The Fòrum de la Societat Civil has collected some 200 proposals from the debate at the congress on tourist saturation held last month in Palma, where several organisations have proposed that foreigners should only be able to buy property if they are resident on the islands. This was announced today, Wednesday, at a press conference by the organisation’s spokesperson, Jaume Garau, who stressed the importance of banning tourist rentals in multi-family dwellings.
The organisation, among the measures it proposes to alleviate the housing emergency in the Balearics, has proposed that foreigners who want to buy a home on the islands should be required to have resided in the community for a number of years. Among the proposals that emerged from this congress, which was attended by some 180 people and up to 15 speakers, Garau referred to the need to recover the historic centres of the localities of the islands, which have changed their form in recent times due to tourism.
The 17 social and non-profit organisations that make up this group to rebuild the islands and pass on these proposals to the government see it as essential to stop promoting tourism in the region and to establish an obsolescence index to transform old and obsolete hotels into housing and other facilities, such as cultural, technological and health infrastructures.
Another of the measures included by the organisation is to establish a tourist saturation index, in which a maximum number of visitors per resident in the Balearics can be established, and that the tax on tourist activities should increase “quite a lot”, especially during the peak months of June to October, so that the community has money to invest in diversifying the economy, Garau said.
This civil forum also sees it as “fundamental” that civil society, which has hundreds of organisations on the islands, “must be better represented in the public bodies that decide things”, in Garau’s words, and he also called for greater transparency. The Fòrum de la Societat Civil on the islands has called for a proposal for a law guaranteeing that the structures of civil society will be financed by the institutions, as “they have a public function and must be correctly represented in public bodies”.
Another of the conclusions that this entity will convey to the government in the working groups to be held by the executive led by Balearic president Marga Prohens is that in any tourism proposal on the islands “the local language and culture should be perfectly represented”, as Garau defended in his speech. He insisted that these proposals, which emerged from the congress with political representatives and social agents on June 26 in Palma, are strategic proposals and that “all of them are very important” in the face of an “evident” situation marked by an “unsustainable” tourism system, something that “nobody disputes, not even the government”.
Garau stressed that there is only one alternative, which is to reduce volumes. “We are talking about decreasing the tourist sector and making other sectors grow, such as the health and agri-food sectors, among others,” he said. “If we decrease little by little it will be easier for everyone. We must return to a sustainable balance, which has existed on these islands, and to an inclusive transition system,” he reiterated.