The debate surrounding tourism, now transformed into a citizen's demand mobilized in the streets, goes back a long way. For decades we have known or debated about the tourism-based economic model, very often without having fully understood the implications of it all, what the deep root of the problem is, or what the possible viability of the solutions is. From environmentalism, it has always been told to us that tourism destroys the environment, because obviously where there is a hotel there could be a pine forest, and wild goats instead of a Dutch couple. My grandparents' entire generation, for example, saw how Mallorca transformed from a land of orchards and villages into an environment of hotels and apartment blocks, and some knew how to take advantage of the momentum of all this and became very rich, and began to see old Mallorca as a rat's nest, or of bewildered peasants who did not know how to adapt to the heated times of a gold rush.
Novels have been written about all this, perhaps too many novels already, but in the end everything has increased: more hotel rooms, more hotels, less nature, more planes and more tourism-related jobs... and among us all we were discovering what the pernicious effects of it all were, because there is no wealth that does not come with its share of misery. It is the price we have paid for living in Paradise, which was not ours but belonged to the highest bidder, who is no longer even our most skilled neighbor, but an international financial network with no vision of the country or of its own culture. We must have a very in-depth reflection on tourism and ourselves, but the problem is that reflection without power is useless.
We don't know how to offer an alternative; we don't know how to create wealth and employment in the 21st century without having to sell the grandparents' orchard to build a rural apartment complex there. More or less everyone has a piece of land cursed by the desires of others. And the problem is when it is so desired and is worth so much that the chain between parents and children is broken, and the children no longer have anywhere to fall dead, with all the literalness of the funereal expression.
And from here, now, the cries and opposition, which at the same time tries not to bother the tourist, but knows, down the street, that it is the enemy, the wolf in sheep's clothing, or the eternal emblem of hedonistic capitalism: it creates wealth but also inevitable inequalities, and collateral damage.
The alternative is also capitalism: luxury tourism, fewer and richer people, more bourgeois with inflated wallets and fewer drunken children of the European working class, which is, after all, what we have become after the end of old industrial capitalism. An annual maximum number of visitors must be set, and the tourist tax increased, with which to recover housing for the locals. These are feasible measures, common sense, achievable with parliamentary majories, meaning that we cannot expect them to be implemented. The usual thing is to muddle through, at the end of August take stock and then give four speeches, five if it's an election year.
