2023-08-13 09:18:30
Inflation cannot with the desire to travel again after the pandemic. Tourism is on track to break all records this year. Neither the increase in the prices of plane tickets, hotels and packages offered by travel agencies can with the main sector of the Spanish economy, the one that generates the most employment and wealth. “Occupancy in the month of July has already exceeded the 2019 figures in some territories, also in terms of profitability,” says Jorge Marichal, president of the Spanish Confederation of Hotels and Tourist Accommodation employers. The recovery of travelers to pre-covid levels has also returned an old problem to Spanish cities: overcrowding and problems of coexistence between residents and tourists. Industry forecasts suggest that 85 million people will visit Spain this year. What is the capacity of Spain to continue adding visitor records?
The main access to the port of Torrevieja (Alicante) closes from 8:00 p.m. due to overcrowding and lack of parking since last August 2. This same week, the Costa del Sol town of Nerja ordered the temporary closure of the Chíllar river due to the high risk of fires to try to reduce the number of people who met in the area after reports from Seprona of the Civil Guard, the Provincial Consortium of Firefighters and Civil Protection. In Santiago de Compostela (La Coruña), the City Council is studying the possibility of introducing a tax for hikers who do not stay overnight, that is, only for those visitors and pilgrims who simply spend a few hours in the city. The Galician capital has also remitted to the Xunta a tourist tax for overnight stays from 50 cents to 2.5 euros per night depending on the type of establishment. In Spain, only the Balearic Islands and Catalonia charge a tax to tourists and the Generalitat Valenciana approved in December that the consistories apply it according to their needs from 2024.
For Francisco García Pascual, doctor in Geography and dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication of the European University, it is not a question of reducing this industry, but of managing it better to limit its negative impacts. “In the last decade, millions of people have joined the world tourism market and this inevitably leads to the overcrowding of the most popular destinations,” he points out and assures that the use of public space by tourists is what has caused tourismophobia. “We must also take into account that it has added pressure on the housing market and its costs”. An example of this are the provincial capitals where new construction is already more expensive than in the 2008 bubble: in Barcelona, newly built homes have increased their prices by 11.5% more, in Madrid 9%, in Palma de Mallorca 4.3% and San Sebastián 3.7%, according to data from the Appraisal Society.
“The mass tourism is practically a global phenomenon. Venice is the most extreme case, but the influx of tourists has grown at a general level,” says Viola Migliori, director in southern Europe of Evaneos, an agency specializing in trips to unique places . Some of the most coveted areas of Spain by tourists are located in the Mediterranean, the Balearic and Canary Islands. The high temperatures and the concentration of tourists in some destinations is the discordant note of the goose that lays the golden eggs. Spain needs tourism, its main industry with 12.2% of GDP and serves to offset the balance of payments and the current account deficit. The tourism contribution to the estimated growth of the Spanish economy in 2022 was 60.8%, according to the quarterly report on Tourism Outlook of the Alliance for Tourism Excellence (Exceltur). “It would not be realistic to decrease these numbers and there is room for them to increase,” says Francisco García Pascual.
It is also expected that the impact of tourism will be even more positive this year for public accounts. According to the Bank of Spain, the current account surplus, which measures income and payments from the exchange of merchandise, services, income and transfers, registered a surplus of 16.2 billion euros up to the month of Maycompared to the deficit of 2,000 million that it registered in the fifth month of 2022 due, in part, “before the greater strength of services and tourism” as indicated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its latest review of world growth.
The industry recognizes the problem
José Manuel Lastra, First Vice President of the Spanish Confederation of Travel Agencies, recognizes that there are certain destinations, especially in the Balearic Islands and the Costa del Sol, which are overcrowded. From this employer’s association they are committed to making the holiday period more seasonally adjusted, since in Spain it is very common to take them in July and August, and promote destinations in the world. “It would be very positive if sun and beach vacations could be combined with inland destinations,” he explains. “We are aware that local communities are not a theme park and that is why we are committed to long-term sustainable tourism,” she remarks.
Migliori points out that distributing the holidays in a different way throughout the year would help to balance tourist flows and avoid overcrowding. “The goal is for trips to have a lesser impact on the environment and on local communities”, Explain. In certain places, the only way to protect the environment is through the limitation and protection of heritage. “In certain enclaves of cultural value, mass tourism can be counterproductive and it will be necessary to limit in some way the number of people who can access it,” says geographer Francisco García Pascual. This is what is already happening, for example, on the famous Las Catedrales beach in Ribadeo (Lugo), the beaches of the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park (Almería) -from Genoveses to Cala Carbón-, in some coves of Menorca, on Torre de Río de Oro Beach in Mazagón (Huelva)…
“Tourism must adapt to a new paradigm that will go through the limitation of tourist apartments”explains Pablo Díaz Luque, professor of Economics at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). Portugal has already banned the opening of new tourist apartments in Lisbon, Porto and a large part of the country’s coastline. The veto only excludes interior areas that are heavily unpopulated, although the approval of the building’s community of owners will be necessary. “If measures are not taken, some destinations could die of success and deteriorate until they lose their attractiveness due to tourism, although in the case of Spain there is still room to reach this situation,” says Díaz Luque.
Neighborhood unrest has been palpable for years in some cities such as Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca or Malaga where neighborhood groups denounce the overcrowding, the degradation of some neighborhoods due to the effects of mass tourism and drunkenness, the increase in rental prices due to the advancement of tourist apartments and the effect that it also has for public services due to the lack of personnel to attend to such a number of tourists in health centers. This week the most widely read magazine in Germany, ‘Stern’, echoed this reality that Mallorca is experiencing in an extensive report that describes the saturation suffered by the island. “Palma has become a theme park, where there are visitors who come to spend two or three days partying without control, without going through a hotel and end up sleeping on the beach. Beyond Magaluf and El Arenal, which are the best-known spots, we see it in the downtown district, in Santa Catalina or El Jonquet. The rental of holiday apartments has been prohibited in the entire city of Palma since 2018, but it doesn’t matter because innumerable irregularities are committed and tenants pay the fines if they get them”, denounces Maribel Alcázar, president of the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Palma.
“The tourist tax -ecotasa as it is officially called- of the Balearic Islands that has been applied since 2016 It has not had any effect in avoiding this degradation or the undesirable effects of tourism. It is not a deterrent to avoid the massive arrival of tourists and in the end the economic effects are paid by the citizens of the islands: we are one of the communities with the highest inflation, with a GDP per capita below the national average and the fifth autonomous community with the lowest wages. No one buys a flat in Mallorca and many residents and workers who come to work in tourism are forced to live in caravans and cars as we see in the neighborhoods of Ciudad Jardín or Estadio Balear”, he recounts.
Benidorm, the example
“Benidorm is a destination of about 38 km2, which receives approximately 10 million tourists a year and has a population of about 69,800 residents.. It was always a project planned to receive tourists and it has evolved, applying very successful regeneration and sustainability strategies. Its vertical construction, with tall buildings, means that the degradation of the territory is not as great as it happens with more dispersed urbanizations. It has more than 90 km of bike lanes, pedestrian areas… With ten cities like Benidorm along the Mediterranean, the degradation of the Spanish coast would have been avoided”, argues Arturo Crosby, co-director of the expert course on sustainable destination management and innovation. tourism at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).
Crosby explains that most cities They are not prepared to receive a massive number of tourists and even less are small towns and natural environments because they are unplanned vulnerable environments. nor are they prepared to accommodate a large number of visitors, so the solution to overcrowding does not involve redirecting tourists from one place to another, as is the case with inland or rural tourism. “Zorita de los Canes (Guadalajara) has only 70 inhabitants but can receive 1,000 visitors a day on summer days, something very impressive, so they decided to impose a load capacity, creating a river park, park and ride charging the entry (10 euros), but with good bonuses if customers ate at least one dish and drink per person in the municipal restaurant”, he indicates.
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For this expert, the solution to overcrowding is not easy or fast, but it involves a combination of factors: limited capacity and dialogue between the agents involved., as neighbors, institutions and businessmen in the sector as is done in Bordeaux (France). He does not rule out tourist taxes, but he believes that they are insufficient unless amounts of money are invested to curb demand. Bhutan, on the eastern edge of the Himalayas, has a traveler’s tax of $250 per person per day in high season and $200 in low season. Something similar happens in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador where to be able to access as a foreigner you must pay 100 dollars.
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