Last summer, over 50,000 residents on the Spanish island of Mallorca gathered in Palma de Mallorca, its largest city, in a mass protest against overtourism, holding signs that read things like, “Tourists, we love you when you don’t buy our land,” and “Your paradise is our nightmare.”
They called for the preservation of their natural and cultural resources, increased access to housing and a more sustainable tourism model that allows residents to reap the benefits of the vast numbers of tourists that visit the island each year.
A record-breaking 13 million tourists visited Mallorca in 2024, and Spain as a whole set a new record with 94 million visitors. The island’s less than one million residents are fed-up with the ways things are. Other protests drew large crowds in beleaguered cities across Spain last summer, including Barcelona, with many residents protesting against the same issues as those occurring in Mallorca.
This year, the Palma Tourism Board isn’t launching a campaign to attract more tourists. Instead, it’s launching a campaign to change residents’ minds.
According to the tourism board, the main goal is to encourage residents to take pride in Palma’s tourism industry and feel like it's a valuable part of life, to “promote further the integration of tourism activity into local life” and “strengthen the bond and sense of belonging between residents and their city.”
As part of the campaign, residents can enjoy free access to experiences like tastings, exhibits and other attractions.
Yet I wonder…is it really a good idea, or even an ethical one, to spend money on convincing people their problems aren’t real—lack of affordable housing caused by travelers buying up too many short-term rentals, for example—instead of actually working to transform the island’s tourism model to support and benefit the people who live there?
After all, the tourist board isn’t going to be solving any of the residents’ major issues simply by trying to change their minds and help them see the value tourism brings. The problems aren’t going to disappear, even if there aren’t any massive protests this summer like last year.
Extremely popular destinations need to re-think their tourism models, re-engineer them so that the people who live, work and raise their families in these cities are the ones that benefit from tourism the most and ensure that the funds generated from such tourism can support and protect what makes these destinations so popular in the first place.
My take? Don’t spend tax dollars or government funds on changing the people’s minds. Instead, listen to the will of the people and act accordingly as their representatives.
They’re not asking for the world—only that, when the world decides to visit their island, they aren’t ignored in favor of catering to travelers, or left out of the benefits.
We’ve been operating on this idea of exponential tourism growth—more travelers, more tourism dollars, more tax revenue, more hotels and resorts, year after year after year, ad infinitum.
But in medicine, exponential growth like that is called cancer.
Launching a campaign to change residents’ minds isn’t going to solve anything—it might as well be a band-aid on a tumor. And if a doctor gives you a band-aid when you have cancer, well…that’s not ethical at all.
We have to transform the way we think about tourism if we’re to sustain it and our tourism communities for future generations. We need forward-thinking plans, not just goals. We need actionable steps,
Take Greenland as an example.
Greenland’s government just released a ten-year tourism plan with goals that include designing tourism around the people’s benefits—it’s planning to improve healthcare and housing for its residents through tourism dollars, and one of the plan’s main pillars is to ensure that tourism grows to support the people and the land—not the other way around.
I hope more destinations will take Greenland’s responsibility towards the land and its people and create new ways for locals to thrive alongside tourism, not in spite of it.
You know my answer. It isn't ethical to try convincing people with real problems that tourism is beneficial. It can be, when done in the right way. Yet unchecked, it can create lasting problems for residents in tourist-dense areas.
Let's be part of the solution, not the part of the problem.
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