One of my old bosses here in Mallorca forwarded to me an opinion piece written by Alfonso Rodriguez, an opinion writer at https://canal4diario.com/ and I fully agree with it. You can view the original column here. I’ve used auto-translate to show you the English version below:
On September 30, 2011 the Escarrer family presented, with the presence of President Bauza, the Minister of Tourism Carlos Delgado and the mayor of Calvia Manu Onieva (all of them from the PP) the Calviá Beach Resort, a project that sought to turn Magaluf into a Private Resort made up of eight hotels and that would also affect the properties, its natural environment and the leisure and commercial offer. Urban planning, coastal management and legal security will be the responsibility of the institutions, or what is the same: Public bodies should do whatever is necessary to achieve the objectives of the hotel group.
The idea, according to the company itself, was to renew Magaluf with this ambitious plan and, in this way, extend the season and attract family and sports tourism and “ improve and modernize the complementary leisure and commercial offer, as well as the reputation of the destination”
Last Friday the president of the Insular Council, Catalina Cladera, in an interview in a national radio medium, came to say that changing the tourism model consisted of changing Magaluf and acknowledged that public administrations had been talking about doing so for years and that Covid19 was the opportunity to change it.
Different bodies have the same message: We must end Magaluf ” . Gross error, in my opinion, but typical of the hoteliers’ ambition, on the one hand, and the ineptitude of politicians at the head of administrations on the other (for mental health, I prefer to call them inept rather than having to admit that some rule over the others, in this same order).
The large hotel chain intends to establish its business order and eliminate, with the approval of the administrations, what it considers detrimental to its interests regardless of the number of corpses it leaves on the way, all for the good of the change in the tourism model and the eradication of drunken tourism, although that same tourism has been the engine of the company’s growth.
There is not a single party that has not included a change in the tourism model in its electoral program. Bringing better tourists, with greater purchasing power and who, instead of getting drunk, go to visit the cathedral, Valldemossa or Deyá. What they never said in their programs is that this is an advertising trap message because they neither want nor know how to do it, but knowing the electorate they don’t care to repeat the same lie so many times until it becomes a truth, in this case totally impossible.
Meanwhile, some lucido, one good morning had the great idea of creating the famous zoning decree to fight against excess tourism, where the distance between the places where the dry law is applied and where it is not a few meters and, As they did not surround the plagued areas with barbed wire and concertinas, the decree and nothing are exactly the same.
And the pandemic arrived, the manna expected by politicians so that, in the face of their incapacity, they could carry out the transformation so often announced and never executed. Poor deluded, they thought that closing Punta Ballena tightly and tightly would end all the evils of excess tourism and the new model would flourish, by spontaneous generation, like wild flowers in spring and that they had to stay seated waiting for the miracle to be completed. .
And there they continue, sitting in their armchairs waiting for the disease to do what they have been unable to do, thinking that if they ruin those who live off excess tourism they will have ended the evil, but they forget the essential: the offer of Inexpensive leisure is not the one who brings you these types of clients, they only receive them and adapt to the demand that tour operators and hoteliers offer them. But they lack the political courage to confront them and demand that they provide us with another type of product.
We will ruin those who sell cheap alcohol, those who walk daily on the cutting edge of the legal and the illegal and others will come who will buy the businesses at bargain prices to continue doing the same because the hoteliers have to fill all the excess of places that we have and they will have to continue bringing the same tourists and it will be to start over and pray for a new pandemic to come and be more generous than this one.
The change of model, so necessary, will not be possible while we have the politicians that we have, the tour operators that we have and the hoteliers that we have. Only with a great pact in which everyone agrees, the General Administration of the State, the Balearic Government, Consels, town councils, tour operators, hoteliers, merchants, unions, neighborhood organizations, etc. and that, in addition, it is a pact that is not It can modify or change depending on who governs us.
Until we achieve this consensus, change will be totally impossible, no matter how many Magaluf we close.