Celestí Alomar dies, driving force behind the ecotax

PalmaCelestí Alomar, former Minister of Tourism of the Balearic Government and one of the key figures of the first Pacte de Progrés, has died. Alomar, born in Llubí in 1949, held the Ministry of Tourism between 1999 and 2003, during the first Government of Francesc Antich, and was one of the main promoters of the ecotax, after a strong confrontation with the hotel employers' association. Alomar, also a geographer, maintained an active presence in public debate on tourism, territory, and the economic future of the Islands until recent years, also as a columnist for ARA Balears.

In his texts he defended the need to overcome excessive dependence on tourism, preserve the territory against real estate and tourist pressure, and move towards a more diversified economy. Even in 2026, he had intervened in the debate on the current Sustainable Tourism Tax: he defended updating its amount, but warned that it should not be conceived as a tool to reduce tourist arrivals, but rather to return resources to the protection of the heritage, landscape and culture of the Islands.

Alomar was one of the founders, on February 18, 1976, of the Socialist Party of the Islands, which would later become the Socialist Party of Mallorca. He was also Director General of Tourism Strategy during the last government of Felipe González.

Throughout his professional career, he worked as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), advising the governments of Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, and Guatemala, as well as that of the Mexican state of Zacatecas.

Mallorcan left

Alomar's political career began long before his institutional stage and allows us to trace a good part of the history of the Mallorcan left in the second half of the 20th century. During Francoism, he was a member of the Communist Organization of Spain-Red Flag and, later, of the PCE. In 1973, together with Antoni Tarabini, he participated in the founding of Gadeso and, in 1976, he was one of the founders of the Socialist Party of the Balearic Islands (PSI), the embryo of the later PSM, although he left the project during the 1977 diaspora.

After years of independent political and professional trajectory, in 1998 he decided to join PSIB-PSOE. He explained it in 2022 to ARA Balears with a definition very much his own: ""I was at an age where I was tired of being a lone wolf". The opening of the socialist primaries and the election of Josep Borrell had convinced him that the party was moving towards greater internal democratization.

That militancy did not prevent Alomar from maintaining a critical view of Spanish socialism. He had been Director General of Tourism Strategy for Felipe González's government between 1994 and 1996, but years later he stated to ARA: "I never believed in him or in Alfonso Guerra".

Regarding the ecotax, Alomar also claimed it in terms of self-government: "Implementing a tax that contributed to the improvement of our environmental resources was a way of claiming national sovereignty". His relationship with the PSOE would definitively end in 2017, when he resigned following socialist support for the application of Article 155 in Catalonia: "I could not allow my party to support" that measure, he stated.