Should the Soller tunnel be reinstated?

Should the Soller tunnel be reinstated? | Archives

Anna NicholasPalma04/10/2024 10:03
TW
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I was stopped in the local supermarket last week by a belligerent elderly local. She wanted my opinion on overtourism in Soller. I braced myself as this thorny topic has rapidly become a no-go area in our valley. There’s a fury about house purchase and rental prices, insufferable traffic and lack of parking. To my surprise, the feisty pensioner rattled on about how important it was to keep welcoming visitors to keep the economy buoyant, and for Mallorquins to cease blaming them for their own woes.

She underlined that if locals hadn’t sold out years ago, selling and renting their homes for greedy sums to foreigners, there wouldn’t be such a crisis in the local rental and housing market today. She also pointed out that it was only a few years ago that islanders were wringing their hands during and after the pandemic, when they faced empty hotels and restaurants, and deserted shops.

It’s a tough old chestnut this tourism malarky. Of course we need visitors for a stable economy but in the last few years the tourism model has most definitely gone awry. The tourism dam has burst its banks. A local civil servant I know asserted that the gentrification of Mallorca was akin to an aggressive cancer, gobbling up towns, cities and villages and destroying the authentic way of life. This has always been my biggest concern as the very reason we relocated to the island, was for its authenticity and rural bliss. Much as our local high street in Soller has fast become a gift emporium with the sort of ubiquitous product assortment you could find in markets across Europe, it still thankfully retains its architectural splendour and Sollerics are still wonderful characterful Sollerics. No one can take that away, and the soul of the valley, a rural garden of Eden, still remains blissfully unchanged.

What might happen is that in order to accommodate more and more visitors, Soller council will make the terrible error of relentlessly creating car parks, destroying citrus orchards and olive groves, the very jewels tourists come to see! Instead, the best solution would be to reinstate the Soller tunnel, charging day visitors and sight-seeing coaches a fee for entry. I feel this would help in deterring those who purely want to take Insta snaps with no interest in the magnificent culture and rural values of the valley. Let us not forget the immortal words of chanteuse, Joni Mitchell: Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.