Reality contradicts the Government: the Islands are breaking records again with more than 19 million tourists in 2025

Palm"The first thing I must do is listen to the growing social unrest (...) which expresses a shared outcry that our model can no longer grow in volume, that our islands have already reached their limit, that going from almost 18 million visitors to potentially reaching 20 million is not sustainable. That is why we have to talk (...) about limits, we must talk about restraint." The President of the Government, Marga Prohens, made these remarks in Parliament on June 20, 2024, referring to the 17.8 million tourists expected in 2023. At the time, she was defending the Pact for Sustainability, an initiative that the Executive presented as historic in terms of changing the course of the Islands. However, many of the proposals remain unknown; the committee of experts that was supposed to evaluate them and select the most appropriate ones has never been established; the document outlining the framework for the transition has been shelved; and the Executive has already made it clear that it does not intend to implement any significant restraint measures. And yet we have over a million more visitors than when Prohens considered it essential to talk about limits: 19,053,592 tourists – 1.73% more than the 18.7 million in 2024.

The figures from the Balearic Institute of Statistics (Ibestat) reflect this in point 2. Hoteliers continue to benefit from the bulk of the business: of the more than 19 million tourists in 2025, 13.1 million stayed in hotels. On the other hand, 2.5 million resorted to illegal rentals, and almost a million visitors stayed in their own homes.

Measures against overtourism have not gone beyond words. Neither an increase in the ecotax, nor an increase in the water sanitation fee, nor a tax on rental cars. The major milestone presented by the Balearic Government (again), this time at Fitur, was a system to monitor the islands' beaches, a measure that will amount to nothing more than allowing beachgoers to access information through an app. This disregards the president's promise, made in September 2024, that measures would be implemented before the 2025 season.

The islands are now facing their last tourist season before the 2027 regional elections, and the situation will remain unchanged. The government is pleased that visitor numbers have increased slightly during peak season, but what has been growing for years is visitor dissatisfaction with increasingly high summer temperatures. The government has not implemented any measures, and climate change is helping to mitigate the impact. Mabrian, a tourism intelligence consultancy It established a five-point increase in tourist disappointment due to weather-related issues between 2021 and 2023. And every year, records are also being broken for high temperatures and longer heat waves.

On the other hand, the Government is also trying to promote the message that it is reducing seasonality. But it's important to clarify that reducing seasonality means distributing tourists from the peak season across other months to lessen overcrowding, avoiding peak visitor numbers, and increasing numbers in other months to ensure no business opportunity goes untapped. "The data tells us there's a change in trend," the Executive now asserts, which will discuss the increase in the Tourism Tax (ITS) with the Social Dialogue Committee on Wednesday without intending to implement it: to begin with, employers' associations are against it. What has changed in trend are the street protests: they were massive in the summer of 2023, had remnants in 2024, and have subsided in 2025.