Last Sunday, how could anyone fail to have noticed, there was a protest calling for an end to touristification. It is an accepted word, but it isn’t a commonly used one. A quick glance at Google suggests it is a fairly recent word, perhaps less than ten years old. It may well have its origins in academia and it could well also be an anglicisation of a phenomenon with Spanish roots. Quite some years ago, must be getting on for fifteen, I started to refer to ‘tourismphobia’. A translation from Spanish, there were - as far as I could discover - no other examples of this anglicisation. I can’t claim to have originated the word in English, but it most certainly wasn’t in common usage.
Both tourismphobia and touristification hint at a peculiar way in which Spain, an undoubted global tourism superpower, has used this supremacy in spawning a vocabulary dedicated to negative ramifications of an industry to which the country has devoted more than sixty years in building up as a major element of the national economy; far more major at certain regional levels, the Balearics most obviously.
A Spanish leadership in tourism has thus been matched in a dominance of, if you like, a discourse about tourism, and a not wholly positive one at that. Odd you may think, but not so odd given that it was Spain that gave this tourism lexicon the term ‘Balearisation’. No, not Spain, it was Mallorca, and it started to be used in the sixties in discussing (and criticising) a destructive process of mass tourism that Mallorca had pretty much invented in the sixties (the Costa Brava can also lay some claim in this regard). This principally referred to the loss of unspoiled coastal areas to development, but it also had in mind a social transformation that not everyone viewed as welcome.
It’s wholly wrong to believe that criticism of Mallorca’s tourism model is somehow a recent phenomenon. The Franco regime may not have encouraged dissenting tourism opinion, but there was room for commentators in the sixties who expressed concerns so long as they kept away from the politics. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to take to the streets in protest back then, but the process of mass tourism, firmly with its roots in a Spanish Mallorca, fostered an examination of this process that wasn’t solely focused on the economic benefits.
A conclusion one can draw from the way in which words like ‘saturation’ crept into the discussion from the late sixties is that Mallorcan society has grown up over the past decades with a tourism culture influenced by the terms and the language adopted. And more recently, because of a realisation of growing social pressures and of overexploitation of resources, there has been what can seem like an invention of terms to explain the intensification of this realisation - tourismphobia and touristification are cases in point.
Eight years ago, touristification did seem to be new. In May that year I wrote about how it was starting to appear more and more. Spanish media had adopted the word. El Confidencial considered what was happening in Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia because of touristification, specifically the bubble in rental prices caused by Airbnb.
El Mundo looked at how the digital era was affecting urban character. Holiday rental, a phenomenon that had predated digital times (and quite obviously so), had given rise over Easter 2017 to plus-90% occupancy of rental properties in major cities. Here was evidence of touristification. A journalist for El Español gave a first-hand account of touristification in Madrid. Under a piece headed ‘Irrational tourism throws us out’, he explained that five entire buildings had been given over exclusively to holiday rentals in the past twelve months. In his own building, with fifteen apartments, only five were now for residents.
The Huffington Post (Spanish version) looked at touristification in greater depth and concluded that the digital economy had taken advantage of neo-liberal deregulation that favoured multinationals as part of a new post-capitalist model that lived more off income than from the production of value. Emerging new elites were seeking to redirect and rebuild destinations for their exclusive service.
Are the protests of today a consequence of how terms have emerged and thus contributed to forming a common currency of belief? An exaggeration, I would suggest, but society can nevertheless be influenced or guided by an apparent normalisation of expression. It, society, accepts there is touristification (or part of society does anyway) because of a usage that eventually leads to the word being all over protest banners.
The result is a reinforcement of a negative. This is a logical process, so logical in fact that there has been negative reinforcement in Mallorca, expressed in one form or another, for the past sixty years and which relevant authorities have totally failed to ever really comprehend. Only now is there an impetus towards social sustainability, but unfortunately one suspects that this is a term drawn from a different source - the sustainable development manual now more than thirty years old - which is being used for political marketing purposes.
Look back at those reports from 2017 and there is a common theme. To all intents and purposes, touristification equated to holiday rental. And in that year, the Balearic Government got holiday rental horribly wrong.