What's happened to tourist "saturation"?

The fifteenth of the month marks the point of gradual decrease. The fiesta for the Assumption might not mean a great deal to the majority of foreign visitors, but it does for the national tourist. The celebrations over, and so the Spanish will start to return home, while Europe's school holidays - not uniformly of course - are coming to an end.

We won't know the official numbers of tourists for the two highest months of the summer for some weeks yet. The June numbers came out last week (foreign tourism up five per cent over last year), but July's won't be released until early September and August's until early October. But don't let's get too hung up on the numbers, shall we. What about the perception? And in particular, what about the tourist saturation? The end of July, and I'm struggling to think of the types of report that appeared pretty much daily last summer. Saturation here, saturation there. If not an idyllic beach overrun by holidaymakers, then it was a mirador in Deia.

Now that we're into the fortnight of peak population, perhaps the saturation agony will reveal itself. The met agency had forecast rain for Friday. There was rain. Palma was saturated by hire cars and the police activated Operation Cloud in a vain attempt to control the influx. It used to be the case that a cloudy and rainy day was what produced the saturation reports. But only for Palma. Nowhere else on the island mattered that much in tourism terms unless they were Magaluf or Playa de Palma. And saturation wasn't the story there, it was the misbehaviour.

I say don't let's get hung up on the numbers, but they are all we really have - if you want to be reasonably objective, that is. It's no use people saying that they feel it's busier or less busy, that terraces look more or less rammed (and likewise beaches), that it seems as if there is more or less traffic. This tells you nothing other than what people feel. It's of little use to quote bar owners or hotel directors who say they're busier or less busy unless they're prepared to provide you with hard figures, which generally they will not be except for some vague percentages. And these only tell you their experiences. The bar next door may have a totally different story. The next resort down the coast may have as well.

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But the official figures only ever provide totals - the total number of tourists per island. They don't tell you where on the island. Sure, if the number is up, then this might be said to be evidence of saturation, but because no two places are the same, then you can have higher numbers of people in one and lower numbers in another. On top of this is what happens as people move around. Yes, there are reports (or have been in the past) of particular beaches being overwhelmed, but this doesn't mean that they all are. No one can say.

Last summer, we had the tourism minister, Iago Negueruela, saying that there was a "feeling of saturation", which was also pretty vague. But what more could he have said, other than quote the official figures? There are more tourists than ten years ago, way more than twenty years ago. But as there is no uniformity and there are no comparative figures for, say, beach occupancy or parked cars on either an historical basis or by locations, it is very difficult to get a true assessment of this "feeling", i.e. being able to quantify it.

Consequently, there is a reliance on the specific reports. Yet they have been lacking this summer. Is this because there isn't saturation? Almost certainly not, but if so, then why haven't there been the laments about, for instance, Caló des Moro being chocker? Is it that there have been fewer high-summer tourists in general? We can't say for certain until the figures are released, so we are back to perceptions.

Or might it have something to do with a change of government? The most obvious examples of ministers to have expressly discussed saturation in recent years have been from Més - Biel Barceló when he was tourism minister and Miquel Mir at environment - while there clearly was all the talk by the last government about the need to redistribute high-summer tourists to other months of the year. But just because the government has changed shouldn't make any difference, certainly not to entities with a habit of highlighting saturation.

Perhaps people have simply tired of saying the same old thing. To hell with the figures, we know it's saturated, but who truly listens when we say so?