Packed
beaches and gridlock loom large as tourists swap terrorism hotspots
for Spain
Record
numbers of cruise ships, airport capacity pushed to the limit and on
the roads. But the Balearics find welcome cash also brings headaches
Tracy
McVeigh in Mallorca
Saturday
14 May 2016 20.48 BST
The beaches are not
yet packed on a windy weekend in the Balearic islands and few have
ventured into the brusque waves. But even though the summer season is
just under way, the bars, restaurants and roads of Mallorca are
thronged with people and traffic.
The famous dance
clubs of Ibiza are planning their seasonal launch parties this week,
while Menorca and Formentera expect to bust their environmentally
sustainable levels of visitors even earlier than last year.
The cruise ships are
already arriving, looming into port out of the Mediterranean like
giant futuristic housing estates. On one day in the first week of May
a record eight of the sea monsters came in at Palma, the largest of
Mallorca’s two ports, disgorging more than 22,000 passengers into
buses and taxis for the short hop into the old town to look at the
cathedral and linger over the tapas.
The three main
Balearic islands of Ibiza, Mallorca and Menorca have become the
second-biggest destination in the Med for cruise ships, themselves a
growing phenomenon in tourism, with 790 ships stopping off last year.
While Palma expects
524 ships this season, Ibiza predicts 154, up 28% from last year’s
120. On Monday the 275m-long MSC Armonia, owned by Swiss-based MSC
Cruises, became the first giant cruise ship to slip into the freshly
deepened port of Mahón in Menorca. The ports authority says the
visits translate to 3,000 jobs on the islands. But they bring just a
small percentage of the total 65 million visitors to Spain last year,
a number some think could rise by up to 20% this year.
The Balearics, with
a permanent population of 1.1 million, had 13 million visitors last
year. Palma is already pushing its airport capacity of 66 flights a
day to 100 this season.
As Europeans turn
away from Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, and any other destination tinged
with a threat of terrorism, Spain – along with Portugal, Greece and
Italy – is picking up the trade. That’s good economic news –
but Spain’s holiday hotspots are creaking at the seams.
“Where do people
go to find peace? Into the sea?” said Gerard Hau, a geographer and
spokesman at Grup Balear d’Ornitologia Defensa de la Naturalesa
(GOB), an umbrella group for environmentalists in the Balearics.
“This will be a
crazy year. The infrastructure will not cope. Mallorca is booked out.
We will have serious problems this summer.
“People come here
to enjoy life, but they are stressed because they can’t get a seat
on the buses – there aren’t enough buses. Already we have 60,000
rental cars on this island. We are second only to Hong Kong in our
car density. The traffic is gridlocked, so people are stressed. There
are no parking places.
“If they can’t
go in the sea sometimes, they are stressed. Last year we had problems
with sewage. The system just couldn’t cope, and we do not let
people into the sea if there are such problems. They are stressed
because there is no room on the beaches, they are stressed and they
won’t come back. Tourism is a vital thing, mass tourism is a
tricky, tricky thing. This year will be a crisis year,” he said.
Hau recognises the
benefits of tourism and the beauty of the islands, but is worried at
the lack of controls. GOB has been influential in bringing to court
some 15 politicans now languishing in Mallorcan jails over illegal
construction in sensitive areas. Last week in Palma, graffiti
appeared saying “tourism is terrorism” and “tourists go home”.
Hau believes there
is strong support for sustainable development, but points to
conservation issues. Mallorca has a rare population of 100 black
vultures and “people are now walking up to the nests”. Sand dunes
have been eroded. “How can you limit the people?” asks Hau. “In
Spain it’s a fundamental right to be able to go anywhere and that
is a good democratic right. You cannot start to ask people not to go,
or to pay. It’s tricky to reduce numbers.
“I think it’s
better to have those drinking ghettoes, Playa de Palma and Magaluf,
where people go, rather than these intellectual types of tourists who
tramp over everything in their search for the untouched bit, the
original Mallorcan, and the residential tourists, who buy up
property, buy a car, usually two, swimming pools, and want gardens
with plants and grass like at home but that need water.”
In Barcelona there
is full-throated debate over tourist capacity. Last year the new
mayor, Ada Colau, allowed stallholders to ban big groups of tourists
from la Boqueria market at set times and stopped all licensing for
new tourist accommodation, which had tripled in a decade.
Formentera and Ibiza
are considering banning tourist cars and Mallorcan police scan the
internet to clamp down on illegal holiday lets. The president of the
Balearics, Francina Armengol, is deeply worried that the good money
they can earn as a waiter or hotel worker is stopping young people
from going into the professions.
Others are leaving.
Rose Sala is Mallorcan by birth and wanted to stay, but has changed
her mind. “It’s enough. It costs so much and the mainland is far
cheaper. It would have been worth it because we love this place, but
it is unbearable in the summer now. I’m sorry because I have a lot
of friends who need these jobs and want the tourists to be high in
number, but for me, no. It’s too much.”
Her friend is
Lesley, a Scot who jumped ship from her job on a cruise liner 11
years ago and stayed, marrying a local doctor. “This is a beautiful
island, and such friendly people,” she said. “Everyone needs the
tourists to survive, so I’d hate to put anyone off, because a busy
summer is good news and will be fun. What I’d really like to see is
more people coming off-season, because it’s still lovely then.”
On 1 June a
controversial tourist “eco-tax” comes into force – €2 a day
towards environment protection.
Professor Geoffrey
Lipman runs the SUN Program, based in Brussels, which works towards
sustainable tourism, and he fears the pressure is too often on
politicians to end up throwing such a tax into their main budgets
when austerity bites.
“It’s all a
little like King Canute sitting on the seashore ordering back the
waves. Who wants to attack the problem when it’s helping you grow,
bringing in to countries like Spain 4% per annum growth?” he said.
“So whether it’s moral or not moral, leaving the destinations
damaged or not, there is a huge economic driver.
Lipman added: “If
a cruise ship is dumping too many people in too small an area, then
they shouldn’t be. I worried about that when I saw the first cruise
ships going to Cuba; it’s a big problem. It could be damaging your
assets, your coral reef, your resources, this tourist footprint
that’s wearing away the Taj Mahal, for instance, or your culture,
like the Hindu population in Bali watching hordes of crazy
Australians on their beaches. The cobbled streets of Prague which
began to be destroyed as masses of tourist buses arrived.”
He is optimistic
that governments, including Spain’s, and the tourism industry are
beginning to see sustainability as a goal. “It’s not an overnight
thing. Mallorca will have a difficult summer, but we have to balance
the positive with the negative. Tourism brings in jobs, income,
growth and a benefit across the economy, but we have to watch the
balance sheet, and while we’re not there yet, that is beginning to
be accepted.”
In Playa de Palma,
the party town around 10km from Mallorca’s capital, a sheepish trio
of Dutch men are returning a lifebelt they purloined in the early
hours to the side of their hotel pool. It’s early afternoon and the
resort is heaving. Singsongs have already started in the Bier Konig.
The bins and bars along the front are full. “It’s crazy already,
so the more people, the happier,” said Lucas, 24. “More women
would be fine. You come here to go a bit crazy and I think we spend
plenty of euros, so it’s good for Mallorca, too. See? We even
return the safety swim.”
The hotel
receptionist, Nico from Madrid, apologises for the noise from the bar
next door: “It’s a party place and the party is getting bigger
and bigger. It’s bad now, but come July and August, well, I would
like to take a holiday then myself.”
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