The High Summer Of Saturation

It's the ducks which do it of course: the ducks and Pep Guardiola. The Manchester City supremo may be a Premier League virgin, but he'll do as a representative. The football season returned not so much with a bang but with the bank vault having been blasted open with a nuclear device and a vast mushroom cloud of cash obliterating the summer skies as the wads rained down on agents and their eager clients. What madness it is. As someone said, money, where English football is concerned, has ceased to have any value.

Curiously, the great stakeholder base, which could once afford a speck on the terraces, remains intact but now scrapes its pennies together in order to pay its tithes to the Murdoch empire and the bastard descendant of Maggie's privatisation of the spun-off telecommunications wing of the Post Office. Fans howl for millions more to be spent in pursuit of a grand marketing masterplan. When money loses its value, the money is meaningless. It's like Monopoly, only million times greater.

This is just as well. The bars (British) of Mallorca count the days until the new season starts. And so it did start, as it always does right around the time that summer begins to splutter before hurtling into its tailspin. This might also seem curious, as high summer is still here, but it's the ducks (as well as the Premier League) which suggest otherwise.

The day of Assumption, 15 August, marks the swim for the ducks of Can Picafort and summer's peak. No doubt the occupancy numbers will remain close to maximum, but once the peak has been reached, there's no mistaking the signs of summer in descent. Slow at first, and then suddenly it's gone. Again.

And as it makes its descent, what will there be to debate? With almost total certainty we know that Mallorca's saturation point of last mid-August will have been surpassed this mid-August. If it hasn't been, then politicians will be disappointed. A point of argumentation will have been undermined.

But what is this saturation? Is it a state of mind rather than wholly physical? What constitutes saturation? The government is hiring experts to explain all. To what end? Will there be controllers at Son Sant Joan with counters which, when they reach a predetermined number, will trigger the raising of barriers? Mallorca's full. Go home.

This saturation does of course bring with it riches and wealth. More riches and wealth. We should be grateful that it does. Shouldn't we? But the riches are often meaningless. They find their way into the investment portfolios of some of Spain's wealthiest individuals. Pickings for others are meanwhile slim ones, sufficient to enable a reasonable winter return on the dole, but slim nonetheless. Unlike football, alienation of the stakeholder base has existed over time. It howls for more money of its own, not for meaningless amounts to be spent on fantasies and the fantastic.

Saturation is not egalitarian. But then tourism never has been. Oh, an original philosophy where the tourist was concerned was predicated on an ideal of equal rights to a foreign holiday (the philosophy of Horizon's Vladimir Raitz anyway). But the equal distribution of wealth has never been part of the equation: only the generation of wealth.

The government would like there to be greater distribution. It may succeed, but will this turn back the tide of negativity, for which saturation is now a chief conspirator? By its very narratives, the government has fostered negativity. It demands that there is now sustainable tourism. Logically this means that tourism, as it is, is unsustainable. Meaning what exactly? Just as saturation has not been defined or quantified, so sustainability is not qualified. Saturation and non-sustainability are thus states of mind, allowed to enter society's consciousness and to become accepted wisdoms.

As part of its sustainability message, the government wishes to now inform the public about the value of tourism. Yet it has allowed a perception of lack of value to take hold, one to be addressed fiscally with a tax. Its mantras include that of "quality", the indefinable platitude that is sustainability's fellow traveller on the way to non-saturation.

So as summer starts its descent, the saturation will lessen. There will still be the Palma-centric obsessing with cruise passengers, a class of saturators divorced from the rest of the island, but otherwise the numbers will fall, just as fall comes round until finally the question is asked: where did everyone go? If only some thousands of summer visitors could be magically moved to November or December. If only ... .

And then, as thoughts begin to turn to next summer, there will be the other saturation. Cyclists. Keys to sustainability and tackling seasonality but the objects of venom. What does this island want? Does it know? And come next August high summer, nothing will have changed. Let's play Monopoly.

When It Rains, It's Colapso

The weather was a bit iffy last Thursday. Highs only around 23 degrees, some rain about, mostly cloudy all day. What to do, if you're a tourist? Head to the nearest hire-car agency. Look at all those cars that have been brought over from the mainland. Look at them all, many of them from agencies paying nothing in taxes. That's a story in itself. Part of the story means that these immigrant vehicles add to the "colapso", taking advantage of roads and car parks for which there are no contributions. 

They love a good colapso in Mallorca. Love talking about it anyway. It has nothing to do with vino, and thank God it doesn't. All those hire cars with all those tourist drivers with little clue where they're going and their task is made more difficult by having had a glass or several. Mind you, it's enough to drive you to drink: driving when everything's colapso, as in the traffic. Logjam, standstill, collapsed: there's your colapso.

It happens all the time when there's dodgy weather. This is what you get from alternatives to sun and beach. When the sun doesn't shine, when the beaches are empty, when the poolsides have not been attacked from the earliest hour by the race to lay the towels, what is there to do? Yep, let's all go to Palma. All those with a hire car, that is; those who are prepared to splash out for one. Pity the poor economy-class all-inclusive vacationer, wandering lonely as a cloud, several clouds, thick clouds and wondering what on Earth to do. Or maybe you shouldn't pity them. That's up to you.

Of course it isn't only the all-inclusive guest who does the in-resort wandering. There are the other hotel occupants. The hire-car drivers are all in holiday rentals, the thousands upon thousands of those. That's what the regional government seems to think at any rate. Whatever accommodation the drivers have, it's always the same: head for Palma.

Someone has suggested - Javier Mato, writing in "Preferente" - that there should be information available for tourists, advising them what to do on an iffy day, warning them that if they go to Palma, they'd wish they hadn't bothered. Jam after jam, nowhere to park. It sounds a good idea, until Javier mentions that this would be information in hotels. Eh? In hotels? It would need to be in holiday rentals - legal or not - because the government says that colapso occurs because of the rentals.

Why aren't there park and ride schemes? Like with the car park that was created for just this purpose but which has since become unused, unloved and unmanaged. Why not? Because local authorities, let's them call them Palma's town hall, are useless. Too busy mucking around with closing roads in the city centre than doing something sensible like providing park and ride. There again, the turning into Antoni Maura off the Paseo Marítimo was bad enough as it was, what with being one lane, there being pedestrian crossings, buses (public and excursion) blocking the way and traffic lights that gave no more than thirty seconds of green.

What would make things really ducky would be for an iffy day to coincide with twenty odd thousand cruise passengers traipsing around the city. Colapso? You bet it would and would include the loos. The system couldn't take all the bar bogs being flushed at one go by the cruise passengers and the hire-car occupants, stuck in jams for hours, haring to the nearest bar to relieve themselves.

Why not take a bus instead? Or the train? Are you kidding? Ever tried getting on a bus to Palma on a good day let alone a bad one? You might succeed, but then there's the getting back as well. The train? What train, if you are in Pollensa, Alcudia, Cala Ratjada, Cala Millor, Cala d'Or, Colonia Sant Jordi, Magalluf, Andratx?

Why go to Palma at all? What about other parts of the paradise island? Fancy Soller? Not by car you shouldn't. The train? A good alternative, if there were space. Large (largish) towns like Inca? Why would anyone want to go to Inca? Actually, there are some interesting parts and it has what seems to be the main reason to want to go to Palma - shopping, though not on anything like the same scale admittedly.

How about mooching around the small towns and villages? Petra, Sant Joan, Lloret and many others? Well, how about it? Does it cross anyone's mind to do this? It should do. You never know, you might be surprised by what you find. Mallorca.

Overwhelmingly though, the choice will be Palma, which will be overwhelmed to a greater degree than it constantly appears to be. Mallorca is geared to two things - sun and beach. Take them away, if only temporarily, and there's colapso.

Monsters Of The Seas

Harmony Of The Seas will bring more than 100,000 passengers to Palma over the course of the summer and into autumn. On Monday the world's largest cruise ship will arrive. Its maiden voyage from Barcelona has had among its passengers some 2,500 journalists, travel agents and others from the tourism industry. You could say that Royal Caribbean has pushed the boat out in terms of attracting publicity.

When the ship arrived in Barcelona prior to its voyage, there was a protest. It wasn't large, only some 150 people. It wasn't, said the organisers, against tourists but against the tourism industry. Nevertheless, coaches taking passengers to cruise ships in the port were jeered. The protest was motivated by what is now becoming a familiar theme - the mass tourism of these monsters of the seas is not sustainable for the destinations that are visited.

The Balearic tourism minister, Biel Barceló, wishes to set a limit on the number of ships on any given day. He accepts that the number of four is subjective. He might also accept that the citing of the eight ships on one day in early May did not involve 22,000 passengers traipsing through the streets of the city. Three of the ships were home base. People were getting on, people were getting off and being taken to the airport. As ever, you can use numbers to suit an argument.

And the argument is being had over and over. The mantra of this summer is overcrowding. Competitor destination instability, huge supply of accommodation, colossal cruise ships. This is mass on a scale that not even Mallorca has previously experienced.

How does the government deal with it? Barceló suggests that there will be regulation in order to limit the number of ships, the cruise operators having given the suggestion of a limit short shrift. Spreading the load across the course of a week rather than loading influx on to one or two days sounds like common sense. It is also in keeping with Barceló's wish to spread the total tourism load over more months than is the case. It's easier said than done though, and he knows it.

And members of the government doesn't necessarily agree. President Armengol has said this week that she is against limits being placed on the number of tourist arrivals. She wants to spread the tourism load not by smoothing out the number which currently comes but by adding to it in the lower months of the year, thereby assisting with creating greater employment. Barceló has flip-flopped on the question of a limit. He has said that it would be difficult but he also intimated that he would like there to be one.

Barceló is not wrong in believing it would be difficult. The cruise-shop story is something of a sideshow. It only affects Palma. The mass is shortlived, even if it can be repeated almost daily. By far the most important contributory factor to the Barceló overcrowding theme is holiday accommodation. As he struggles to find "consensus" for planned legislation, that has been made ever more difficult by Brussels and the Spanish Supreme Court.

The European Commission issued a report earlier this week in which it said that bans on the so-called collaborative (sharing) economy services such as Airbnb and also Uber (for quasi-taxi service) should only be the "last resort". The Commission wants common rules to apply and has distinguished between individuals who rent out their properties on an occasional basis and operators who rent out in a "professional capacity". For the latter, it is suggesting that there should be a "threshold" on the level of activity but it is certainly not proposing onerous restrictions: quite the opposite.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has this week ruled against the regional government in Madrid. It had decreed that a holiday rental via, for example, an Airbnb-promoted property must have a minimum stay of five days. The court has ruled that this is a restriction of competition. It might not appear to have too much relevance for Mallorca, given that tourists typically stay for longer than five days, but it does relevance insofar as the Supreme Court is laying down principles of competition, and they are not so far removed from those of the European Commission.

Against the background of all this has come a further report this week. It states that the availability of holiday rental in Spain as a whole now exceeds the supply of "regulated" accommodation (hotels, for instance) for the first time. It is said that there are 2.7 million holiday rental places as opposed to 2.4 million regulated places, and it is most unlikely that this trend will be reversed. In addition to Brussels and the Supreme Court, there is the National Competition Commission in Madrid: it is against bans on Airbnb and others.

There is a perfect storm that is creating overcrowding in Mallorca. The weather will be calm on Monday, but might a different storm brew? The protest in Barcelona will surely not have gone unnoticed.

Pave Paradise, Put Up A Parking Lot

When Joni Mitchell wrote "Big Yellow Taxi" the world had yet to acquire the environment. It was there right enough but it was regarded with less than due deference. Among the limited cadres of the environmentally aware, who were to form an expeditionary eco-warrior force that Friends of the Earth (founded 1969) and others were to convert into a full-scale army, were the acid heads of Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon.

Joni, one of those residents, penned "Big Yellow Taxi", she has explained, when she saw a vast parking lot edging its way towards green mountains in Hawaii. "It broke my heart, this blight on paradise." Though arguably not one of her finer compositions, the song, courtesy of commercial success and its undisguised sentiment, probably helped to tune environmental perception as well as anything else had up to the point that it was released in 1970.

The line about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot had an alliterative power that spoke of the absurdity of condemning the environment to the voracious appetite of not only the automobile industry. It seems like a world away now, a time when nary a second thought was given to concreting and tarmacking over Mother Nature in order to allow the consumer society to park its car. The line, though, still makes abundant sense. It has survived as a form of eco-slogan, one current in the present.

There is a great deal of talk about cars, their movement and their parking in Mallorca. Cars are the present-day manifestation of Balearisation, the uncontrolled development of the coasts that paved dunes and put up hotel blocks. While hotels continue to attract the ire of the contemporary eco-sound political class in Mallorca (such as Més, the eco-nationalists), cars have been manoeuvred onto the environmentalist front line. Barely a day passes without cars and their associated needs, notably parking, making the news.

Let's consider some cases in point from the paradise island. Cars are to be banned from Palma's old town (unless they belong to residents). Cars being brought to the island by tourists or car-hire firms may or may not be subject to a tax. Cars are to be found creating hazards because of their parking on roads leading to unspoiled beaches (so unspoiled that people go to them in their droves and so therefore in their cars). Cars, because of their pollutant effect, are the reason for considering a  special environmental tax on large retail outlets; the car parks are so massive that they form pollution blackspots (or maybe hotspots). Cars, on account of pedestrianisation schemes, are, ironically, being deterred from entering the front line, such as in Puerto Pollensa. Cars are not to be parked (Son Serra de Marina) because they block the view. Cars, back in Palma, are to be eased away from the Paseo Marítimo by removing some parking and some lanes. This is part of the calming of traffic in Palma. The paradise island, also dubbed the island of calm by the Catalonian artist Santiago Rusiñol many a long year ago, is to retrieve a little piece of calm.

The regional government is working on a grand scheme to promote alternatives to cars. Buses, in other words. You might have encountered some of those, the ones which appear to be on unfamiliar terms with the maintenance and service departments. But not all. Some of them are even brand spanking new. And the government would need there to be a great deal of brand spanking new ones if its grand plan is to make any sense: not, one suspects, that it will do.

There is no harm in attempting to alter travel habits, but is the government aware of just how great car ownership is in Mallorca? You would have to assume that it is. Even members of the government have cars and some of them will probably have families whose combined car ownership equates to a small fleet.

The implied demon in all this car talk isn't the local resident, despite his three or four vehicles, it is the visitor and the devil's work of car-hire companies not registered for tax on the island. But it isn't typically a bunch of tourists clogging up approach roads to unspoiled beaches. It's the ones who live here, who, even if there were such a thing as a bus service to unspoiled beaches, wouldn't use it anyway.

But buses need somewhere to park as well, just as they need roads, while the  public transport alternative can always fall foul of other eco-interests. Take the rail extension to Alcudia. They could never agree on it because of the competing environmental arguments regarding the proposed routes.

Pave paradise. Parking lots. They wouldn't have given it much thought back when Joni wrote the song. Mallorca hadn't really acquired wealth then. It soon did, and it needed somewhere to park it.

The Environmental Crisis Coming Our Way

"The Guardian" joined the Mallorca overcrowding bandwagon at the weekend. Apart from a factual error - the date of the introduction of the tourist tax - and certain points that needed qualifying, such as all those cruise ship passengers supposedly inundating Palma on one day, it was reasonable enough. Being "The Guardian", an environmentalist was sounded out. A GOB spokesperson, Gerard Hau, said that this will be a "crisis" year, "a crazy year, the infrastructure will not cope".

You would expect GOB to say this, but are forecasts of some touristic Armageddon just environmentalist hot air? We will only know once high summer arrives, but the current prognosis goes something like this: airport stretched beyond its limit; Palma crowded out by ships and passengers; roads chockful of hire cars; ever more thousands of apartments being rented out; the hotels full; limits needing to be placed on the numbers on unspoiled beaches; supermarket supplies questionable; water supplies threatened; outdated sewage-treatment plants incapable of taking the pressure. Too many planes, too many ships, too many cars, too many people.

It should be a bonanza, but the anxieties and fears seem to outweigh the joy and the benefits. Mallorca, safe haven destination, reaping the rewards of others' hardships: all systems go, until the dam bursts and the haven is flooded by a tsunami of human pressure.  

To take a specific. Water. The geographer Dr. Ivan Murray from the University of the Balearic Islands, one of Mallorca's most often quoted experts on the impact of tourism, said the other day that while a resident might consume 125 litres per day, a tourist will get through 440. One might query how he gets to these figures, but he is not the first one to point to the vast difference in terms of water usage. With Mallorca having endured a dry autumn and winter, we all know that water supplies are not as they should be. Thank Heaven that there was the foresight to build the Andratx and Alcudia desalination plants, barely used until now.

But desalinated water costs more than the water supplied from aquifers and reservoirs, and this water - from whatever source - goes for example, as Gerard Hau observed, towards the swimming pools and gardens of residential tourists. These aren't only foreigners. There are plenty of Mallorcan-owned second holiday homes.

Hau, it might seem strange, suggested that it is better to have "drinking ghettoes" such as Magalluf rather than have "intellectual types who tramp over everything in their search for the untouched bit, the original Mallorcan". Strange but not wholly wrong. There is a name for it. The Benidorm Effect. Pack tourism densely into specific areas, introduce sound environmental efficiency controls, and the overall cost and damage to the environment and resources are reduced.

Inefficiency is increased by having high dispersal of tourism, and there is ever greater dispersal in Mallorca, partly aided by legislation. The last government made easier the creation of rural tourism accommodation, one needing water and other services and so adding to inefficiency. It seemed minded to also permit developments such as polo fields. These might seem benign, but not when the supplies of water have to be factored in. Likewise with golf courses. Murray reckons that the 440 litres per day doubles if a tourist plays golf. His calculation is obviously not solely on direct personal consumption but the volume of water required to permit this type of tourism activity.

There again, if tourism is a vital industry, which it is, is this water usage any more detrimental than the vast amounts needed for agriculture? Tourism's contribution to island GDP is massively greater than that of agriculture, but then agriculture, with its huge appetite for land (and so therefore water), is equally vital. Citing GDP figures gets one only so far when produce, livestock, landscape, rural communities and employment need to be taken into account.

Water is just one example but it is a fundamental one. The lack of rainfall has sharpened minds, as have all the forecasts regarding numbers, be they for people or means of transport. But what, other than drafting drought plans, has the government been doing to prevent this being a "crisis" year? What actually can it do? Biel Barceló, the tourism minister, talks on the one hand of it being impractical to put a cap on numbers - preferring instead that the load is spread and therefore assists with tackling seasonality - but he also implies a cap. If there are finite numbers for hotels, so there should be for other accommodation.

Yet for all this, can anyone say what the cut-off point should be? Does anyone know for certain what this might be? Is talk of "crisis" correct or is it just environmentalist propaganda? We may be about to find out. But if systems start collapsing, don't blame the tourists. Forward planning had required more than a couple of desalination plants.

* http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/14/gridlock-tourists-terrorism-spain-balearics

Banning Tourist Cars Or Not

This week's foreign media Mallorca and Balearic alarm-raising headlines had to do with cars. Tourists cars are to be banned from the Balearics, said one headline. This stemmed principally from a piece in La Vanguardia, the Barcelona-based national paper which, given its location, takes a keen interest in that city's tourism affairs (of which there are many) and thus considers other destinations by means of comparison.

The background to all this is familiar enough. The regional government, especially Biel Barceló, has been making reference to overcrowding and saturation for several months. A ban or a limitation on cars has been most spoken about in respect of Formentera. As the island has no airport, it can get overrun by the volume of vehicles: this was certainly how things were being described last summer.

A ban on the entrance of cars to it and to the other islands would be extremely difficult to enforce. It would run up against challenges from the ferry operators and its legality might be questionable. The Balearics are part of Spain, so how can you stop other Spaniards moving freely? And that's before one gets to other European nationalities. The example is cited of Capri, where non-resident vehicles are banned during the summer, but Capri is really tiny and is also right next to the mainland. The comparison, even with Formentera, isn't as strong as some might think, not least because of the differing nature of the islands' governmental administrations.

Another measure is some form of tax. The possibility of this was raised some weeks ago, with imported hire cars being its target along with tourist vehicles. While a charge on hire cars might be possible (as a way of dissuading agencies from bringing ever more cars onto the islands' roads), one for private vehicles would come up against European law. Toll roads are perfectly legitimate but tariffs to simply use roads are not.

The number of vehicles on the road, especially in high summer, is obviously a reflection of the number of tourists, and as this number continues to rise and is expected to rise again this summer, the whole issue of human saturation has arrived centre-stage in Balearics' tourism politics and possible policies.

On 10 August last year, the population of the islands exceeded two million. This was the total population. One can of course ask how the number is arrived at, but assuming that it has some legitimacy it would have acted as confirmation of how much human pressure there can be on any given day in high summer. This maximum value has risen every year since the turn of the century except for one small blip downwards in 2009. In 2000, the maximum, also on 10 August, was 1,543,160. So, tourism has contributed to a rise of over 460,000, has it?

Well no, because the registered population increased by almost 280,000 between 2000 and 2015. Tourism, therefore, has added under 200,000 over the same period, though even here one has to be aware of the caveat that not all this additional number is made up by tourists.

Nevertheless, the increase is significant, and last year's maximum represented an increase of over 40,000 on 7 August 2014, when the population reached its maximum. This wasn't the largest rise since 2000 but it was one of the larger, and crossing the two million mark might be said to have been a crossing of a psychological barrier. Two million are too many, however ill-defined too many might be. Which is of course the nub of the issue. How many people can the Balearics cope with? How many should they cope with?

Saturation, human pressure, overcrowding are going to be themes of this coming summer, even more so than last year.

This said, we already have the sound of the doubting voices ringing in our ears. Despite current tourism performance, there is the familiar, typically anecdotal denial. Businesses are reporting a bad start to the season: the normal response to what statistics would suggest otherwise. Somewhere between the anecdotes and the statistics lies the truth, though it's anyone's guess as to what that might be.

Anyway, for what it's worth, a survey by the Gadeso research organisation here in Mallorca reports that a half of hoteliers expect this season to be better than last year. With all the visitors we can supposedly anticipate this season, one would have thought that they would all be expecting a better year. But maybe the other half see themselves threatened by holiday rentals. They may actually be right.

The Rise Of Tourismphobia

It's some five years since I wrote an article entitled "Tourismphobia". The word was a straight lift from Spanish. "Turismofobia" was a condition that was being taken increasingly seriously in the summer of 2011. It was largely attributed to the difficult economic circumstances of the time and to the potential undermining of the principle of reciprocity that exists in the relationship between tourism and its destinations. I observed in 2011 that this reciprocity is "one under which a destination opens its doors, accepts there will be changes but expects some compensation". So long as an equilibrium has been and is maintained, any "underlying social tensions caused by tourism" are minimal.

Five years ago, there was little evidence of this phobia in Mallorca, despite the economic crisis. But it was evident elsewhere. Barcelona was a prime example, and the phobia was to get worse, especially in La Barceloneta, where uncontrolled, illegal rentals were attracting a type of youth tourism that was driving residents to despair. Barcelona was also being overrun. There were, some felt, simply too many tourists.

In the Canary Islands, and Tenerife in particular, there was a feeling of "social divorce" arising from the scale and type of tourism. The phobia was never widespread there, but it was sufficiently obvious for efforts to be made in involving local people in tourism and in its promotion and in communicating the benefits of tourism. A similar campaign in Barcelona made even more strenuous efforts in this regard.

Tourismphobia was a minority social problem, but as I concluded in 2011 its growth could not be discounted. With the graffiti in Palma, might one suggest that the phobia is on the increase?

The regional government - Biel Barceló anyway - has sought to downplay the graffiti. Yes, it sends out a bad message, but an "act of vandalism" shouldn't be blown out of proportion. And up to a point, he is right. From the style of the writing, it is thought that the graffiti was the work of no more than two people. Hardly a mass movement, therefore.

Caution needs to be exercised in extrapolating from a possibly isolated incident in saying that tourismphobia - a social rejection of tourism, if you like - is on the increase. In Palma and in Mallorca, it might require some social attitudes research, rather than anecdote, to establish the existence of the phobia: such research has been carried out in Barcelona. But the Palma graffiti may well be a response to what the Spanish tourism journalist, Xavier Canalis, has drawn attention to: tourism gentrification of cities. This gives rise to a fundamental question: who are cities for, residents or tourists?

Palma's centre has experienced an increase in the number of boutique hotels, an increased number of passengers from huge-capacity cruise ships and also a significant increase in the availability of private accommodation. It is the latter, more so than the others, that has raised concerns with politicians. But it is this very expression of concern, and not just regarding Palma by any means, that might be said to contribute to tourismphobia. 

The political narrative at present is focused on overcrowding - the saturation of tourist areas. It also embraces the nature of employment (worker exploitation) and the need for sustainability. The tourist tax, aka the sustainable tourism tax, comes with its in-built narrative, and it is one predicated on a need to extract dues from tourists to address damage caused by tourism (and therefore the individual tourist). In addition, the narrative demonises hotels, a means of attracting tourists who threaten this sustainability. And now, we also have what seems to be a crisis of lack of accommodation, the consequence of property being made available for ever more tourists.

Javier Vich, the president of Palma's hoteliers, has suggested that it is government policy which gave rise to the graffiti. What he was implying is that the more politicians refer to negative consequences of tourism, then the more the public becomes conscious of them and the more, therefore, that attitudes shift away from what was that one-time reciprocity. The consequence is tourismphobia.

Negative attitudes towards tourism have, in recent years, resulted from the "drunken tourism" of Magalluf and from the impact of all-inclusives. The Palma slogans are not representative of either but appear instead to reflect the city's tourism gentrification allied to apparent overcrowding. Such attitudes can be addressed, as in Magalluf. Although the success is open to debate, the process of transformation may well bring about more positive attitudes. Meanwhile, however, there is the constant narrative that can only help to fuel negative perceptions, and the very conceptualistion of the tourist tax adds to these. There is majority public support for the tax, and because the tax is based on a negative premiss of righting damage, the very existence of the tax can only add to negative attitudes.

Podemos Takes Aim At Hoteliers Over Holiday Rentals

Laura Camargo, the Podemos number two in the Balearic parliament, certainly knows how to win friends and influence people. Or rather, she knows how not to win friends because she isn't particularly interested in their being her friends.

We are talking Mallorca's hoteliers and indeed the hoteliers on the other islands. They, says Laura, consider the islands to be their "cortijos", which literally means farmhouses or farm cottages but in a broader sense can be taken as meaning their domains. The hoteliers treat the Balearics like they own them but there are, as Laura has been at pains to point out this week, "many more people who have the right to offer accommodation to the tourists that we receive each year". Podemos has confirmed that it will be taking part in dialogue to arrive at the best possible agreements on the regulation of holiday rentals. And if the tourist tax is anything to go by, then this probably translates as what Podemos wants on holiday rentals will be what the legislation ultimately contains.

As mentioned in this column last week, it is the government's intention to have legislation signed, sealed and delivered within six months. Whether this schedule takes account of all the haggling with Podemos is not known. But legislation is on its way. What it will look like, no one can say with much certainty at this point. Of elements of the law that have been creeping out, we understand that town halls will be able to determine areas which cannot be used for tourist rental (a different emphasis to saying which ones can be used), that there will be a set of quality standards introduced for accommodation, that a maximum number of places will be imposed according to the type of property and that any property has to be five years old in order to be eligible for tourist rental.

The thinking behind this latter point is to prevent speculative developments with tourist rental alone in mind. It isn't one that the Partido Popular is wholly in agreement with. It doesn't want this provision but nor does it want more supply of accommodation. Which sounds as if it remains inherently opposed to a form of regulation which would facilitate greater supply, as in it remains opposed to apartments being openly marketed as tourist rentals.

All will be revealed over the coming months, but in the meantime there have been a couple of revelations this week that make one wonder as to how permissive any holiday rental regulation might be and also make one wonder as to the veracity of the notion that Podemos is behind what are two inextricably linked pieces of legislation: those for the tourist tax and holiday rentals.

The first of these was the lesser of the revelations, as we have known for some time that the tourism minister, Biel Barceló, has concerns about overcrowding because of the sheer volume of tourists in peak season. He said on Monday that "we have to get used to there being limits on beaches and other natural spaces, just like at a cinema or a football stadium". He made much of the fact that the current tourist model generates inequalities, pointing to the time in the 1980s when the Balearics had the highest per capita income in Spain courtesy of six million tourists. With more than double this number now, the Balearics have slipped to seventh in the income stakes.

The problem for Barceló is being able to define the type of limits that might be suitable. The second problem is how such limits might be enforced. But inherent to both these problems, in the immediate short term, is the issue of holiday rentals. More permissive regulation doesn't per se crank up the volume of accommodation to unsustainable levels, but it has to be reasonably permissive in order to tackle the blatant abuses that are being perpetrated and will continue to be without highly effective enforcement. It is this illegal supply that is a contributor to the overcrowding, but so it might be said is the legitimate supply. Barceló was not looking at the immediate short term, rather at five, ten, twenty years from now, but does one conclude that there is to be a strategic objective to cut hotel places?

The third problem for Barceló is that drawing on what was the situation thirty years ago is not a solid argument for basing decisions on in the current day. Apart from anything else, it may be that other regions have caught up rather than the Balearics going backwards. His analysis may well be simplistic.

The second revelation came from "Preferente" on Tuesday this week. An article said that three weeks before the general election in December, Barceló and President Armengol met with the grand hoteliers of the Balearics. They included apparently Fluxá, Escarrer and Barceló (Simón, that is). What was said at this gathering, according to the article, was that Podemos had the government (PSOE and Més) by the short and curlies over the tourist tax, intimating that it was basically Podemos who were driving it.

The hoteliers, it would appear, bought this, though one finds it difficult to believe that they, given who they are, would simply swallow the argument. The implication, though, was that both PSOE and Més were less evangelistic about the tourist tax than may have been thought. PSOE perhaps, but Més? The article then said that Armengol had been lying to the hoteliers and pointed, rightly enough, to the fact that it was PSOE and Més who between them had brought the tourist tax legislation before parliament. Podemos, it shouldn't be forgotten, abstained on the first pass at legislative approval because its demands were not being met in respect of, for instance, geographical distribution of the tax revenue and its sole use for environmental purposes. This isn't to deny that Podemos is highly influential in the drafting of the tax legislation, but for PSOE and Més to have apparently sought to distance themselves from it at that meeting does take some believing.

If nothing else, and if what was said at that meeting is indeed accurate, then it exposes the purely political nature of current tourism decision-making. The tax is one thing, and the holiday rentals will doubtless be another. In truth, this is no way to be running or legislating for Mallorca's principal industry. But then we probably already knew this.