Nobody wants the €464 million job: Tenerife Sur airport left without a builder

Passengers moving through Tenerife Sur still cross between three terminal buildings built decades apart and patched together rather than designed as one. Aena promised to finally fix that with a single €464 million contract, but when the tender closed, not a single construction company had bid for the job.

Construction firms are turning down public contracts across Spain

Not a single builder submitted a bid when the tender period closed, leaving Aena’s flagship contract without a company to carry it out before work has even begun.

Rising material costs are only part of the problem. Contractors have walked away from more than 1,130 public tenders across Spain so far this year, worth a combined €707 million, because the prices on offer no longer cover their costs, according to the National Construction Confederation (CNC). Its leadership has described the situation as “asphyxiating” for thousands of firms.

Construction costs have risen 5.46 per cent this year alone, driven by a shortage of skilled labour as well as pricier materials. Aena’s own contracting system, which weighs bids partly through an electronic reverse auction pushing companies to undercut each other on price, has drawn criticism from engineering bodies in the past for squeezing margins too thin to be workable.

The revamp was meant to finally join three mismatched terminals into one

The Tenerife Sur contract was never just about a lick of paint. It covers unifying three terminal buildings put up in three different decades, the 1970s, the 1980s and 2022, into a single airport, with 125 new check-in desks, a centralised passport control area for flights outside the Schengen zone, a new baggage system and a link to a planned South train station.

A three-level car park with 2,062 spaces and an expansion of Terminal 1 are also part of the package, which totals more than €550 million once the parking work, worth €48.4 million, is added in. Aena had planned to start construction in autumn 2027, spread across 57 sub-phases over roughly a decade, without closing the airport to traffic.

Hoteliers had already warned the wait was wearing thin

Just two days before the tender collapsed, Tenerife’s hotel association, Ashotel urged Aena to get the works under contract without further delay. Its president, Jorge Marichal, said the sector would “only truly be at ease” once the paperwork turned into signed contracts and work on the ground, after what he called more than a decade of waiting.

Between Tenerife Sur and Tenerife Norte, Aena has earmarked €866 million for the islands’ two main airports, €553 million for the south and €313 million for the north, as part of its wider DORA III investment plan. Ashotel had already called even that sum “seemingly insufficient” given the scale of the backlog.

Passengers keep arriving while the airport waits for a builder

Tenerife Sur handled 14 million passengers in 2025, making it Spain’s seventh busiest airport and the main gateway for the island’s British and European package-holiday traffic. None of the crowding at its ageing terminals will ease until a construction firm agrees to take on the job.

The contrast with Málaga is hard to miss. Two days before news of the failed Tenerife tender broke, the government approved an €830 million expansion of Málaga-Costa del Sol Airport under the same DORA III programme, aimed at lifting capacity from around 30 million to 36 million passengers a year. Aena has not said when it will relaunch the Tenerife Sur tender, or whether the price on offer will need to rise to attract a bidder.