The stuffed islands

This month of August, Mallorca broke its record for saturation (or overtourism or human pressure, whatever you prefer to call it). Specifically, on August 11 and 12, coinciding with the solar eclipse, there were 2.1 million people on the island, as you can read in the ARA Balears news report which collects the data from the Human Pressure Index published by the Balearic Institute of Statistics, Ibestat.

Specifically, we reached 2,117,026 people in Mallorca during those days in August. It is an alarming figure in itself, but we would be wrong to look at it in isolation, or to consider it the consequence of a one-off event: in this case the pretext was the eclipse, but it could have been any other. What this data does is corroborate a trend that is not only not being corrected, but is worsening every summer. We knew it and were warned about it, at least since 2016, when the economist Andreu Sansó, who was then the dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the UIB, published the study Projections of the daily demographic load of the Balearic Islands for different time horizons. In this work, Sansó pointed out that the minimum number of people who will coincide in the Balearics at the same time will increase by 32.7% in Mallorca, 28.8% in Menorca, and 39.8% in the Pityusic Islands. The figure repeated by the headlines is that there could be up to 25 people per square meter on the Mallorcan coast. The projection the study made was until the year 2030.

Ten years have passed since the publication of the study (which was commissioned by the Department of Innovation, Business and Tourism, then led by Iago Negueruela) and it seems we are well on our way to seeing those forecasts fulfilled, and perhaps even surpassed. Since the pandemic, the pace of massification has accelerated, just as global touristification has. There is tourism in war-torn countries, tourism in natural disasters, people exploding inside a submersible while trying to reach the ocean depths where the remains of the Titanic are located, and at various heights of Everest, there are tourist bottlenecks (a few days ago, two helicopters collided at a base camp on the mountain that not so long ago was mythical because it was supposedly inaccessible). In Mallorca, and in the Balearic and Pityusic Islands, touristification had been underway for fifty years and has taken on the same pace as the decomposition of the island in the hands of an out-of-control real estate market: as you can also read in ARA Balears, 40% of the homes sold in the Balearic Islands are purchased by foreigners. Many of these foreigners are speculators, and many others just want to have a house in a paradise that merely has the minor annoyance of residents. What is certain is that none of them arrived here on a small boat, which must reassure President Marga half of the Tramuntana mountain range has come by boat Prohens. Destroying one's own country by selling it to speculators, while blaming immigrants for the disaster, is an attitude made up of several ingredients, and all of them are toxic. There is supremacy, xenophobia, and aporophobia against the most vulnerable, and greed and servility towards the wealthy. While we continue to carve up the territory, we are getting closer and closer to the goal of 25 people per square meter trying to smear aftersun on themselves on the Mallorcan seashore. Confusing wealth creation with overstuffing, like the goose with its liver about to burst to make foie gras, is now only possible from a cynicism that is too abject.