The Unnecessary Tourism Plan

Algaida. What do you know of the place? Do you know where it is? To be brutally honest, Algaida is one of the towns in Mallorca which is just there. On the road from Palma to Manacor, it is near enough to Palma to almost be a suburb, but it is far enough away to be somewhere that no one would necessarily venture to. It is on-the-way-to-somewhere-else Mallorca, in this case Manacor, and even one of its greater claims to fame, the Osborne Bull statue, is on the way, i.e. on the way to the next town, Montuïri, along the road to Manacor.

Algaida is a town of some 5,000 people. Like other parts of Mallorca, it has its prehistory (talayotic period) and its Conquest history; two farms were recorded under the Arabic name "al-gaida", meaning the wood, three years after Jaume I invaded. It has a few sites, such as the Cura sanctuary on the Puig de Randa, but it is not a town known for its tourism. On Algaida town hall's website, though there is supposedly an English section, when it comes to information such as that for fairs and fiestas and cycling routes, the menu lists these in English but the explanatory text is in Catalan. There is no tourism section as such. Of areas of responsibility of the town hall's seven councillors who form the administration, not one of them has any responsibility for tourism. It is a town where tourism, in terms of officialdom, does not exist.

Oddly though, Algaida council has just approved its plan for tourism development. The mayor says that it is a "realistic project" for a municipality in the plain of Mallorca which will preserve the character of the village and its environmental, social and cultural characteristics.

All of which sounds reasonable enough, even if it doesn't actually say what will be developed, if anything. But then, maybe there isn't really anything much to develop when it comes to a tourism plan. If so, then why has the town hall gone to the trouble of approving one.

The reason why is because it was told to. As with every other municipality in the Balearics, Algaida has had to come up with a tourism plan. The Balearics tourism minister, Carlos Delgado, pointed out this summer that under the 2012 Tourism Law, all municipalities had to have one. And he was right to have pointed this out, as many municipalities may not have realised that they had to have a plan. Under Chapter One, Article Eight of the law (to do with competences of various bodies), there was item F, the approval of municipal tourism development plans. And item C of Article Eight refers to the "promotion of tourist activities within the municipality", which in turn will be integrated into "tourism promotion ... in the context of the promotion of each of the Balearic Islands" (item B).

On the principle that tourism is Mallorca's most important industry and so on a further principle that any municipality, even one without a notable tourism industry of its own, should form part of this island-wide industry, it seems fair to expect individual towns to have plans. Fair, but what does having a plan achieve? In Algaida's case, its sites, its Bull, its cuisine (it is reckoned to be the centre of the Mallorcan style of cuisine) are all matters of record with or without a plan. What should Algaida now do? Throw money at promoting them? Money it almost certainly doesn't have.

The national government's attempt at reforming local authorities - one which would see responsibilities being assumed by higher authorities, i.e. the Council of Mallorca, in the case of smaller towns, those with fewer than 20,000 people - is currently stumbling along and not really getting anywhere. This reform points out that the scope of powers for "issues of purely local interest" is limited, and tourism is one such issue for which the scope of powers is limited. This, though, is both vague and too wide. There are towns in Mallorca which have very much stronger local interests in tourism than others, and some of these, like Algaida, are quite small. Muro has only a couple of thousand more inhabitants, but it is firmly a tourist town and one that definitely requires a tourism plan.

While the power remains, even if it is limited, then the Balearic Government can insist that each municipality draws up its own tourism plan, but where Algaida is concerned, how different is it to neighbouring or nearby towns? It isn't particularly.

Now that the Council of Mallorca has finally relented and accepted that it will take on responsibility for tourism promotion (it had said it wouldn't because it didn't have the money), it will presumably be made aware of whatever Algaida has in its plan. And once aware of this, then what?

It's all well and good there being different plans for different towns, some of which don't have much by way of tourism, and there being a moving of the tourism promotion responsibility furniture, but would it not be better if there were an overarching and integrated plan? Maybe there will be, but at present the requirements placed on towns like Algaida, where the absence of a councillor with responsibility for tourism emphasises tourism's relative lack of importance, seem unnecessary. It is a town like many others.

* Photo of Gràcia Sanctuary on the Puig de Randa, Algaida from Wikipedia.