Some of the more radical nationalist parties in the Balearics are blaming tourists for all of the region’s ills making tourism an election issue. Més, for example, want to hike the tourist tax by 60% while pushing ahead with restrictions and limits on foreigners and even mainland Spaniards from buying houses in the Balearics, while one of its ‘sister’ parties in Madrid wants to scrap or double the Golden Visa scheme because foreign investors are pushing house prices up. Not even the centre right Partido Popular is prepared to go for it and scrap the tax; instead they want to ‘manage it better’.
Then we have the Law of Excesses - you can’t do this, can’t do that despite having invested your hard-earned savings in coming to the Balearics on holiday when, to be quite honest, there are a number of other destinations people could go to which are much cheaper and much more exotic like Turkey or Greece. Talk of caps on numbers, not only people but yachts, for example. It’s all prohibition as opposed to proper government management. Plus, I don’t see why residents, in view of the high taxes we already pay in the Balearics, have to pay the tourist tax. Some analysts have called it “tourismphobia”, a term coined in 2017 by the Balearic University - that is six years ago. Has nothing been learned about how Mallorca has become ‘the next Monaco’? No and that’s all thanks to tourism.