The Experiment That Went Wrong?

Catalonia has 699 kilometres of coast and each kilometre supports 18,268 tourists. The Balearics have 1,428 kilometres of coast and each kilometre supports 6,329 tourists. Great. On this basis the Balearics could accommodate three times as many tourists and still have loads of coast left over to take on many more. This is one way of looking at the statistics and is almost certainly not the right way of looking at them. Another way of looking at them is that Catalonia is tourism-sardine land and that the Balearics are mercifully not.

Ivan Murray, professor of geography at the Universitat de les Illes Balears and someone to whom I have referred several times previously, once described the mass of tourists who descend on the Balearics as "an aberration without parallel in the whole world". It might appear that he should have been talking about greater aberrations in Catalonia (and Valencia and Andalucía come to that) but there are distinct differences between the Balearics and Catalonia. The islands do not have anything like the land mass of Catalonia, they do not have equivalent centres of population to Catalonia and as islands they have a more fragile ecology than a region of the mainland. A more meaningful comparison might be that between the Balearics and the Canaries, which support 5,182 tourists for each of their 1,583 kilometres of coast.

The national environment ministry has released findings of a study of tourism numbers relative to Spanish regions with coastlines. The Balearics rank fourth in terms of this human pressure after Catalonia, Valencia and Andalucía, each with less coast than the Balearics. Tempting it might be to conclude that scope exists for the expansion of coastal tourism in the Balearics, but such a conclusion would also overlook differences in what generate tourism numbers in the different regions. There may be more theoretical human pressure on the coasts but the tourism numbers elsewhere are engaged in more diverse activities. Andalucía, for example, has its grand cities. It also has ski tourism in the Sierra Nevada. Balearics tourism, while not exclusively coastal tourism, does not have this diversity. The islands' tourism is overwhelmingly coastal and it is tourism that has threatened the islands' coasts with being overwhelmed.

Professor Murray makes the point that this tourism brings with it not only people but also infrastructure which has to support them. And a great deal of it is also coastal; marinas for example. The infrastructure does of course sprawl across whole islands, and Murray makes the further point that this is an infrastructure which has been designed partly if not mainly with tourism in mind.

I have previously spoken about the absurdity of the amount of real estate on Mallorca which lies unused and unproductive for several months of the year. Other investment, that in infrastructure, isn't unused but it has been designed and is being designed for a capacity of people who just aren't around for most of the year. The cost of the investment and of its maintenance contributes to a high cost of living but without the benefits of a genuine return for more than five or six months of the year (fewer, some might say).

The consequence of this is the total disequilibrium which exists in Mallorca's economy. When we consider the mess that the island and the country are in (and though the same disequilibrium exists elsewhere it is not as pronounced as it is in the Balearics), one can argue that tourism is both a solution and a problem. Indeed, to what extent has the financing of infrastructure and construction which guarantees a good return for only a limited period of the year contributed to the financial difficulties?

This infrastructure and construction has been primarily with one aim in mind - coastal development. And coastal development means tourism. The Balearics may have more coast than the likes of Catalonia but how much more coastal development can it take? The reform of the Coasts Law combined with the Balearics new tourism law suggests that there may well be more development. Environmentally it almost certainly makes no sense but economically it is also questionable. More development would not address the disequilibrium. By its very nature, coastal development serves one key purpose - to satisfy tourism for only part of the year.

Murray has described development in the Balearics as a testing ground, an experiment, one used to transfer the experience of tourism to other lands and to make what he calls "non-places". We certainly can't live without tourism in Mallorca and the Balearics, and it cannot be denied that tourism has brought enormous benefits. But have we, without really knowing it, experienced a tipping-point, one at which the experiment actually went wrong?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.