Anyone who already owns two or more properties in the Canaries would be treated as a non-resident for the purposes of the rule.
- Companies could buy residential property only if their exclusive activity is selling or letting homes to private individuals, which shuts out investment funds and general-purpose holding companies.
- Inherited property is exempt: acquisitions mortis causa would not need the ten years of registration.
- A sale that breaks the rules would be void and could not be entered in the land registry, which turns a paperwork failure into a title problem.
- The restrictions would cover new-build homes and future developments, not just the resale market.
- The regime would run for ten years, presented as a temporary answer to a housing emergency.
- Municipalities would gain room to levy tourist charges on non-residents and to block new holiday lets in the most saturated neighbourhoods.
Nothing in the draft touches the annual property tax a non-resident already pays on a Canary home, or the imputed income charge that goes with it. The new test would sit in front of the purchase itself, which is a different and much harder barrier: a buyer who fails it does not pay more, they cannot complete.
Why Brussels has to agree to a residency test
A rule that keeps EU citizens from buying property in part of Spain runs into the treaty’s guarantees on the free movement of capital. The Canary government’s answer is Article 349 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which lets the EU adopt specific measures for outermost regions such as the Canaries, the Azores, Madeira and the French overseas departments, because of their remoteness, insularity and small size.
That article permits derogations, but it does not hand them out automatically: a member state has to ask, and the EU has to agree. Reporting in January said the Spanish government had asked the European Commission for authorisation to restrict purchases by non-residents in the islands, following a separate request from the regional government. The Commission’s published output since then carries no decision on it, and the region’s own nine-point document presents Article 349 as a justification rather than a settled ruling.
That is the weakest link in the plan. The taxes and golden-visa changes other Spanish governments have pushed through were fiscal measures inside Spanish competence. This one would need a European green light before a Spanish decree could be drafted properly.
The market this residency test would reshape
The numbers behind the push come from the notaries, and they cut both ways. Foreign buyers completed 3,694 home purchases in the Canaries in the first half of 2026, down 20.3% from 4,635 a year earlier, according to the Consejo General del Notariado. Nationally the fall was 13%, so the islands cooled faster than the Spanish property market as a whole.
Prices went the other way. German buyers accounted for 22% of the foreign purchases and Italians for 11%. In 2025 outsiders took 36.3% of all homes sold on the islands, against a national average of 20.1%, which is why the measure is aimed at the Canaries rather than at Spain as a whole.
| Indicator | Canary Islands | Spain |
|---|---|---|
| Foreign purchases, first half of 2026 | 3,694 | 62,327 |
| Change on the first half of 2025 | -20.3% | -13.0% |
| Foreign share of all home sales, 2025 | 36.3% | 20.1% |
| Price paid by foreign buyers, first half of 2026 | 3,171 euro per m² | 3,493 euro per m² for non-residents |
The last row explains the political pressure. The average price foreign buyers paid in the islands rose 9.7% year on year to 3,171 euro per square metre, which is almost 10% above the regional average for all purchases, as Canarias7 read the same notary release. A 150 square metre house at that rate comes to roughly 475,000 euro.
The construction side is not convinced. The Las Palmas federation of builders and developers called the proposal populist, with its president Salud Gil asking what buyers are supposed to purchase when so little is being built, as La Provincia reported.
What a non-resident buyer should do next
For now, nothing changes at the notary. There is no decree, no published text in the Boletín Oficial del Estado and no instruction to registrars, so a purchase completed this week follows the existing rules. The risk sits in the pipeline rather than in today’s transaction.
Three signals decide what happens next, in this order.
- The Spanish cabinet: if the measure is not adopted before the 29 November election, it loses its urgency framing and becomes a bill for the next parliament.
- The Diputación Permanente, the standing committee of Congress, which would have to ratify it during the campaign.
- Brussels: a decision in the region’s favour would be the first of its kind for housing in an outermost region.
Anyone buying property in Spain with an eye on the islands should treat a reservation or off-plan deposit as the exposed part of the deal. The draft says nothing about transactions already under way when the rule takes effect. A condition making completion depend on the buyer qualifying, or on the rule not applying, is cheaper than arguing about it afterwards. For residents, the padrón certificate is worth keeping current now, because the whole regime turns on it.
The objections the plan already has to answer
Three objections are already on the record, and none of them is about the principle of protecting local housing. The first is legal: residence-based restrictions on capital movement are hard to justify even with Article 349, and no comparable housing measure has been cleared for an outermost region. The second is economic: the islands lost a fifth of their foreign purchases in the first half of 2026 while prices kept rising, which the construction lobby reads as evidence that supply, not demand, is the binding constraint.
The third is political. The party that governs the islands alongside the nationalists is campaigning against the machinery the region is asking for, and the Spanish government that would have to sign the decree is in caretaker mode until the 29 November vote. A measure can be legally sound, popular in the islands and still fail on that arithmetic.
Questions buyers are asking about the plan
Can I still buy a home in the Canary Islands today?
Yes. No restriction has been approved by the Spanish government, published in the official gazette or applied by any notary or registry. The ten-year rule exists as a regional proposal sent to Madrid in October 2026.
Would the rule apply to EU citizens?
As drafted, yes. The test is ten years of registration on a Canary municipal register, or fifteen years with interruptions, and it makes no difference whether the buyer holds a Spanish, British or German passport. That is the region’s attempt to frame the measure around residence rather than nationality.
What happens to a purchase that breaks the rule?
Under the draft, the sale would be declared void and could not be registered in the land registry. For a buyer that is worse than a refusal at the outset, because the money has already moved. This is the clause to watch when a final text is published.
Does inheriting a Canary property count as a purchase?
No. The draft excludes acquisitions by inheritance from the residence requirement, so heirs can take on a property without ten years on the padrón. Whether a later sale by those heirs would be caught is not addressed in the published summaries.
