2021 May Midweek in Mallorca

May 2021. The Belgian government lifted the ban on leisure travel in April, but strict travel rules limited options. As the Balearic Islands – lles Balears or Islas Baleares – were a yellow zone, we booked flights to and a hotel in Palma de Mallorca.

Finding a suitable and feasible destination for our May 2021 vacation wasn’t easy. In our Grand Scheme of Future Travels, we planned a United Kingdom + Isle of Man train trip. Impossible due to coronavirus countermeasures.

A next idea was a train trip combining France, Italy and Switzerland. Like 2018, but different.

But it became clear that even if we could travel outside Belgium, crossing border would be a hassle due to different coronavirus countermeasures in every country.

For a while we looked at a train trip within Portugal. But that was impossible as tourism related journeys were forbidden.

Balearic Islands

The Balearic Islands came up, inspired by our Swiss colleague Maxime, who we follow on Instagram. So we set our sights on Mallorca and Palma de Mallorca.

We decided on a midweek. Three full days in and around Palma would be enough. A midweek is cheaper for hotels and it would also be nicer to not leave Danny‘s boyfriend alone at home in rainy Antwerp on his weekend days off.

Balearisation

Timothy was was wary of the destination. Mallorca sounds so touristicated. In Spanish and French there’s a word: balearización (ES) or baléarisation (FR).

Balearisation is a term coined at the end of the 50s, in an article in the French magazine Paris Match, to describe the transformation that the coastline of Mallorca was undergoing as a result of the terrible urban planning caused by the tourist boom that at that time it struck the Balearic Islands .

The phenomenon was recorded mainly by the urban activity carried out in the municipality of Calviá, where it was literally built on the very shore of the sea, giving rise to the creation of tourist complexes such as Magaluf, Palmanova and Santa Ponsa.

In 2007, an ecological campaign carried out by the Ecologistas en Acción and GOB organizations, called Banderas Negras, denounced that the Mediterranean coastline is the most degraded in Spain, more than Cantabria and the Canary Islands, and that the greatest exponent of degradation in the Balearic Islands is supported by the municipality of Calviá, due to the unsustainable exploitation of its natural resources.

Subsequent studies indicate that the balearisation process has spread globally, when the main hotel companies of the Balearic Islands began their expansion towards impoverished countries and less demanding institutional environments, as was the case of the Dominican Republic, as well as other Latin American countries , where many real estate companies from the Balearic Islands also increased their presence.

Likewise, this form of aggressive urbanism typical of the Balearic tourism industry has generated a multitude of conflicts and mobilizations in most of the countries where it has been implemented, either due to the privatization of beaches and accesses or due to the control of natural resources, such as for example water and deforestation in rural areas.