Airport woes, estate agent joy - Mallorca news round-up

José Miguel Artieda is the president of the API estate agents association in the Balearics. Earlier this week he made this statement: "All kinds of opportunists have proliferated ... and for the most part have avoided or ignored the laws, regulations and obligations, causing an unjust discrediting of the profession as well as clear harm to the public and a certain distortion of the market."

Artieda was speaking in light of Balearic parliamentary approval of regulation for the real estate sector, including a compulsory register of estate agents. "A milestone", it was an important development and one that companies with full bona fides and adherence to associations' codes of practice and standards have been demanding for years. The remarkable thing is that it has taken so long, just as remarkable having been a decree law of 2000 that had left the real estate brokerage profession "deregulated" and had made "membership and training for the provision of such services unnecessary".

Amnesty for buildings without licences

The approval was within the framework of other property legislative initiatives. While regulation of estate agents received strong support across the board in parliament, this hasn't been the case with other reforms. An amnesty for properties that are "outside municipal planning ordinance", referring to building on so-called rustic land, led opposition parties and environmentalists to argue that there will be "a new wave of speculation" as well as destruction of the environment.

This amnesty would depend. It is not carte blanche for legalising every building (including extensions and pools) as protected land classifications would not allow this. Even so, the opposition were incensed. A government insistence that it will look to prohibit the use of legalised properties as holiday rentals did not ameliorate them.

Padlocking a squat

The estate agents reckoned that the regulation approval represented a further step towards easing the serious housing problem in the Balearics. Perhaps it does, but manifestations of this problem are never far from getting into the news. And so we had the tale of Jesús Molina, a resident of C. Manacor in Palma, who put a chain and a padlock on the entrance to a plot with a shanty in the hope that this would prevent squatters returning. They had in fact already returned, having previously been evicted. Enough was enough for Jesús, who found himself being arrested by the National Police; the squat wasn't his property.

Homes for Mallorcans - in the north of Spain

For those more fortunate than the squatters, there is nevertheless an obstacle to purchasing second homes in Mallorca by island residents. Thirty odd years ago, when prices were still comparatively cheap, second homes were affordable. This isn't the case nowadays, partly because of "displacement by foreign capital", observed Ignacio Fiol of Palma-based AB Capital.

His company is offering a solution - in the north of Spain. Land is relatively easy to come by and is cheap by comparison with Mallorca. One development in Cantabria is about to start. It may only be for 24 houses, but there are other projects in the offing. Fiol pointed out that people from Mallorca don't have to "fight with investors from northern Europe". Not yet, anyway.

Boom in the hire of scooters

Regulation of a different sort is being sought by the hire-car association in the Balearics. The president of Aevab, Ramón Reus, says that there has been a boom in the hire of low-powered motorcycles and scooters. This started before the pandemic and has become even more evident over the past two seasons. Many of the association's members have diversified into this hire, which does have advantages for companies (lower costs of maintenance, for instance) as well as for customers - cheaper than a car, easier to park.

However, there are operators who cause harm to his members and generate complaints. Price is one way, as there are add-ons that customers are unaware of. Reus therefore wants to see regulation of prices.

And the booming cycling season

The Mallorca 312 cycling event has undoubtedly been a great success. It has grown since the first one in 2010 to an extent that more than 8,000 cyclists now take part. Held at the end of April, it represents the peak of the cycling tourism season, but it has perhaps had the effect of over-concentrating cyclists into a specific period, as is also the case with Ironman 70.3 in May.

The season can really be said to run from mid-February to mid-May, and it continues to boom regardless of these events. But the pressures on the roads are at their most acute in April, and the roads most affected are in the Tramuntana Mountains, where April also brings an increase in the number of coaches and hire cars. As a consequence there is saturation of the roads, a fact highlighted ten years ago by the mayor of Escorca. In 2014, Toni Solivellas, while welcoming the boost that cyclists brought to local businesses, warned of the risks and called for improvements to infrastructure. He's still waiting.

Measuring beach 'saturation'

Saturation of the beaches in summer does occur, but the Balearic government wants to be able to quantify this rather than rely on perceptions. It is therefore going to gather data by measuring the number of phones. A pilot project is planned for this summer. This will be at an as-yet unnamed beach, which will be non-urban, meaning that it could be the likes of Es Trenc in Campos, Cala Varques in Manacor or Caló des Moro in Santanyi.

What will the government do with the data? This hasn't been specified, but it is believed that results could lead to more public transport for given areas or traffic restrictions of the kind that apply to the Formentor peninsula from June to September.

Recent weather certainly hasn't presented any risk of beach overcrowding, which is perhaps as well for holidaymakers in Calvia. The municipal beaches, Magalluf et al, don't currently have beach services - sunloungers, etc. - because the awards for the concessions haven't been made.

This, to be fair, is the sort of issue that crops up each year in different municipalities, usually because of delays with getting authorisations; these used to be from the state Costas Authority, they are now from the Balearic government's coasts department. In Calvia, however, there was one major setback in processing all manner of things - the cyberattack on the town hall's systems in January.

Overcrowding - beaches and airport

Tourist overcrowding was one reason for the protests that were staged in the Canary Islands last weekend. In Mallorca there was a rally in support of those protests. Organised by the environmentalists GOB, it wasn't a large affair by any means. Nevertheless, it was an opportunity to again press the need for limits, as the Canaries protesters were calling for.

The current tourism model, GOB said, "ignores islands' realities". This model has, for instance, "distorted and increased the price of housing" and has led to an impoverishment. Over the past two decades the Balearics have fallen from 46th in terms of GDP per capita in the EU to 110th.

The number of tourists can perhaps be linked to problems at Palma Son Sant Joan Airport, but aren't they really more to do with scheduling and service provision? On Friday last week, it was claimed that there was a "giant two-hour queue" to get through passport control. This came from a passenger. The National Police reckoned it was no more than an hour, while the airport management insisted it was less than 15 minutes, "which is within the norm". What had happened was that flights had been delayed, and so a number arrived when they hadn't been scheduled to. This was shortly after midnight, and the police admitted there weren't enough officers on the shift.

On Monday, there was something of a repeat of what occurred over Easter at security controls for departures. A work-to-rule by security was again denied and the airport management put the long queues down to an "accumulation" of flights, insisting that delays were no longer than 20 minutes rather than one hour, as some passengers maintained.

As ever with these incidents, there was the disparity and there were also those travellers who reported that they hadn't experienced any problems. Which doesn't mean to say that there aren't incidents, but that they only occur at specific times.