Overtourism in Mallorca

Mallorca overtourism is presenting a worsening problem for local people, and now they’re fighting back with a string of highly publicised protests. Read all about overtourism in Mallorca, how it’s affecting life on the island, and what’s the future of this lovely holiday destination – victim of its own spiralling success.

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Overtourism in Mallorca

Mass protests by local people have brought attention to the overtourism problem on Mallorca, which is pricing residents out of their island.

In the last half-century the region of Calvia, in Mallorca’s southwest, has changed beyond recognition. The people who lived here once focused their efforts inland on agriculture, meaning that the coast was empty. But then mass tourism arrived, the coast was suddenly desirable, and it began to be developed. Between the 1960s and the 2010s Calvia’s population exploded from around 2,700 inhabitants to over 50,000.

Now, agriculture has been abandoned for tourism jobs, and the current population – mostly from the Spanish mainland, but also British and German buyers who have purchased summer or retirement homes – have made parts of Mallorca among the richest regions of Spain. Calvia’s town hall runs regular Spanish language classes to cater to its high number of foreign residents.

Mallorca is now a massive tourist destination, to the point of overtourism. Local people are being priced out in favour of more lucrative holiday lets, antisocial behaviour has spread, and sites and beaches are overrun. The Balearic government has contemplated capping visitor numbers, and local people have been ramping up their activism.

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The ideal isle

Mallorca’s sunshine and coastline mean that for many it’s an ideal place to live – and to holiday. Millions now arrive every year, often attracted by cheap deals. In Magaluf in the 2010s, tourists could buy a pint of lager for a euro at numerous bars along the resort’s popular strips. It’s still common to find flights from UK airports for less than £50 return, and very affordable package holidays. On the other end of the scale, Mallorca is one of the busiest destinations in Europe for private jets, and the city of Palma is one of the Mediterranean region’s major yachting hubs.

How many tourists is too many tourists?

In the 1960s Mallorca had one million tourists, and heaps of tourist properties were built up around the Bay of Palma. After 1975 and the death of Franco, tourism grew further. In 2012, there were nine million visitors. In 2018, UK papers reported a 23 percent increase in bookings year on year, thanks to the popularity of hit reality TV show, Love Island, filmed in a villa on the island.

In 2019, there were 12 million visitors, with 500 cruise ship arrivals a year accounting for two million of them. Post-pandemic, numbers jumped again. Suddenly, there were over 14 million. At the same time, the island’s population has stayed around that of its 1960s visitor numbers: just one million.

Mallorca’s airport breaks arrivals records year on year, and tourism accounts for 45 percent of Mallorca’s economy.

Everywhere you look, everyone is foreign, read the protest placards processing through Palma. Local people hold cardboard models of the private jets and cruise ships that they want to ban. Thousands have been participating in a series of demonstrations that have closed the streets and had tourists giving their usual haunts a wide berth. But the day after every protest, the streets return to Mallorca’s overcrowded norm.

Mallorca no es vem: Mallorca is not for sale

What’s the problem?

Mass tourism has behaved predictably – surface-level pleasure hides a dark underbelly. All-inclusive resorts at Magaluf, Palma Nova and Santa Ponsa offer happy hours that fuel a sometimes dangerous lack of inhibition, and resulting assaults and other crimes. Police now patrol beaches to crack down on antisocial behaviour.

In Palma’s bay, things are no less grimy. The city has some of the worst pollution levels from cruise ships in Europe, according to the Platform Against Megacruises, a collaboration between 25 separate organisations and a number of famous Spanish personalities, including ambassadors and artists. At the peak of the problem, Palma had as many as eight daily cruise ships arrivals.

Local businesses along Palma’s shopping streets are now more likely to sell postcards than groceries. Summer resorts become ghost towns in winter months, their communities disbanded. Property prices soar, and there have been calls for restrictions on property purchases for anyone who has lived on the island for fewer than five years.

It’s thought that there are as many as 235,000 unregulated holiday lets in the Balearic Islands, compared to just 26,500 that are legitimately run and paying the proper tourism tax. In the last five years, over 15,600 properties were bought by foreign nationals, again, mostly Brits and Germans. In the 2010s, Palma banned most Airbnb properties from operating, after rental prices for local people increased 40 percent in two years. It was the first city in Spain to do so, but the difficult to regulate ban did not stop adverts for short term lets appearing every summer.

As tourism puts pressures on the island’s finite systems – its water, its roads – residents are faced with a worsening quality of life.

Local people are being priced out of their own cities across the Balearics, forced to move in with friends or relatives or to move away. People live in campervans between their work shifts, unable to afford rent. Mallorca is wealthy, but tourism has created an unequal distribution of wealth, and many jobs on the island remain poorly paid – Mallorcan wages are below average for Spain, and hospitality jobs are among the worst paid.

In the last couple of years, social media has made Mallorca’s busy summer not just a problem for historically touristy areas, but hidden beauty spots, too. These are now only a location-share away from the eyes of the world. What were once quiet places are now subject to pollution, erosion, noise and overcrowding. It’s a situation that has prompted Mes per Mallorca, the island’s opposition party, to describe the island as “on the brink of collapse”.

Ocupem les nostres platges: We will occupy our beaches

Defending the secret places

Local protest groups are fighting the tourists on hitherto relatively unknown beaches, gathering in their hundreds to blockade the now Instagram-famous Calo des Moro. This beach has become so renowned online that there are queues to park, and no space on the beach by midday.

This beach is found in the south-east of the island, an area historically less visited than the south-west. Social media has made unwitting stars of beaches like this in a very short amount of time. Pre-Instagram, guidebooks propelled certain beaches into fame, but the increase in popularity and associated overcrowding tended to be more gradual.

Car rental is very popular on Mallorca and even the most hidden-away beach on the island can be reached by road in under an hour. In the summer rental cars line the streets, erode the verges, cause traffic in towns, and park dangerously on roads. Sometimes, they even block the entrances of houses close to the beach. The popular Cala Varques on the south-east coast spent years in planning permission battles to create a car park to meet the increase in visitors driving to the beach.

Local people struggle to park close to their homes in popular towns like Soller and are petitioning for extra parking. Protest groups have called to limit numbers to 45,000 rental cars on the island in the peak season.

Mallorca overtourism and mass protests

Grassroots activism has made headlines. The first mass protest against overtourism was in 2017, attended by 3,000 residents. Yet, save for the pandemic years, local people have seen tourism arrivals grow every year since.

In the early 2020s, the activist group Caterva put signs on beaches in English warning holidaymakers of dangerous ‘falling rocks’ and ‘jellyfish’, whilst wording in Spanish underneath told the truth: that the beaches were fine, and the signage was to deter tourism. But tactics became less playful as the situation become more urgent. The next year, under the slogan Menys Turisme, Mes Vida (less tourism, more life), groups were organising protests including a march of thousands in Palma, and there were threats to block the airport. The movement seemed to be gaining international recognition. A study by Evaneos, a travel company, found that 45 percent of Spanish people think that more controls should be exercised over tourism. Yet so far protests haven’t managed to deter arrival numbers.

What’s being done about overtourism in Mallorca?

The Balearic government introduced a tourism tax in 2016 to be spent on island improvement projects such as water infrastructure and building restoration. The following year it announced that the tax was to be doubled (to up to €4 a night). The government has also unrolled a plan to encourage more sustainable tourism and improve water management. The British embassy and the Balearic government have been involved in a joint campaign to stop the ‘tourism of excess’ which, among other things, places restrictions on the amount of alcohol all-inclusive resorts can supply. There are also now restrictions in some resorts banning overnight alcohol sales. Palma has begun limiting cruise ship arrivals – to just three a day, and just one carrying over 5,000 people.

A wider tourism campaign aims to reduce the number of beach-focused visits to the island, and look into more sustainable sorts of travel – promoting less-congested areas of the island, handicrafts, and agrotourism that focuses visitors further inland.

The Balearic government has said it doesn’t want to exceed the 16.5 million visitors that the archipelago received in 2022, although it has flip-flopped on the ideal number of sun-seekers. Meanwhile, protest groups are calling, with increasing urgency, for more restrictions to the number of flights that can arrive each day, as well as further controls on cruise ships and the property market, and caps on hire car numbers.

What’s the future of Mallorca’s tourism?

There’s another threat to Mallorca tourism – climate change, which, among other problems, will put further pressures on the island’s finite water resources. As the climate crisis unfolds, Spain is far more likely to experience deadly summer heatwaves than in previous decades, whilst its most common visitors, those from Britain, might be increasingly keen to get away from their wetter climate. The heat in peak summer months may deter holidaymakers from the island. Yet protests call it a ‘suicidal ally’, which will mean local people have to endure tourists for a longer season, from March to December, on top of unbearable heat in summer. For residents of Mallorca, it’s out of the frying pan, into the fire.

What can you do?

Mallorca’s local economy depends on tourism but there are ways to be a better tourist, and ensure your visit benefits local people. Make sure that you are staying in a property that is a registered holiday let – this means it pays the tourist tax. Use local knowledge where you can. Local residents will know better than Instagram whether a beach is worth visiting – or whether it’s far too busy. Consider visiting Mallorca for one of our walking holidays or on our wellness retreat, where you’ll stay away from crowded areas. These trips operate in spring, September or October – outside of the busiest summer months.

Overtourism in Mallorca