Spokespeople of four groups gathered yesterday in Plaça Cort in front of Palma town hall in order to issue a joint manifesto against holiday rentals. Entitled "Not one more tourist place in Palma", the manifesto was the work of the federation of residents associations, the collective Ciutat per a qui l'habita and environmentalists GOB and Terraferida. The principal aim of the manifesto is to seek to ensure that Palma is treated as a single zone in which there would be no holiday rentals.
The president of the residents federation, Joan Forteza, insisted that there can be no more "speculative invasion" in Palma. He drew attention to sixty new hotel licences being processed, which would mean more than 3,000 new tourist accommodation places, and also to the 60,000 tourist places in all in Palma; 20,000 of them, he said, are for private rentals.
The manifesto, Forteza added, is not against tourism but against "massification" in Palma. "It would be ideal if instead there was a stock of places for people with low to medium spending power."
The federation president issued a reminder that a motion was passed in July last year which stated that apartments holiday rentals would not be allowed. This motion, which the federation had itself proposed, was backed by Més and Podemos. There were abstentions from the opposition Partido Popular and, more significantly, from PSOE, partners of Més and Podemos in the town hall's ruling administration.
Forteza stressed that this vote must be complied with. If it isn't, he said that he would consider taking the issue to the anti-corruption prosecutor.