Balancing Tourism: Impacts, Challenges, and Alternatives in Popular Travel Destinations

The holidays. Perhaps one of the most desired moments of the year. Having overcome the dilemma of beach or mountain, it’s time to choose your destination. The decision is influenced by thousands of posts on Instagram that recommend secret coves or caves that, thanks to social networks, are now anything but secret.

Thus, the charm of some places is sometimes tarnished by overcrowding. Anyone who has never been wandering around to find a parking space on vacation when visiting that highly recommended paradisiacal beach is little less than a being of light.

One of the consequences of mass tourism is the saturation of small and medium-sized municipalities. It is on the coast and in summer where the extreme cases occur. Through Noja, in Cantabria, with 2,600 inhabitants, more than 59,000 tourists passed through the month of July 2022, and in August the population also multiplied by about 20.

In Peñíscola, the population is multiplied by 11 this month, so the town of Castellón reaches a population of more than 90,000 people compared to its little more than 8,000 regular residents. These are data from the telephone antennas that register mobile users and that the INE collects and disseminates, detailing the origin and destination of national and foreign tourists.

The map shows, on the one hand, the increase or decrease of the population in each municipality. For the calculation, the number of residents as of January 1, 2022, the number of them leaving their municipality and the visitors they receive are taken into account.

Thus, at a glance, it can be seen that the coastal municipalities of the Valencian Community bring together a large part of the travelers. For example, Oropesa exceeded 90,000 people throughout the month of August, multiplying its registered population by nine.

On the other hand, the information from each municipality illustrates how the situation evolves month by month. In the main tourist areas, the season starts at Easter and decreases from September. In small towns in the Aragonese interior, many with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants, they also experience enormous growth in the summer season..

Cities like Madrid registered their maximum peak in October, when more residents remained in the capital and the contribution of tourists made the population grow. And, in winter, the first months were the peak of municipalities such as Benasque, Bielsa or Panticosa, due to the snow.

Already in December, Canary Islands towns such as Lanzarote or Fuerteventura experience their highest records, thanks to their stable temperatures throughout the year.

These data, although they have certain limitations, such as ignoring those who do not use their terminal or have it turned off or counting the same person more than once in the event that they leave their municipality on different occasions in a single month, are useful for estimating the impact of tourism town by town.

However, taking these figures as an indication of mobility, this calculation serves to verify that, while the coastal towns are full of visitors, the big cities are their exporters.

Thus, Madrid and Zaragoza empty out in August. Barcelona and Valencia not so much, compensated by the tourism they receive. This, which is verified with a simple walk through its streets, remains black on white with the data collected by the INE.

And they also allow us to observe that these dynamics are not only typical of capitals, but of the large cities of their metropolitan areas, such as Alcorcón or Getafe, in the center. Or that, in the municipalities between Seville and Córdoba, the number of inhabitants plummets with the arrival of heat.

Another approximation is the human pressure indicator produced by Ibestat, the Statistical Institute of the Balearic Islands, which includes entries and exits by land, sea and air, and the population variations forecast by the INE.

According to their data, still provisional, the maximum peak of 2022 was reached on August 5, with 2,062,428 people in the archipelago, while the number of residents is just over 1.17 million.

For their part, the municipalities of Mallorca, Ibiza, Menorca and Formentera stand out among those that receive the most tourist pressure from all over Spain

Health, money and… water

At a macro level, tourism, the leading Spanish industry, contributed 12.2% of GDP in 2022, according to Exceltur. And its prospects for this 2023 are growth. However, some municipalities have been showing signs of exhaustion for years.

This is the case of the Balearic Islands, where the effects of touristification have been denounced by its residents, who cannot find affordable long-term rentals.. In the first quarter of this year, the value of the square meter in Ibiza and Mallorca has pulverized the highs prior to the 2008 bubble.

In addition to the price of housing, one of the derivatives of how the arrival of people affects the infrastructures and services of tourist areas is the impact on the use of water. Several researchers from the universities of the Balearic Islands and La Rioja estimated the expenditure attributable to tourism in the entire archipelago at 24.2%. one in four liters. To do this, they compared the use of water during confinement with the same period of the previous year.

“The average figures for the archipelago are one thing and the differences between municipalities depending on their type of tourism or not are another,” warns Celso García, professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Balearic Islands and one of the authors of the article.

Thus, in the most stressed areas, such as Calviá or Muro, in Mallorca, water consumption fell by 60.9% and 73.7%, respectively, between April and June 2020, with the population confined and without tourism.

In Ibiza, in municipalities such as Sant Antoni, consumption during confinement fell by 40.1%. Here, last summer, the population quadrupled with the arrival of tourists to the island. Today they are on pre-alert due to drought, according to the Balearic Government’s water panel, although this only takes into account groundwater, explains García.

Most of its water resources come from desalination plants, so the supply is not in danger, yes, at a higher cost, with intensive use of energy and with greater generation of waste, such as brine, recalls the academic.

An optimization of its use would provide oxygen to the aquifers of the Balearic archipelago. When there is rain, the desalination plants reduce their production, but they should keep up to give the aquifers a breather and allow them to recover an adequate level. “If you have desalination plants, use them”, sums up the professor.

The public health system is another of the victims. The more tourists, the more patients. Municipalities such as Sanxenxo, in Pontevedra, which grow close to 600% in August, have opted to pay for housing for four doctors —the reinforcements— during the summer. Others have coverage problems that summer only aggravates. Here, once again, Ibiza stands out, says Miguel Lázaro from the Balearic Medical Union, where the difficulty in filling some positions, such as oncology or anesthesia, has become chronic.

“I call it the perfect storm,” says the union representative. The first ingredient of the phenomenon is a structural deficit that Lázaro estimates in “about 300 doctors”. Added to the previous deficit situation is an effect of wear and tear caused by the pandemic, which has affected primary care professionals and ICU professionals to a greater extent. In addition, they are dates in which doctors also enjoy their vacation days, so those who stay take care of population overloads.

“In the end, it falls on the patients, who have more waiting lists, are in the corridors because there are no beds…”, laments Lázaro.

However, for this doctor, the Balearic Government is “lucky” that 40% of the population has private insurance in the archipelago, which largely complements the deficit that exists.

Decrease or limit: alternatives to massification

“Degrowth is fashionable at an academic level, but what is complicated is going from studies to reality,” says Celso García. This happens by assuming that growth is not infinite and that its collateral effects require converting mass tourism into one of high value, less saturated and more responsible.

Another model, put into practice by some institutions, is the mixed one: stopping or slowing down growth, by limiting it, and optimizing the model.. In this sense, some territories implemented different fiscal measures, such as tourist taxes, or administrative taxes, such as the limitation of places, but the changes in government point to a twist in the script.

Three months ago, before the elections, the Cabildo de Lanzarote began the procedures to declare itself an island touristically saturated and start the reduction plans. Its new president, Oswaldo Betancort, then dismissed this initiative as an “occurrence”.

In the Balearic Islands, these measures, approved by the previous government of Francina Armengol, are today in the sights of the new Executive of Marga Prohens.

“For the new governments, the easy thing is to increase places”, says the professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Balearic Islands. “But it will be society itself that will realize that saturation is unbearable.

Tourism is very important for the economy, but it has to benefit everyone and it cannot be that the resident ends up fed up with it. We live from this, but we have to set limits ”, ditch.

For Lázaro, part of the solution to improve services in areas with more tourism involves strategies to attract and establish a population that can meet the demand. The union representative of the toilets denounces that the career of doctors is “blocked” in the Balearic Islands, and that the problem goes further.

“There is a lack of police, Civil Guard, teachers…”, he warns, as one of the consequences of not updating the residence compensation supplement in order to cope with rental prices and inflation.

“The central government mistreats us,” he asserts, pointing to the former socialist president of the Balearic Islands and recently appointed president of Congress, Francina Armengol, as responsible for not having obtained the update in 2019 of aid that has been frozen since 2007.