The wave of social and economic outrage that took more than 200,000 people to the streets in the Canary Islands to demand the end of mass tourism has crossed the borders of the archipelago. A month after April 20, the people of Cantabria asked not to become "the Ibiza of the north", to which the people of Malaga joined, demanding a solution to gentrification, and the people of Barcelona, tired of receiving 15.6 million tourists annually.
Of the territories that have joined the movement against touristification, the Balearic Islands are the most similar to the Canary Islands. Around 1,700 kilometers separate both territories, but their demands have united them for years.
"When the mobilizations broke out in the Canary Islands on April 20 at the level of all the islands, there was a kind of mirror effect here, as if they put a mirror in front of us and said: you are the same," explains the president of the Grup Balear d'Ornitologia i Defensa de la Naturalesa (GOB) Mallorca, Margalida Ramis, one of the most important environmental associations on the islands during an interview with La Voz.
From Mallorca, an open assembly was convened to channel "all that energy" and turn it into a mobilization. Last May 25, around 10,000 citizens demonstrated in Palma against the rise in housing prices and touristification, to which demonstrations were also added in Menorca and Ibiza, besieged by high housing prices.
After that, a campaign was launched that concentrates all the Balearic Islands and for which "autonomous and local groups" are being created in each municipality with the slogan We change course, let's put limits on tourism. In addition, on July 21 they plan to "make a splash" with new demands, promoted by the platform Menys Turisme, Més Vida.
In the Balearic Islands there were social movements in this direction, already in 2017 thousands of people took to the streets under the slogan Enough of tourist overcrowding. We have come this far. "At that time, the kellys gained relevance and their workloads were made visible, people also focused on how they are working within this sector," explains Ramis.
"The trend after the COVID pandemic has been to intensify the tourism issue, but at unprecedented levels," she says. In the Mediterranean islands, a broad social movement was achieved and demands still latent in the Canary Islands were reached, such as the implementation of an eco-tax and a moratorium on plants, but the zero tourism of the pandemic stopped the winds of change and the new government group, of the Popular Party, "wants to lift" that moratorium.
The tourist tax in the Balearic Islands
In 2016, the Balearic Islands approved its eco-tax, a tourist tax that is charged in accommodations and cruises and that ranges from one euro per night and person to four, depending on the type of accommodation and whose purpose was the protection of the environment and reverse the damage of tourism in the territory.
However, the money collected has stopped being used for environmental preservation, to be dedicated to "the private company in the tourism sector", so it has gone from being called an eco-tax to a "sustainable" tourist tax. The president of GOB Mallorca describes this as "a perversion" and reports that "the theory" states that the income will reverse or reduce the negative effects of the model on the environment, but "it is just a slogan" to sell that tax to tourists.
The Balearic Islands use the tax in "infrastructure, paying for reforms in mature tourist areas or inventing nonsense to invent new tourist products", she adds, "it will not be because there are no problems to solve but because the administrations are not focusing on that and private investment ends up presenting projects through the local administrations themselves".
In previous legislatures, "two or three years" would pass and no one knew "what had happened to the money". However, in the current one, "if someone presents a project, it has to be in execution within six months", although they are usually led by private initiative.
Luxury tourism
Political and business discourses in the Mediterranean islands sell the local population the idea of luxury tourism as the solution to end mass tourism. However, betting on luxury travelers and "criminalizing everything that is more popular tourism" is, for the activist, "a super dangerous argument" in terms of resources and depredation".
For the president of GOB Mallorca, elite tourism is "much more consumer of resources" such as water and "degrades the territory" in search of exclusivity. "What it wants are constructions in more privileged natural spaces, it wants to be alone, because everything bothers it and because it pays and believes that it can ask for absolutely the world and it has to be served". This situation has been experienced for years in Ibiza, a habitual vacation destination for stars, celebrities and upper classes.
Ramis explains that the Ibizan population has seen the flow of private jets grow, despite the environmental cost involved, as an example of the search for that exclusivity.
In this line, from the platform Less tourism, more life they prefer to talk about the concept of "touristification", compared to the words overcrowding or saturation. "If it doesn't seem like there are too many people, and if there are too many, what kind of people are too many? Well, the most popular tourism because it is not interesting, it is the one that leaves the least money in the establishments themselves, not to mention that there is no redistribution of the income it generates," says Ramis.
"That we have more luxury hotels does not directly revert to an improvement in society because the benefits stay in the company itself and in the closed circle that this implies" and emphasizes that "in luxury hotels people do not earn more, do not live better, do not have guaranteed better working conditions".
In this sense, she warns of the danger of falling into xenophobic and racist discourse. "On the one hand, it criminalizes a certain type of popular tourism, from middle-low classes, and then, on the other hand, it questions the same workforce that this model needs to move forward," she says.
For Ramis, this trend exposes that "luxury hotels will need less labor, so there will be fewer, but more exclusive and therefore, we will not need to have so many people migrating to our territories and competing with us in housing or work". Thus, she emphasizes that "now everything is tourism and what we need is to discriminate by type, by origin or by purchasing power and, what a research colleague says is, let's see, there are not enough rich people for everyone"
Decreasing as a solution
"We focus on the need for a change in the economic model, which involves tourist degrowth and that involves decreasing in places, both hotels and rentals," says the also graduated in Physics.
Ramis speaks of "an overload" in resources, in the territory and also in the resident population. In addition, she explains that diversification does not imply bringing "different tourists" but "lowering the weight of tourism in our economy".
Thus, she urges institutions to invest in training so that people move from one sector to another and accompany the process of change, something that could be done with the tourist tax itself, idea.
From the environmental association not only promotes tourist degrowth, but demands control to prevent the purchase of housing in the islands by non-residents.
"The whole tourism issue is linked to a super powerful real estate and construction speculation, which is now targeting rural land", the activist recounts the precariousness and workloads that are associated with tourism employment, as happens in the Canary Islands.
In the Balearic Islands, even, it has been decided to approve a decree law that "legalizes endless illegal uses and constructions on rustic land and gives them the possibility of having tourist activity. It is an absurdity".
The big problem of housing
Both the populations of the Canary Islands and Lanzarote and the Balearic Islands suffer the difficulties of accessing a home for sale or rent. The concept of the working poor already includes all these people who, even in the labor market, cannot rent a house, much less buy it. "Speculation, second homes, digital nomads, people who come because they can afford to work here, but do not live here, there is a very perverse market, with investment funds behind it", she exemplifies during a telephone call.
The Balearic Islands also suffer the difficulties for public officials, both teachers and health workers, to live in the destination islands. "In Ibiza more than in Mallorca, we have people living in caravans throughout the year and teachers who, during the winter find something to rent, but when summer arrives they make them available for tourist rental", she continues.
One of the differences of the Mediterranean islands is that tourism is more seasonal, typical of the summer months, while in the Canary Islands it extends around the whole year.
