The swish seafront hotels and freshly planted palms on the gleaming promenade might tempt any unwary holidaymaker to book in for Mallorca’s Calviá beach. But step out the back door and the resort is still firmly, as it is better known, Magaluf: boozed-up Britain in Spain, with cocktails by the pint.
Mallorca got most of the Balearics’ 3.5 million UK visitors last year: for some residents, far too many. The island has become emblematic of the most heated debate in travel: overtourism – and how to tackle it.
The island’s Calviá region, home of Magaluf, this week played host to the annual Abta convention for Britain’s tourism industry. And tourism doesn’t get much more industrial than here.
Straight out from an evening bash at the upmarket Nikki Beach club, a short walk through British pubs, kebab shops and purveyors of I ❤️ DOGGY STYLE T-shirts led delegates to the party end of the Strip, where bar ambassadors come out in force to lure in the punters.
“Beer and two shots, four euros?” one offers. The Guardian declines. The man reconsiders: “Titties?”
Prominent signs in English advise €300-€400 (£261-£348) penalties for nudity, fighting and drunkenness on the street. On an October weeknight, the patrolling police aren’t overstretched – but it’s early yet, only midnight, and as one seasoned resident warns: “It gets a bit dirty after 2am.”
Street signs in English warning of fines for behaviour along the Magaluf Strip. Photograph: Gwyn Topham/The Guardian
But the main business was in the Abta conference hall. Debates on overtourism and homilies on “slow travel” peppered the agenda for an industry grappling with the realisation that, despite the tantalising invitations on the Strip, not everyone wants them there.
Mallorca is one of many destinations where locals have demonstrated against overtourism: this June, thousands marched through the capital in protest. But diagnoses of the problem – and potential remedies in a country whose annual flow of Britons exceeds all others – divided the convention.
The strategy in Spain’s new marketing campaign is chasing diversification rather than numbers: urging visitors to go inland, stay longer, try things such as “astrotourism and oleo tourism”, watching the next eclipse from a parador and sampling the olive oil.
Steve Heapy, chief executive of mass market holiday operator Jet2, read the runes: “They want less tourists, but they want them to be richer. I don’t think it’s very fair. Why should holidays be only available to a certain subset of the population?”
Prices in lesser-visited Galicia up north were even cheaper, Spain’s tourist office protested. UK director Manuel Butler says: “Like fast fashion, we have had fast tourism … We have to slow down, have more contact with people and explore more deeply the destination.”
Tourism should be “resilient, inclusive, and beneficial to visitors and residents alike” – and places such as Magaluf, he says, “have to target a different clientele, people are who not looking to get drunk and make a noise. It’s the reality.”
A decade-long strategy in Palma has massively increased its stock of small upmarket hotels for year-round breaks; it is bidding to become Spain’s next European capital of culture. Calvía and Magaluf have been following on a similar path: 80% of the hotels are now four or five star. Tens of millions of euros have been invested in cleaning up and improving the beach. And, as Calvía’s mayor Juan Antonio Amengual Guasp proudly told the auditorium, Magaluf now hosts a literary festival.
It is a difficult balance for a place reliant on tourist income, with expats also a significant population; Amengual says Magaluf has “achieved a harmonious relationship between tourists and residents over the decades, and that has not changed.” But, he concedes, local discontent with tourism was “a reality” worldwide.
English breakfast in Magaluf. Photograph: Schoening/Alamy
The UK managing director of the travel giant Tui, Neil Swanson, was conciliatory: “They are in charge, right? Clearly we’re bringing money into the local economy, but it’s got to work for you in other social ways, and maybe not all tourism has. It needs to feel right for the local community, and for the guests coming in.”
Abta’s chief executive, Mark Tanzer, says: “If you can extract more value that’s good.” But, he adds: “If they don’t want us, we won’t go. People like Jet2 will fly their planes somewhere else.”
Heapy says the anti-tourism protests were having an impact, albeit small, after headlines about kill-a-tourist graffiti in Tenerife: “We’ve had many people writing into us and ringing our call centre saying, is it safe to go to Spain?”
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Jet2 could switch more capacity to Morocco, which is cheaper and more welcoming, he says, with some regions in Spain no longer promoting tourism “because they’re frightened of a backlash from their populations”.
He says the word overtourism was really describing “poor tourism management”, citing private rentals such as Airbnb as the bigger problem. “Licensed tourism, people going on a holiday, staying in a hotel etc, it’s perfectly easy to manage it – you know how many people are coming.”
Spain hopes trips will spread over longer seasons as hotter summers shift demand. Visitor numbers from January to May this year were 9% higher than in 2019, while the peak summer months remained static.
Heapy is unconvinced: “People want that Mediterranean holiday in the summer months. I live in Manchester. It’s pretty grim – it’s cold, dark and wet. I want to get away to the sun, and if it’s hot, well great.”
Others sense further change ahead. “You’ve got to look to see what’s coming,” says Cathy Sasson, owner of Pirates, a Magaluf landmark whose “swashbuckling immersive dinner show” (★★★★★ – the Daily Star) claims to have entertained 4 million people over 40 years. “A few years ago nobody served calamari. Now if you’re in a restaurant and it didn’t have salt and pepper squid you’d be disappointed.”
Pirates sticks resolutely to one meal: chicken and chips with corn on the cob, even for its late-night adult show. But Magaluf, she says, is “not what it was in the old days”. Is she sad? “No – my dad would never let me out!”
Nonetheless, she says: “No one wants people to stop drinking. We’re Brits, we go on holiday, and we like a drink. But it’s how they come and how they drink.”
On the Strip, the lunchtime after the night before, barmaid Emma is opening up at Lennons pub and putting the bins out. “I think it probably will change,” she says, smiling a little sadly. Only one punter is here this early, Steve Davis, 75, from Coventry, holidaying to visit family here. He shows a photo of himself 17 years ago dressed as Elvis, in the nearby Three Lions pub: “I couldn’t remember, but my niece said it was in Magaluf.”
These parts, he says, haven’t altered much: “I’ll be here till closing.” His Heineken and Guinnesses, though, are zero-alcohol: “Cirrhosis of the liver.”
Ainhoa Paredes Penades, a journalist with Telecinco, grew up in Calvía, when visiting Magaluf upset her: “All the people working there were talking to me in English, I felt a stranger in my own island.”
Now, she says, Spanish locals have rediscovered Magaluf. “This summer, several friends asked me if I’d been, saying the water is really clear. They wanted to transform Magaluf as a better tourist destination – but now there are more Mallorcans going there with their family as well. You see the change.”
