MÉS denounces that the Council of Mallorca is reactivating tourist places without having updated the carrying capacity

PalmaThe debate over tourist containment in Mallorca no longer revolves solely around how many places there may be in the future, but also about what is happening with those that already exist and can return to the market. Since the entry into force of Decree Law 4/2025, the Council of Mallorca has sold 1,020 tourist places and reserved 876 more through the exchange, while it has renewed the authorizations of 1,649 multi-family dwellings that total 6,730 places, according to data provided by the institution in response to a battery of 32 questions from MÉS per Mallorca.

The figures were made public this Wednesday by the MÉS candidate for the Council, Miquel Oliver, who considers that with this data, the tourist containment speech of Llorenç Galmés's government is completely out of place. The fact that a place is sold or reserved through the exchange does not necessarily mean that a new tourist place is created. The Council maintains that the temporary exchange is nourished exclusively by places coming from previous cancellations and that, therefore, their commercialization does not increase the total authorized ceiling. In the call opened this March, for example, 1,069 places from previous cancellations were offered.

But Oliver argues that, even if there is no net increase in the total number, recovering places that had been out of the market for commercialization makes it difficult for the effective volume to decrease. The Council, on the other hand, presents this mechanism as a way to organize the legal offer without generating new places. In June, the institution defended that the temporary exchange allowed for “more order and more legal certainty” and insisted that the rotation of places did not increase the overall number.

6,730 renewed places

The other major block of data affects authorizations for tourist stays in multi-family dwellings. According to the responses from the Council released by MÉS, 1,649 authorizations representing 6,730 places have been renewed. Pollença, with 1,929 places, and Alcúdia, with 1,602, account for more than half of the total: 3,531. There are also renewals in municipalities with a high tourist supply such as Santanyí, Felanitx, Son Servera, Andratx, and Calvià.

The point that the sovereignists consider most inconsistent is that the Council itself allegedly acknowledged in its responses that it still does not have an updated study on the tourist carrying capacity of Mallorca. Oliver demands to know what territorial criteria are being used to make these decisions while this study remains pending.

The issue of carrying capacity has been on the table for at least two years. In May 2024, the Council announced the start of work to modify the Plan for Intervention in Tourist Areas (PIAT) with the explicit goal of calculating how many places Mallorca can support based on updated data and attending to the particularities of each area. At that time, it was based on the nearly 412,000 places registered in the official registry.

The Galmés government also announced that year its intention to reduce the maximum ceiling from 430,000 to about 412,000 places, a decrease of 4.2%. And this February, the Minister of Tourism, Guillem Ginard, reiterated that the moratorium cannot be lifted until the island councils approve the corresponding carrying capacity studies. Ginard argued that these studies should serve precisely to adjust the ceiling to the reality of the territory.

Hundreds of controls still to be resolved

One of the other issues raised by the sovereignists is the Council's ability to verify that the dwellings already in operation meet the required conditions. According to the data released by this party, the institution has carried out six control campaigns on tourist stays. MÉS asserts that there are 106 files with a favorable report, 203 with an unfavorable report, and 691 still pending resolution. However, the figures provided contain an inconsistency that requires clarification: the Council speaks, according to MÉS, of 900 controlled stays, while the sum of these three categories gives 1,000 files.

Oliver also demands to know what has happened with the cases that already have an unfavorable report. Regarding other requirements, MÉS asserts that the responses received do not include sanctioning files related to energy certificates and that there are 657 visits to accommodations to check water-saving systems, without specifying how many of them correspond specifically to tourist dwellings.

These data coexist, however, with an increase in sanctioning activity that the Council presented just a few days ago. The institution claims that between January and July it has initiated 146 sanctioning files against illegal tourist supply, 40% more, with sanction proposals totaling 4.37 million euros. It has also initiated 60 procedures to order the immediate cessation of activities considered illegal.

For Oliver, the data on the exchange, renewals, and controls demonstrate a distance between the discourse of containment and the daily management of the places. “One thing is what Galmés announces and another is what his government's data reflects,” he stated. MÉS now demands that the president of the Council explain how the reactivation of places and the renewals fit with the announced objective of reducing Mallorca's tourist ceiling.