Your weekly news catch-up in Mallorca

So, where were we? Oh yes, extreme heat, threat of disruption to holiday flights and agonising over how the season is going. Having suggested last week that we would experience even greater heat this week, the temperatures duly delivered. While various parts of Mallorca registered record highs, the all-time high for the island (44.5C) remained unaltered, Sa Pobla having got closest with 43.9C on Tuesday. There was some suggestion that Llubi had knocked out a 44.9C, but a bloke with a weather app (or whatever) doesn't officially qualify. The Aemet met agency appeared to be sticking to 43.9 for official purposes.

With any luck, this will be as hot as it gets this summer, but the heat wave - we were led to believe - will continue until August, although this does rather depend on the definition of a heat wave. There is a popular one for being consistently very hot and the official one that qualifies very hot, i.e. Aemet's. The met agency has pointed out that the term can be used rather loosely.

The uncertainty of heat

Mallorca found itself on all those maps with loads of red in the Med that were being plastered all over the media, and so there were warnings that holidaymakers will be cancelling because of the heat. A problem is that the very high temperatures by and large occur where masses of holidaymakers don't go. Yes, it was hot enough on the coast but wasn't on the same scale as parts of the interior. It never is. Yet those general maps tend not to take account of what are quite wide variations even in a relatively small area such as Mallorca's.

With little evidence that holidays were being cancelled, the heat was nevertheless an additional factor to worry about when it came to the strength or otherwise of the summer tourism season. The heat was an additional uncertainty on top of flight disruption and the cost of living.

It always pays to check the tourism figures

There was, it has to be said, a most peculiar report which suggested that average hotel occupancy in July was running at 65%. It was peculiar because if this were actually the case, the season wouldn't just be poor, it would be catastrophic.

How does a nonsensical figure like this even make its way into a report? One can hazard a guess. For example, a hotel or a hotel chain has this level of occupancy and there is then extrapolation to somehow apply this to the whole sector. In a separate report, Maria Frontera, the president of the hoteliers federation, pointed to an expected 90% occupancy in July. And for the record, according to Balearic tourism ministry stats, average hotel occupancy in July 2022 was 87.9% and in July 2019 was 87.4%. So much for the season suffering, therefore.

That peculiar report also reckoned that discounts of 25% are being offered. Well maybe they are. That doesn't mean all hotels are making offers or anything like all hotels. It's way too simplistic to draw conclusions without reference to the only objective data that are available, which do admittedly take some weeks to come through the system but do provide information on, for instance, hotel performance. If indicators such as average daily rate are up, then discounts cannot have been prevalent. We'll see.

Black July on the roads

Has the heat been getting to drivers? I suppose that one might make such an assumption, faced as we have been by the number of deaths on the roads this month. Between July 4 and 19, there were nine fatalities, eight of these in Mallorca and one in Formentera. By way of some context, there were 25 road fatalities in the Balearics during the whole of 2022.

The heat really can't be blamed. It has been a very unfortunate period, with only one of these fatalities for certain having involved a drunk driver. Five of the nine didn't involve another vehicle. One which did was a head-on collision between a 4x4 and a motorcycle in Alcudia. The motorcyclist was killed, the British driver of the 4x4 having exited a road and turned into the wrong lane (the left lane). He has been charged with reckless manslaughter.

Attacks on Uber drivers

It's a hot summer of tension between Uber and taxi drivers. Uber started operations in Mallorca in early June, and ever since, say the Uber drivers, they have been subjected to harassment by taxi drivers. There have been slashed tyres, broken windows, insults and physical assaults, as was the case with Carlos, an Uber driver who was waiting to pick up outside BCM in Magalluf on Tuesday. He was punched in the face. The police located the attacker, who was a taxi driver.

Uber drivers like Carlos stress that they are ordinary workers going about their business, just like taxi drivers. They absolutely don't deserve this, and taxi drivers, for whom there is often limited sympathy, aren't helping their cause. Uber drivers are meanwhile due to lodge an official complaint about the harassment with the National Police next week.

Policing the resorts

In Magalluf, where reports of bad behaviour and crime have been quite conspicuous by their general absence this summer, there is to be a new plainclothes police unit. The new administration at Calvia town hall says that this unit should be operational by late August; there are procedures it has to follow before the unit can be formally set up. It is something for which there has been resident and business demand for several years and it will cover Santa Ponsa as well as Magalluf.

In Playa de Palma, the new president of the hoteliers association, Pedro Marín, is hopeful that political change at the town hall will result in more police and an altogether tougher approach in dealing with antisocial tourism. Despite ordinance and the tourism of excesses law, he believes that there has been a lack of political will in addressing the problems; "a lot of permissiveness, which has to end". He is proposing a model like that in Amsterdam, where there are very heavy fines, arguing that "the only language antisocial tourists understand is fines".

The problem with Magalluf's beach

Back in Magalluf, there is a somewhat unusual situation regarding the beach, which is a very fine one but is quiet compared with nearby beaches like Son Matias, which are as popular as ever. What are the reasons for this? A profile of young tourists who prefer to sleep during the day and party at night is one that has been suggested. The councillor for tourism, Elisa Monserrat, says that the town hall will be working on attracting more family tourism and that efforts will be made to attract more Mallorcan residents. Magalluf beach is "unknown" to many Mallorcans, she reckons.

Or is it the case that the beach is perfectly well known and that the issue has more to do with the persisting negative image of Magalluf among Mallorcans?

Watering and spraying the elite

With the heat comes increased demand for water, and this at a time when parts of the island are at pre-alert for drought. This is the case in Palma, where the Emaya municipal services agency is following Balearic government guidelines for conserving as much water as possible when there is such a situation.

Fiestas in Palma will be affected, as there are events which require a great deal of water. The best known is the Canamunt v. Canavall water fight in Parc de la Mar at the end of August. The town hall has told the association which organises the fiestas, Orgull Llonguet, that Emaya won't be supplying any water this year. There are normally 18,000 litres.

Other than cancelling the event, the only option will be to arrange for a water tanker. While Orgull Llonguet and the federation of residents associations appreciate that there is a pre-alert, they argue that citizens are being penalised when pools in tourist areas are being filled and golf courses are being irrigated.

Golf courses, for an "elitist leisure pursuit", have been the target for Extinction Rebellion and Futuro Vegetal, who in recent days have turned their attention to other elitist examples, such as a superyacht and private jet in Ibiza. Perhaps fearing that they were being outdone, the radical youth organisation Arran, from whom we haven't heard much in recent years, took to spraying slogans on the fronts of estate agencies' shops in Palma on Tuesday night. Well, it made a change to telling tourists to go home.