The annual Spanish student invasion will be starting soon

The annual Spanish student invasion will be starting soon. | M.A. CAÑELLAS

Andrew EdePalma16/05/2024 14:42
TW
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While I've never believed that the great majority of visitors are that bothered how the sustainable tourism tax is spent, there are some who are. And so they will doubtless be interested in learning that approximately eleven per cent of total tax revenue is to be spent on their control. Yes, sixteen millions euros are to be devoted to four very limited areas of four municipalities for the purposes of inspection, security and something referred to as "awareness".

Some of this 16 million will admittedly be dedicated to uncovering shops’ clandestine alcohol-sale activity at two in the morning, which - given the fuss - seems to be the sole reason for tourist drunkenness, but some will go towards the pursuit of tourists staggering along streets with illicit purchases from said shops.

I don’t know, if I were a quality tourist staying in a Pollensa villa with high spending power for a zero-kilometre lamb dinner and imbibing no more than a couple of glasses of zero-kilometre boutique bodega vino, I think I’d be a bit brassed off. Why should I pay for the police to collar some laddo who has just defecated on the head of a zonked-out laddo in a very limited part of Playa de Palma?

Ah, but that's the price you pay for a fortnight in paradise, an instantly Instagrammable paradise. Indeed it is, assuming the payment is well made. For in Arenal, where the defences are being built for the annual Spanish student invasion, some of the 16 million will be spent. When the police are confronted with hundreds of their youthful fellow citizens armed with bottles of Rushkinoff on the Arenal streets, what do they do?

Never mind, the sustainable tourism tax will surely be rebranded the responsible tourism tax.