ABSTRACT
The Balearic Islands The Balearic Islands lie in the western Mediterranean some 200 kilometres from mainland Spain. They include four holiday destinations; Mallorca (better known in the UK as Majorca), Minorca, Ibiza (known as Eivissa in the regional Catalan language) and Formentera. Mallorca and Ibiza are nowadays associated with the excesses of mass tourism, with an image based on the five Ss (sun, sand, sea, sex and sangria). In fact, Mallorca, which is by far the largest of the islands, seemingly has the physical capacity to absorb most of the 11 million tourist arrivals a year received by the Balearics. Mass tourism – the ‘Majorca’ of popular legend in northern Europe – is largely confined to a few mega-resorts around the Bay of Palma and the northeast of the island, while ‘the other Mallorca’ continues to attract wealthy celebrities and the more upmarket tour operators. Tourism in Mallorca is not a new phenomenon – a tourist board was established in Palma in 1905 – whereas it came to Ibiza much later and was grafted on to a poorer, less sophisticated society. In the years prior to the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the island’s mild climate and beautiful landscapes attracted wealthy tourists and artists such as Joan Miró, while the poetnovelist Robert Graves did much to publicize the island from his home in the mountain village of Deia. In the early 1950s Mallorca was promoted by the newly created Spanish Ministry of Tourism as a honeymoon destination, ‘the isle of love’, an image guaranteed to appeal to the countries of northern Europe that were still recovering from the Second World War. Large-scale tourism followed and soon spread to the other islands. This was made possible by developments in air transport and tour operation, while government controls over hotel tariffs ensured that the Balearics remained a low-cost destination. The authoritarian regime of General Franco saw tourism as the engine of economic growth that would lift Spain and its people out of poverty, but the regional culture of the islands was largely suppressed. In a few decades the Balearic Islands were transformed from being one of the poorest regions of Spain, with a high rate of emigration and an economy based on agriculture and fishing, to one of the wealthiest, boasting one of the highest rates of car ownership in Europe.
