With much of North Africa, Tunisia and Egypt’s Sharm el Sheikh out of bounds to visitors and UK tour operators reporting big drops in Turkey bookings over security fears, countries such as Spain, Greece and Italy are all expected to benefit.
A total of 13 million visitors visited the Balearics last year, 524 cruise ships are booked to visit Palma this year while Ibiza is expecting 154, a 28% increase on 2015.
Now, The Observer reports Gerard Hau, a geographer and spokesman at Grup Balear d’Ornitologia Defensa de la Naturalesa (GOB), an umbrella group for environmentalists in the Balearics, has argued the numbers are unsustainable.
He said: “Where do people go to find peace? Into the sea? This will be a crazy year. The infrastructure will not cope. Majorca is booked out. We will have serious problems this summer.
“People come here to enjoy life, but they are stressed because they can’t get a seat on the buses – there aren’t enough buses. Already we have 60,000 rental cars on this island. We are second only to Hong Kong in our car density. The traffic is gridlocked, so people are stressed. There are no parking places.
“If they can’t go in the sea sometimes, they are stressed. Last year we had problems with sewage. The system just couldn’t cope, and we do not let people into the sea if there are such problems.
“They are stressed because there is no room on the beaches, they are stressed and they won’t come back. Tourism is a vital thing, mass tourism is a tricky, tricky thing. This year will be a crisis.”
Hau also argued tourists are impacting the island’s flora and fauna, with everything from black vultures to sand dunes being impacted.
“How can you limit the people?” he added. “In Spain it’s a fundamental right to be able to go anywhere and that is a good democratic right. You cannot start to ask people not to go, or to pay. It’s tricky to reduce numbers.
“I think it’s better to have those drinking ghettoes, Playa de Palma and Magaluf, where people go, rather than these intellectual types of tourists who tramp over everything in their search for the untouched bit, the original Mallorcan, and the residential tourists, who buy up property, buy a car, usually two, swimming pools, and want gardens with plants and grass like at home but that need water.”
