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.
Showing posts with label Coastal development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coastal development. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Conversion Rates: Town halls and hotels
The marathon of consultation and proposed amendments to the new tourism law in the Balearics is about to enter the stadium and take the last lap prior to its final presentation to the regional parliament at the end of this month. Since the start of December, every self-interested party and ones that are more altruistic have had their say, whether officially or unofficially.
The most significant movement by minister Carlos Delgado has concerned the say-so of local authorities - the island councils and the town halls - when it comes to proposed changes of use to existing hotel stock. The local authorities got into a fair old lather when they realised that a major reason for their existence - the approval or rejection of urban planning requests - was threatened by a government inclined to do the signing-off themselves.
The reasons for the local authorities having become so exercised about this possibility were obvious. They do have responsibilities for planning and they do, or so they would argue, have a better understanding as to what a change of use, be it to residential or co-participation (i.e. condohotels), would have on local areas.
A fear has been that the government, were planning left to it alone, would unleash a free-for-all of virtual deregulation, hence the objections of organisations such as the architects college in the Balearics and opposition political parties that this new urban planning would send the islands back to the bad old days of the sixties. Has this fear been overstated? Despite the go-ahead for new projects in Capdepera, Campos and Magalluf (all in theory earmarked for some years), the government has made it clear that it does not envisage massive new coastal construction; work under the provisions of the new law would be confined to conversion and this alone. Or would it?
Ultimately though, the objections of the town halls have been founded on their own self-interests, ones that do not, at first glance, appear to help in stripping out the sorts of delays and bureaucracy in planning requests that the government was hoping would be a consequence of centralised decision-making. The government has bowed to local authority pressure because on this issue it matters to town halls, many with Partido Popular mayors, that they hold onto their power. The government may otherwise have found itself with a real revolt on its hands from the party membership.
The law, as it now appears to be drafted, will give town halls the final say as to plans for hotel conversion. So will this mean that such plans are likely to be blocked or delayed by unco-operative local authorities? Not necessarily. Indeed, the government has been pretty crafty. Any conversion work is going to come with a 5% tax and this tax will end up in town hall coffers. A nice little earner for cash-strapped municipalities, and one that will have them salivating at the prospect and making pretty damn sure that the stamps have adequate rubber and are immediately to hand. Badly needed tax revenues can speed up even the most lethargic of public bodies.
There is, however, an unknown in the provision for conversion of use. It may become clearer once the bill is finally published, but changing a hotel to residential use means a loss of tourism offer. This much is obvious, but it has a planning dimension, namely that within municipalities there is a set amount of land that is designated as being for this tourism offer, i.e. it is accommodation or some other facility expressly with tourism in mind. Take some of this accommodation away, make it residential and what happens to that percentage which can be for tourism?
This is one reason why the government's insistence that it is not contemplating new hotel construction over and above the projects that are known about might not be all it seems. It is not as though it hasn't been, how can one put it, relaxed about other planning matters, such as regularising urbanisations previously considered illegal or giving the green light to projects that had been blocked, albeit that to have kept them blocked would have meant shelling out a whole load of compensation.
The furore over the hotel development near Es Trenc has given rise to further fears of coastal building deregulation, but the Es Trenc project is a specific case, one that will benefit an area of Mallorca underdeveloped in tourism terms. If the government does in fact end up permitting new construction within existing tourism centres, would this be such a bad thing? But it will still depend on whether local authorities agree. What's the tax revenue from new construction?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The most significant movement by minister Carlos Delgado has concerned the say-so of local authorities - the island councils and the town halls - when it comes to proposed changes of use to existing hotel stock. The local authorities got into a fair old lather when they realised that a major reason for their existence - the approval or rejection of urban planning requests - was threatened by a government inclined to do the signing-off themselves.
The reasons for the local authorities having become so exercised about this possibility were obvious. They do have responsibilities for planning and they do, or so they would argue, have a better understanding as to what a change of use, be it to residential or co-participation (i.e. condohotels), would have on local areas.
A fear has been that the government, were planning left to it alone, would unleash a free-for-all of virtual deregulation, hence the objections of organisations such as the architects college in the Balearics and opposition political parties that this new urban planning would send the islands back to the bad old days of the sixties. Has this fear been overstated? Despite the go-ahead for new projects in Capdepera, Campos and Magalluf (all in theory earmarked for some years), the government has made it clear that it does not envisage massive new coastal construction; work under the provisions of the new law would be confined to conversion and this alone. Or would it?
Ultimately though, the objections of the town halls have been founded on their own self-interests, ones that do not, at first glance, appear to help in stripping out the sorts of delays and bureaucracy in planning requests that the government was hoping would be a consequence of centralised decision-making. The government has bowed to local authority pressure because on this issue it matters to town halls, many with Partido Popular mayors, that they hold onto their power. The government may otherwise have found itself with a real revolt on its hands from the party membership.
The law, as it now appears to be drafted, will give town halls the final say as to plans for hotel conversion. So will this mean that such plans are likely to be blocked or delayed by unco-operative local authorities? Not necessarily. Indeed, the government has been pretty crafty. Any conversion work is going to come with a 5% tax and this tax will end up in town hall coffers. A nice little earner for cash-strapped municipalities, and one that will have them salivating at the prospect and making pretty damn sure that the stamps have adequate rubber and are immediately to hand. Badly needed tax revenues can speed up even the most lethargic of public bodies.
There is, however, an unknown in the provision for conversion of use. It may become clearer once the bill is finally published, but changing a hotel to residential use means a loss of tourism offer. This much is obvious, but it has a planning dimension, namely that within municipalities there is a set amount of land that is designated as being for this tourism offer, i.e. it is accommodation or some other facility expressly with tourism in mind. Take some of this accommodation away, make it residential and what happens to that percentage which can be for tourism?
This is one reason why the government's insistence that it is not contemplating new hotel construction over and above the projects that are known about might not be all it seems. It is not as though it hasn't been, how can one put it, relaxed about other planning matters, such as regularising urbanisations previously considered illegal or giving the green light to projects that had been blocked, albeit that to have kept them blocked would have meant shelling out a whole load of compensation.
The furore over the hotel development near Es Trenc has given rise to further fears of coastal building deregulation, but the Es Trenc project is a specific case, one that will benefit an area of Mallorca underdeveloped in tourism terms. If the government does in fact end up permitting new construction within existing tourism centres, would this be such a bad thing? But it will still depend on whether local authorities agree. What's the tax revenue from new construction?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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