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The socio-economic consequences of the volcanic eruption that destroyed part of the Valle de Aridane (La Palma, Canary Islands) in 2021 have provided a favourable context for strengthening a narrative that sees an intense and accelerated tourist development of La Palma as the only viable economic option for the island's future. Although the discourse is not new, the wide convergence of political and business actors that endorse it leads one to believe that it is the most solid attempt to reverse the traditional productive structure of the island. It is dominated by banana cultivation and a model of tourism development that is far away from the dominant patterns in the Canary Islands. In this paper, we analyze the territorial planning of tourism in La Palma since 1990, demonstrating the role played in its evolution by the transition from Keynesian- style regulatory approaches to others clearly indebted to neo-liberal principles. It also shows the validity of the postulates of tourism development formulated in 1971 to understand the territorial model aspired to by the aforementioned actors, who use the crisis cycle culminating in the volcanic eruption of 2021 to construct a narrative that justifies their model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]