| Summary: | In the last decades, the development patterns in the Canary Islands have changed the uses of maritime and littoral areas. Instead of traditional activities linked to fishing, now tourism and recreation are the core of the new uses. Nature, constructed or re-created, is now a key feature of many tourist destinies. In this context, marine protected areas attempt to preserve areas with special biological values from fisheries overexploitation, offering tourist and recreational uses compatible with conservation and following a general tendency all around the world. In the Canary Islands they constitute one of the most important measures of fisheries management and nature preservation. Nowadays there are three marine reserves in the Archipelago. The normative of marine protected areas limit professional fishing activities, and also drive forward tourism, especially scuba diving, involving relevant social impacts in the com-munities nearby. Also, those communities have had to confront many different impacts induced by tour-ism or aquaculture, changing economic strategies or the use of social spaces in land or at sea
|
|---|