Lourdes Royo Naranjo is a professor in the University of Seville's faculty of architectural history, theory and composition. On Friday, she spoke at a conference in Palma on tourism and historic cities and identified how the profile of tourists has changed over the decades. Starting with the romantic traveller of the 19th century, who got to know a destination in depth, there is now the fleeting visitor. Cities have become settings for compulsive snapshots on Instagram. The turbo-trips that flood destinations with tourists endanger their heritage.
She best understands the situations in Malaga and Seville, where the effects of mass tourism are similar to those in Palma.
"I've been working for twenty years on the relationship between historic centres and tourism. In Malaga there was love at first sight, but right now it is in crisis. We are going through a bad period, the benefits are out of control, there are imbalances. Destinations have become objects of desire but are showing signs of fragility and exhaustion, and coexistence is suffering.
"There are common consequences at a sociological, architectural, urban and anthropological level. There is great unrest and the concerns are the same."
Historic centres, she argued, have become products. "Tourism is an industry that consumes the city. There is a mass that goes to the destination and there is a theatricalisation of the historic centre. In addition to tourist pressure, there are problems of gentrification, coexistence and the replacement of traditional housing and shops. Given all this, it is natural that there is a rejection by residents because there is conflict. The rights to housing and rest are being compromised.
"The model has failed and we have to stop and think about how to change the management. The identity of cities is being distorted. They are all the same, due to the same multinationals and the modification of facades. Tourism consumes, exhausts and is capricious. When they (tourists) tire of our cities, we will have a serious problem."
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Charles Dalrymple-ChumleyNo but you can train the genie to behave as you want it to if the population and the government are in tune together. Not more mass tourism, less but better tourism. Less numbers means the businesses relying on more and more each year will suffer and so they should, they are facilitating the problem. Freeing up the inland rental market is a good step but only for existing properties, no more build to short term tourist let anywhere, town or country. Those inland holiday renters are the best distribution of tourist money per head, not the resorts, and certainly not Mr Fergus Hotels.
The irony is that tourists destroy what they liked about Spain in the first place - they suck all the character out of the historic centres of the cities, when local businesses start catering to them, instead of local people. And don't get me started on the influencer/tik tocker leaches!
Naranjo makes an unintended contradiction in her statement. She says that mass tourism is killing some cities but then states "....when they (tourists) tire of our cities, we will have a serious problem." So she's saying that successful tourism, as enjoyed by Palma for example, stops or reduces in numbers a serious (fiscal) liability for the city occurs. And that's the point. Once a destination has accepted the tourist shilling and built its economy on the back of the tourism market, it hurts considerably when the market goes elsewhere (either because it tires of Mallorca or because Mallorca tires of it, as is the case with the current protests). And that's why Mallorca has to keep its tourism business thriving, or substitute the loss of tourism income with another major industry. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle.