What does Mallorca want to be?

Recently however over the past week or so as anti-tourism demonstrations seem to be growing both in number and vitriol and is being closely reported by all press and media outlets almost on a daily basis. Indeed, the general UK press reaction to the various demonstrations has been the quite understandable “Are we welcome in Mallorca/Spain on holiday anymore?” Interestingly, on Monday of this week the BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine aired a phone-in feature covering this very same issue to his very large mid-morning audience Funnily enough, what provoked this particular column of mine, wasn’t anything that happened in Mallorca, but a young acquaintance of mine telling me that her and her friends were squirted with water whilst holidaying, just last week in Barcelona by a group of young anti-tourism militants.

As a person who has holidayed on the island already twice this year - and with two sets of my kids and grandkids about to visit the island over the next six weeks, it could be said that I am more than a little interested as to what there welcome might be like from ordinary islanders. For instance, are we currently witnessing a general reaction to perceived (or real) over tourism that has caught the ire of ordinary Mallorcans, or is it as many would argue, the organised over-reaction by those who see their role in life to annoy or upset the status quo as it stands at the moment?

Those in power locally, and those within the tourism industry on the island, seem to take the view at the moment that “…all is okay, just ignore those trouble makers” but viewing the situation from afar these protests seem to be a little more organised and cross culturally based than the usual ‘rent-a-mob’ protests. It has always been somewhat of an easy cliche to articulate the view that it is the tourism/hotel lobby who run the island, with local politicos aligned to make it all go as smoothly as possible. Whatever your favourite current theory, I suspect that there will be more than enough local and regional politicians keen to attend the next set of flashy tourist promotional conferences and shows in London and elsewhere on behalf of you all.

I wonder if what Mallorca is experiencing at the moment, will in due course be picked up by other traditional tourism venues across the Mediterranean and beyond whose residents have seemingly fallen out-of-love with the idea of mass tourism as a commercial reality, nay necessity? Last weekend I picked up a glossy magazine that was the ‘Lifestyle’ section of a top of the range weekend national newspaper.

Interestingly, it featured a wall-to-wall promotion of Bulgaria as a glorious holiday destination, which was both inexpensive (i.e. cheap!) gloriously sunny and hugely welcoming. I wonder who they were ‘pitching’ this feature at? Meanwhile, at the heart of this messy debate, there lies one very important question… what does Mallorca (indeed the Balearics in total) want to be? Perhaps everyone needs to think about that question before rushing off in the wrong direction.