Season start with war in the background

When Israel and the US started the war with Iran, on February 28th, the whole world shuddered, but in Mallorca the shiver had a particular tone: "Will this affect the tourist season?", was the question that anxious tourism sector businessmen and their servants, also known as elected rulers, were asking themselves. And many ordinary citizens, pure and simple taxpayers, were asking themselves the same question, because they have internalized an ancestral fear similar to that of the small Gallic village in the Astérix comics. Indeed, if those warriors of the Gallic forests lived in fear that one day the sky would fall on their heads, many Mallorcans today anxiously think about the possibility that tourists might stop coming one day. They have assimilated the idea that tourism is their source of sustenance ("tourism gives us food", they repeat, like a responsorial psalm) and that engaging in economic activities other than tourism is equivalent to a return to a life of scarcity and deprivation. (Due to their age, most have not experienced scarcity or deprivation, but within the repertoire of prejudices they have incorporated, it also includes intense aporophobia). Since then the war in Iran has continued its course, becoming more uncertain and alarming each day, and yet, tourists have come. With Easter, the tourist season properly begins: this year we can therefore say that the season runs from March 31 to October 31. These are seven full months, in contrast to the three that the traditional summer season lasted (which was confined to the two strict months during which people usually took holidays, July and August, with the addition of the second fortnight of June to open and the first of September to close). Now it lasts more than double, and the long-standing objective is to achieve a tourist season that lasts twelve months. Indeed, before we learned to say ‘deseasonalization’ without stumbling, reality made it clear that it was a mirage: we will not manage to distribute tourists better across the different seasons of the year, in order to avoid overcrowding, but rather we will have overcrowding all year round. Deseasonalization was another self-deception (in this case, of progressive origin) on par with ‘cultural tourism’: by promoting this, we have not obtained tourists who come to participate in our reading clubs and buy season tickets for the Teatre Principal and the Auditorium of Manacor, but rather tourists who visit prefabricated exhibitions, susceptible to being set up and visited in interchangeable destinations: Malaga (the model to be followed by our current rulers) is just as much a destination as Palma, for buyers of the holiday package for lovers of cultural and gastronomic experiences.When Iran began to fire its long-range missiles, a local media outlet published a report trying to warn that these rockets have enough power for one of them to fall on Mallorca. And what is much worse, it could fall during the peak tourist season. There is a not-so-subtle (but deeply rooted self-hatred) way, which consists of believing that we are too small for what happens in the world to affect us, or that our regrettable condition as a mature tourist destination makes us sweet as pie. Neither of these things is true: Mallorca, although it is difficult for a significant number of Mallorcans to believe, is part of this convulsed, violent, and unpredictable world that appears in the news. It is not only part of it, but it is a strategic point in the middle of the Mediterranean. And its tourist season is too.