Tourists are the new pariahs

Think of Majorca and what do you picture? Maybe it is elegant tapas bars in the Gothic quarter of Palma, full of yachties and foodies from across the world. Maybe it is literary pilgrims trekking to the house of Robert Graves or noisy parties of Brits and Germans, squabbling over sunbeds in Magaluf.

In one Japanese town, residents have erected a screen to block a much-prized view of Mount Fuji

Any which way, what you picture is tourists. Lots of tourists. So many tourists that the reality of Majorca as an authentic place is quite obscured, invisible under the weight of visitors. And if you think that sounds bad, so do the Majorcans, which is why they are finally – perhaps belatedly – rebelling. Recent weeks have seen unprecedented protests against the tourist industry, with thousands of locals marching against the crowds, along with dire promises to ‘storm the beaches’, unless someone does something.

What might that something be? Some years ago, after witnessing the impact of Chinese tourism on the global travel market, I wrote about the inevitability of some kind of future ‘rationing’. These pressures were evident in beautiful Taormina, Sicily (featured in season two of The White Lotus), where the crush of tourists was so intense that people were queueing simply to get into the town, then queuing to have their photos taken in the exact same spots. In the Maldives, hotel managers quietly told me that they had so many Chinese tourists and also, increasingly, Russians, Arabs and Brazilians, on top of the traditional Brits, Germans, Americans, that they operated tacit racial quotas. To prevent their hotels becoming overly dominated by one particular ethnicity, they capped each country at a certain percentage of rooms. The hotels were, nonetheless, all near 100 per cent occupancy.