Your seven days news round-up in Mallorca

Will last Sunday's little protest on the beach in Arenal have any real impact on tourism? Evidence from previous demonstration actions suggests that there may be (may have been) a brief slowdown in holiday demand but that it will recover (will have recovered) very quickly.

Mabrian is a Barcelona-based data intelligence service for travel and tourism. It operates at a global level but close to home is the main data provider for the Balearic government's AETIB tourism strategy agency. These data include the impact of the May 25 protest in Palma and the June 16 beach occupation action at Caló des Moro. Mabrian found that there were slight falls in its two indices in the days immediately following the protests, indicating a slowdown in demand. But as the company's marketing and communications director has said: "Mallorca has shown a great capacity for recovery after the protests of recent weeks."

It was reported that there were around one hundred Mallorca Platja Tour supporters on Arenal beach. This was an exaggeration; there were roughly half that number. But the exact figure wasn't what mattered. The protest was of course of interest to the foreign media, the German more than the British, given the location. A curiosity of this protest was that it clearly had the German market in mind, yet a couple of placards were in English. Particularly curious in this regard was the one which told Germans that referring to Mallorca as Germany's 17th state was "offensive".

It all passed off peacefully, as these protests do, the only minor incidents of note having involved some chap who called the protesters a bunch of clowns and one woman who remonstrated with protesters by explaining that her son works in tourism and that their actions were prejudicial to him.

Lower spending after the post-Covid boom

There has been a suggestion that the protests are in some way responsible for less tourist business activity and therefore less spend by tourists. There is zero evidence to support this claim, businesses themselves having a general view that visitors are spending less than they did in 2022 and 2023, which were 'boom' post-Covid seasons.

The message of the season from the complementary sector of bars, restaurants, shops, nightlife, attractions, etc. is that there is less spend. For example, the president of the Abone nightlife association, Miguel Pérez Marsà, calculates that turnover for his sector is down between 15% and 20%.

This lament from the complementary sector appears to be contradicted by the tourist statistics. These show increased spending - up 13.6% over the first six months of 2024. However, the source for this, the National Statistics Institute's Egatur survey, doesn't give figures for individual sectors, e.g. nightlife or bars/restaurants, while it includes the cost of the holiday. And everyone agrees that prices of accommodation and travel have gone up quite significantly.

Everyone loves a market

It can seem as if tourist overcrowding, a principal reason for the protests, is becoming a convenient excuse for complaining about issues that have been obvious for years. One of these concerns markets. Residents of Santanyi voiced their complaints regarding the Wednesday and Sunday markets to local broadcaster IB3. These were to do with the large numbers of visitors as well as the lack of space for pedestrians and for emergency vehicle access.

The point is, though, that visitors have been going in great number to markets like Santanyi's for many a year. Another is that the island's markets tend to have a lack of space. They don't occupy massive squares, and even where the squares are large, a great deal of space is taken up traders.

Policing the parking

In Soller the complaints can be about the number of people full stop and their cars in particular. Along the Palma-Puerto Soller main road that passes through Soller ('desvío') cars are parked on the hard shoulders. This 'irregular' parking adds to the general sense of traffic chaos in Soller, a situation that has not been helped by the fact that the local police have been unable to do anything about this parking. This is because the road, the MA-11, is a main 'carretera' and not a municipal urban road. The Council of Mallorca has responsibility for these main roads and not town halls; the local police forces don't therefore have direct powers.

A solution, and a sensible one for Soller, is that the section of the MA-11 through the town is to be reclassified as urban. This will allow the police to act. A further solution is that the whole section will eventually have bollards on both sides in order to prevent parking.

Too pretty for its own good?

Fornalutx, a Soller neighbour, was the first village in Mallorca to be included in the list of Los Pueblos más Bonitos de España - Spain's prettiest villages. (There are now three; Alcudia and Pollensa are the other two.) It is just possible that this accolade has contributed to what a former resident now sees - "Streets packed with influencers under the scorching sun; local people have become a very rare species."

Adrià Arbona is the singer with a pop group, Papa Topo. He grew up in Fornalutx. Returning to the village, he discovered that Airbnb was present, that the one remaining bakery no longer sold traditional Mallorcan bread, and that local people were being driven out of their homes. "I couldn't help crying with rage."

Acting with impunity

He was alluding to a form of gentrification that is a further reason for discontent in Mallorca. This is symptomatic, it is argued, of an elitist model of tourism, not solely foreign, that demonstrates little regard for the island. Some of all the yachts that proliferate around Mallorca are indicative of this. And occupants of yachts can act with "impunity", as German diver Thomas Heise has remarked.

He is president of Eco Projects Mallorca, a conservation group who recently organised a clean-up operation in the Portals Vells area of Calvia. This wasn't a beach clean-up. It was for the seabed, where a group of divers discovered thousands of champagne bottles. These were bottles that had been chucked into the sea from boats. Some had clearly been there for years; others were more recent. Thomas said that there is greater awareness now, but it still happens. He reckoned that they collected around a quarter of all the rubbish on the seabed.

There are those operating illegal holiday lets who seem to feel that they can act with impunity as well. This is why the Council of Mallorca has doubled the minimum fine from 40,000 to 80,000 euros. Caught under this new fine regime is a building in Palma's Llevant district. It has twelve apartments for holiday rental, all of them illegal of course as Palma has had a ban on this type of letting of apartments for several years. The total fine is 960,000 euros.

Housing - a spanner in the works

The illegal letting, as has been made clear enough, contributes greatly to the housing problem in Mallorca. Any news which seems to indicate an improvement, however small and however much some might not like it, is clung to optimistically. So it was with College of Notaries data which showed that house prices in the Balearics fell by 6.2% in May and by 5.9% in June. There were further data for sales - down 22.4% year-on-year in June to a total of 1,095 transactions.

But where the average price is concerned, 3,104 euros per square metre in the Balearics is still the highest in Spain. All things, as if a reminder were needed, are relative.

The Balearic government's limited-price housing scheme is an initiative to try and create more affordable housing. Introduced under the housing emergency decree of autumn last year, one of the possibilities contemplated is the conversion of commercial premises into residential accommodation. A government figure of 4,000 new homes is debatable, but there is just a chance there won't be any. This is because the Spanish government has objected to the use of decree law for the particular regulations. The objection, unless the two governments can sort it out, is likely to end up at the Constitutional Court, meaning that the legislation will be automatically suspended until the court reaches a decision. And that could take months.

Storm causes widespread chaos

The Balearics have just spent the best part of 48 hours on high weather alert as a freak summer storm caused widespread damage and alarm across the region.

It hit Ibiza and Formentera early on Wednesday morning and by 9am flights at Palma Airport were being delayed and then went on to be cancelled. It was a similar situation on Thursday, with air passengers trapped in the Balearics and elsewhere in Europe. Ferry passengers were also affected.

Even the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, on his super yacht Koru had to seek shelter in Menorca. Hardly anywhere escaped the wrath of the storm. Hardest hit were Manacor, where the offices of the auditorium were flooded, Maria de la Salut, where a car was found flooded in the middle of the street, and Puerto Soller where part of the beach was washed away.

The Aemet met agency feared maximum rainfall of up to 150 litres in just two to three hours. Meanwhile, emergency services had to deal with fallen trees and debris and needed to reopen roads where trees had closed them. 10 people were evacuated in Soller and 29 passengers had to be rescued from the Palma-Manacor train.

The weather alerts were scheduled to have been downgraded to yellow on Thursday evening. This yellow alert for rain and thunderstorms was due to be active until 6pm on Friday.