-Analysis-
PALMA DE MALLORCA — It’s the middle of the afternoon in Palma de Mallorca and the thermometer exceeds 30 °C (86 °F), although it is not officially summer yet. Pere Joan, an Art History graduate student and Fridays for Future activist, orders an almond granita, one of the nuts grown on the Spanish island in the Mediterranean. A few days ago, he took part in the action called by the platform Mallorca Platja Tour to occupy Caló des Moro, a famous beach in southeast Mallorca.
Locals have already resigned themselves to considering certain emblematic places on the Balearic island “lost” to tourism. But on June 16, some 250 to 300 people occupied this paradisiac cove with turquoise waters, which is usually full of tourists in the summer months.
“For one day, finally, we residents of Mallorca were able to enjoy that beach,” Joan said. As part of their action, they explained to tourists why they were occupying the beach, and “most of them understood and decided to go to a nearby beach.”
At the end of the action, however, the usual tourist activity resumed: “As we left, it started to fill up again. Some of us stayed and had fun looking at influencers and other people taking pictures in very strange positions. Since we no longer go to these places, scenes like this are very surprising for us,” Joan said.
In Mallorca and elsewhere, such protests against mass tourism will continue over the summer. Locals fed up with having their daily lives conditioned by the voracity of the tourism model have been taking to the streets for months to express their exhaustion.
Fed up locals
On April 20, thousands of people demonstrated in the Canary Islands, the Spanish archipelago off the coast of northwestern Africa, to remind people that “the islands do not live off tourism but tourism lives off them.” A call that Canarians living in other Spanish cities also answered.
Along the same lines, thousands of people marched through the streets of Mallorca just a month later to denounce the tourist saturation in the Balearic Islands.The movement and its demands have spread to other cities, including Granada, Cádiz and Barcelona, where residents say tourism makes their life impossible, raising housing prices and making them unaffordable for the working class.
The current tourism model has brought down entire cities and Spanish autonomous communities. In 2023, foreign tourists broke a new record in Spain, and 2024 is set to top it. After the break imposed by the pandemic, more than 85 million visitors came last year, surpassing 2019 figures, which were already historic.
Four communities bore almost 70% of Spain’s touristic pressure.
More than 33% of those tourists ended up in one of the two archipelagos, meaning that almost one in three international tourists went to the Balearic Islands (16.9%) or the Canary Islands (16.3%), despite the fact that they are, respectively, the first and fifth smallest autonomous communities in the whole of Spain.
Catalonia, however, topped the list in terms of tourist arrivals last year. More than 18 million foreign tourists (21%) stopped there, while 12.2 million international visitors (14.3%) passed through Andalusia. In total, these four communities bore almost 70% of the country’s touristic pressure.
To these figures must be added more than 40 million “excursionists,” a term used by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) for travelers who were in the country but did not stay overnight. That includes tourists from cruise ships, one the tourism types most highlighted by organizations critical of the current model.
These enormous floating hotels release thousands of people in certain coastal cities, causing excessive pressure for a few hours, without any real economic benefit. Most of the time, cruise passengers do not even purchase anything on land, as everything is included on board.
A voracious model
For Joan Buades, writer and researcher on the current tourism model, this is the beginning of “a new wave of mobilizations” due to the “unlimited growth” set by the sector.
“We’re talking about reaching 100 million tourists a year, and that is outrageous. People see how their land, beaches, mountains are filling up. And far from getting any benefits, they are expelled from their neighborhoods because they cannot pay the rent or because their salary or the salary of their children does not grow,” said Buades, former Els Verds (Green) representative for Ibiza in the Balearic Parliament between 1999 and 2003.
This situation led the collective Menys Turisme, Més Vida (Less Tourism, More Life) to call for mobilizations on the four islands of the Balearic archipelago during the summer. The first one took place in Mallorca on July 21.
“The problem is the model and the lack of planning.”
“The general claim is that it is necessary to change course and set limits. What we denounce is not binge tourism, but the process of touristification of all the islands. And the solution is not elite tourism,” said Jaume Pujol, who is only 15 years old, and is spokesperson for a movement that has managed to unite groups including Fridays for Future, GOB Mallorca, Arrán Palma, Attac and SOS Residents, as well as feminist, housing, environmental and neighborhood groups.
At the center of criticism of the current tourism model lies the daily saturation of local populations. And exhaustion.
“The territory has physical limits that are difficult to hide and become visible as soon as the waste from sewage literally begins to float, or when the roads collapse, or when the drought prevents the supply of the populations, or when the state of energy emergency is declared and a food emergency is looming,” said Alfonso Boullón, spokesperson for the Canarias Se Agota (The Canaries Have Had Enough ) collective.
“When all this comes together, people say enough is enough. The solution is not to build more roads or more desalination plants, the problem is the model and the lack of planning.”
Addicted to tourism
Far from betting on a change of model, the country remains hooked on tourism and its dependence gets increasingly stronger.
“Spain is waiting for you from next July,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in May 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. He then focused part of his efforts on saving the summer season and that has also been one of the government’s mantras these past weeks, aware of the enormous weight of the sector on the Spanish economy.
The country is addicted to tourism. There, more than 13.6% of workers are employed in tourism related activities. May unemployment data showed once again the extraordinary dependence of the labor market on foreign visitors. In fact, the hospitality industry was the sector where the demand for workers was the highest.
Although all the Spanish Autonomous Communities reduced their unemployment rate, it was Andalusia, Catalonia and Madrid, three of the most touristic regions, that led the decline. The Andalusian case is especially striking, as it managed to reduce its unemployment rate by more than 15,000 people, more than double that of Catalonia and three times that of Madrid.
After COVID-19, it didn’t take long for the tourism sector to recover and set new records.
Despite the drop in visitors during 2020 and 2021, it didn’t take long for the tourism sector to recover and set new records. In its 2023 Business Tourism Assessment report, Exceltur, an employers’ association formed “by 30 of the most relevant companies in the entire tourism value chain”, states that the sector generated 186,596 million euros of activity last year, which represents a 12.8% contribution to Spanish GDP, a record high, thus accentuating the dependence of the national economy on tourism.
And it seems to be only the beginning. For 2024, Exceltur expects “a new increase in tourism GDP in Spain, which will exceed 200,000 million euros for the first time” and will increase its share of total GDP to 13.4%.
This way, tourism would contribute 41.4% of the expected real growth of the Spanish economy in 2024, according to estimates by the association regrouping airlines such as Air Nostrum, Iberia or Binter, shipping companies such as Balearia, and hotel chains such as Iberostar, Meliá, NH or Riu, as well as companies like Viajes El Corte Inglés or Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
A heavy impact on housing access
Despite pressure from government partners, Sánchez does not seem to be willing to rethink the tourism model. In fact, his trusted man in Catalonia, Salvador Illa, has been betting on two controversial projects for years: the construction of a Hard Rock Café macro-complex, in the province of Tarragona, and the expansion of El Prat airport, in Barcelona.
Furthermore, organizations in the Balearic Islands say Madrid used the cover of “improvement works” to expand the Palma airport, which will now allow the arrival of even more travelers. Finally, Spanish airport operator Aena will invest 2.4 billion euros in Madrid’s Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport to increase the capacity of arrival of travelers to the capital and to the country in general. The Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility has not responded to La Marea‘s questions.
Yet in recent weeks, the government has made some gestures. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda announced at the end of June that it is working on a possible modification of the Horizontal Property Law “so that residents have power over the establishing of tourist apartments in their properties.”
The excessive proliferation of this type of housing in some cities has become the focus of criticism from residents, public administrations and from the business tourism sector itself.
It is impossible to differentiate the housing and the tourism problem.
On the sidewalk across from the Balearic Parliament, five real estate agencies advertise luxury villas on the island of Mallorca. Some are for sale and others are for rent. In one of the windows, the price per week is no less than 1,300 euros for a house inland with two bedrooms. The most expensive, a rustic property with capacity for up to 12 people, can be rented from 9,500 euros per week.
Tourist rentals have colonized the island just as they have in so many other regions and cities, pushing residents out of the most central neighborhoods or raising the price of regular rent.
“It is impossible to differentiate the housing and the tourism problem, because they go hand in hand. In Palma there is a constant process of gentrification of the neighborhoods,” said Climent Tortella, spokesperson for the Palma housing syndicate (Sindicat d’Habitatge de Palma). Throughout the archipelago, the issue of lack of access to housing forces workers to live in caravans, hostels or, in many cases, to leave the islands.
The situation has worsened in recent years. The price of housing rose by an average of almost 10% in 2023 in the most touristic communities (Andalusia, the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Catalonia, the Valencian Community and the Community of Madrid), compared to 6.3% elsewhere, according to INE data.
Regulation emergency
For Exceltur, the employers’ association of leading tourism companies, the main cause of neighborhood discontent is holiday rentals as it accentuates the problems of access to housing, overcrowding or “the trivialisation of the most emblematic neighborhoods, with the consequent negative effect on the social perception of tourism.”
Lawyer and housing activist Alejandra Jacinto, however, said that “there are many hotel chains that have spotted a market opportunity in the rental of tourist homes” and have taken it, further aggravating the situation. Large international groups such as Marriott, IHG or Accor do business with tourist housing, as do Spanish companies such as Room Mate or the Piñero Group, as reported by the economic newspaper Cinco Días in 2018.
For Tortella, Exceltur’s discourse, very critical of the “small rentiers”, is only a way to drive the attention away from large companies.
The truth is that the big hotel chains are the ones who start the whole problem.
“They have understood that tourist overcrowding is so obvious and affects the pace of life in these places so much that they cannot have denialist speeches about the problem. So they try to find another culprit, in this case the small rentiers, to avoid being singled out. The truth is that the big hotel chains are the ones who start the whole problem, those that continue advertising so that more people come and those that ask for the airport to be expanded so that more tourists come. And these tourists have to stay somewhere,” Tortella said.
According to data from the Palma City Council and collected by Spanish online newspaper elDiario.es, the city has 639 legal tourist homes. Yet the INE estimates that there are at least 1,023 tourist apartments in the city, meaning that at least one in three is illegal. In 2018, the Mallorcan council decided to stop giving out new licenses to vacation rentals.
The Barcelona City Council, headed by the Socialist Jaume Collboni, has announced its intention to close this type of accommodation by 2028: both the 10,000 that now have a license, and the 6,000 that are estimated to be operating illegally.
Just the beginning
Meanwhile, Madrid Mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida, from the conservative Partido Popular, is in favor of “regulating” rather than “banning”, although he admits that these rentals pose a “serious problem”. In Madrid, in May 2024, 16,337 tourist apartments were advertised on Airbnb, 3,000 more than the previous year. According to calculations by the newspaper El Mundo, 98% of these homes would be operating illegally, meaning without a license.
The Catalan Federation of Tourist Apartments (Federatur) downplays the impact that this sector has on the rise in rental prices: “Making tourism responsible for the lack of access to housing is populist and absolutely false,” they said at the end of April during a round table organized with the College of Economists of Catalonia.
For Jacinto, regulating seasonal rentals, including room rentals, is more than “urgent: “The first thing is to enforce existing legislation, then establish tourist moratoriums and close all homes that are rented illegally.”
This fight has just begun because the problems are going to become more and more serious.
She also believes that the Government has to take advantage of the recent ruling by the Constitutional Court, which supports most of the Housing Law, to reformulate it and make it more ambitious: “Municipalities must be given the possibility of establishing areas of market tension and being able to regulate prices, regardless of the speculative goal of the regional government in power.”
The tourist season has already begun. This year, coastal towns will be filled with bathers and local populations fed up with a voracious model and so tired of promises that they have taken to the streets.
Boullón, spokesman for Canarias Se Agota, is it clear: “If anyone thinks we are going to stop, they are very wrong. This fight has just begun because the problems are going to become more and more serious. We will continue to organize protests and activities to fight against them. This is the place where we live, and we are not going to give up living in our land.”
