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Thousands demonstrate against mass tourism in Mallorca

Thousands of people took to the streets on Saturday in the Spanish city of Palma de Mallorca to demonstrate against excess tourism, one of the main sources of wealth in the area, under the slogan "Mallorca is not for sale."

Published: 26 May 2024 08:55 CEST

Protesters hold a banner reading

Protesters hold a banner reading "Mallorca is not for sale" during a demonstration to protest against excess tourism and housing prices on the island of Mallorca in Palma de Mallorca on May 25, 2024. (Photo by JAIME REINA / AFP)

The demonstration took place two days after the collapse of a bar and restaurant popular with tourists in Mallorca’s capital city claimed the lives of four people, two of them German visitors, and injured 16. However, the demonstration was organised before this.

The protesters processed through the centre of Palma with those at the front holding a banner with the aforementioned motto and another with the message “If they deny us a roof, they deny us the future.”

READ ALSO – ‘Ibiza can’t take it anymore’: Spanish island plans mass tourism protest

The organisers of the demonstration say that overtourism or the excessive number of tourists has made housing astronomically expensive on the island. Mallorca has fewer than 1 million inhabitants, but 31 million passengers passed through its main airport 2023.

Similar protests have taken place in the Canary Islands, Barcelona and Seville.

According to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), Spain, the second most-visited tourist destination in the world after France, received 85 million foreign visitors in 2023.

READ ALSO: Inside Spain: Building safety and summer flights no longer low-cost

Of these, 14.4 million landed in the Balearic Islands, the archipelago of which Mallorca is the main island, followed by Menorca and Ibiza.

As a region, the Balearics received Spain’s second-highest number of foreign tourists in 2023, just behind Catalonia with 18 million.

Palma de Mallorca airport has Spain’s third-highest number of passengers passing through it, with 31 million travelling through it in 2023, according to data from the Spanish airport administrator AENA.

However, tourism remains a huge part of the islands’ wealth: its contribution – direct and indirect – to the Balearics’ GDP exceeded 40 percent before the Covid-19 pandemic and has already recovered, according to an analysis by CaixaBank.

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Spain's Málaga rolls out new rules to limit tourist rentals

According to a municipal estimate, there are already around 8,000 tourist rentals in Málaga, which have been taking over the city, outpricing locals and causing issues for neighbouring residents.

Locals have reacted to the general uptick in tourism by planning mass protests, similar to those in the Canary Islands and the Balearics and plastering anti-tourist slogans across the city walls.

In just the last three and a half months alone, there have already been 800 new applications for tourist licences, which is approximately eight every day.

This trend leads to “excessively high numbers,” Mayor Francisco de la Torre explained, noting that the desired balance between tourist activity and neighbourhood coexistence is at risk.

READ: Why Málaga has become a victim of its own success

As a result of this, Málaga City Council has been forced to implement a new series of control measures that will establish limits in saturated areas and favour long-term rentals instead.

The most important of these regulations requires that holiday homes have an independent access, as stated in the decree of the Junta de Andalucía, which came into force at the end of February.

General facilities such as electricity, water, telephone lines etc. must also be separate from those of the rest of the block of apartments.

This would mean no new tourist apartments located in buildings where locals and tenants reside and may mean that commercial buildings will become tourist rentals instead.

The new order will not, however, affect those apartments registered before the legislation came into force, meaning that the circa 8,000 rentals that already exist will be allowed to stay.

This requirement had already been contemplated in the General Málaga City Plan since 2011, but will only now begin to affect those 800 new applications for licences, as well as any more in the future.

De la Torre explained that they will study which of the 800 applications submitted under the new legislative framework meet this requirement, adding that “It will not be easy for there to be properties for tourist use with an independent entrance”.

“We recognise the positive role that tourism has in Málaga, of course, both in hotels and tourist housing, but we want everything to be done in terms of harmony and coexistence,” since “the number of tourist apartments is too high,” he continued.

He explained that the objective is that rental prices will not rise uncontrollably and the market will be healthier. He added that people who want to rent out their home as a vacation rental will have the option of offering it up as a long-term rental instead.

Málaga is not the only city that has been cracking down on tourist rentals recently. Seville has become the first city in Andalusia to actually ban new tourist licences in certain areas.

Seville’s mayor José Luis Sanz has already announced that he will not grant new licenses in the most saturated areas. “There is no room for one more tourist apartment,” he warned.

Licences will no longer be granted in 11 central neighbourhoods including Santa Cruz, Arenal, Alfalfa, San Bartolomé, Feria, Encarnación-Regina, Santa Catalina, San Lorenzo, San Gil, San Vicente and Triana.

And in the Galician city of Santiago de Compostela, hundreds of tourist apartments will be forced to close due to new rules that limit their use to ground and first floors in buildings only in the old town.

READ MORE: ‘We won’t look for renters’: Holiday lets in Spain’s Santiago forced to close

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