The Christmas holidays see a massive exodus of Balearic residents to their places of origin, a circumstance that has a direct effect on the human pressure on the Islands. If the month of August is the one that causes a higher density of population in Mallorca and the other islands, then Christmas causes the opposite effect and the human pressure is at a minimum between Christmas Eve and the festivities of Sant Sebastià.
It is during these holidays, with the massive exodus of residents to their places of origin, when Mallorca has less human pressure on any given day. The arrival of tourists to celebrate the end of the year in the Islands does not compensate the massive departure of citizens who live in Mallorca.
The data collected by the Institut Balear d'Estadística (Ibestat) in the Human Pressure Index during the last ten years are clear. During this decade, December 23 has been on four occasions the day of the year when fewest people stayed in Mallorca. Depending on the years and how the holidays fall in the calendar, December 24, January 1 and January 3 also appear among the days with less human pressure.
However, on two occasions in the last decade there has been another curious circumstance when measuring the daily population figures: both in 2019 and 2021 the date with fewer people has been around Sant Sebastià, which suggests that in Palma there are many who take advantage of the feast of its patron saint to take a trip of a few days.
The analysis of these historical minimum figures also shows that human pressure has been increasing every year and not even the pandemic has caused a drop in the figures. The day of lowest human pressure a decade ago was December 23, 2012, when there were 843,950 people in Mallorca. Ten years later, on January 22, 2021, the population on the island on that day was 946,169 citizens, an increase of more than 100,000 people in just ten years. The Balearic Islands is one of the communities that increases in population and this increase of 10,000 people per year is very high.
This record of fewest people in a single day is very close to the real population of Mallorca. According to the data of the National Institute of Statistics, on July 1, 2021, 947,309 people lived in Mallorca, practically the same figure of the historical minimum: the massive Christmas departures are compensated by the arrival of tourists.
The pandemic has had no effect on the data of less human pressure, but it has had an effect on the opposite: the day when there are more people in a single day in Mallorca, which in the last decade has always been between August 4 and 10. The absolute record is still set on August 8, 2017, a day when there were 1,473,873 people in Mallorca at the same time. The figure is overwhelming: it is as if the population of the Island increased by 50% all at once, something unacceptable from the point of view of the provision of services.
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