At Palma airport, passengers numbers were down; in Ibiza they were up. | Michel's

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The Balearic government has pointed to an increase in first-quarter foreign tourism as evidence of a successful drive to promote low-season tourism. However, a 23% rise in March was undeniably assisted by the timing of the Easter holidays.

April's tourism will have also been affected by Easter, but in a different way. Passenger numbers for Palma's Son Sant Joan Airport indicate that there was a fall of 1.2% in April. There were 2.2 million passengers in all, of whom there were 709,000 who travelled to and from German airports and 434,000 to and from the UK.

Over the first four months of the year, passenger numbers at Palma grew by 5.5% to almost five million.

Elsewhere in April, and quite probably because of the lack of an Easter effect, there were passenger number decreases at Tenerife South (down eleven per cent), Gran Canaria, Alicante and Minorca (a seven per cent fall to 144,000). In Ibiza, by contrast, there was five per cent rise to over 487,000.