For better or for worse, the Balearics are often regarded as a model, as an image on which expectations can be projected, heralding a future of economic growth for emerging tourism markets throughout the world, particularly those of coastal Mediterranean areas. Nonetheless, there is also the reverse side of the coin or its counter image: Balearization or the uncontrolled destruction of the landscape and a coastline covered in a shapeless mass of buildings. This contradictory aspect of the most popularized image of the Balearic Islands is accentuated by the ambiguous descriptive and prescriptive notions so commonly bandied about in local political debates, such as the terms “territorial model”, “model of development” or “tourism model”. This apparently enigmatic facet of the Balearic Islands’ recent history probably only reflects the contradictions of a complex modern society, in our case, in the context of globalization, set within the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean zone: a zone whose construction is unlikely to escape these contradictions, which are incorporated in the basic objectives of its founder principles (as set forth in the 1995 Declaration of Barcelona): free trade, growth, development, sustainability, a reduction in social discrepancies, improved living conditions etc. The example of the Balearic Islands may serve to cast doubt on the compatibility of many of these pretensions, at least in the form they take in one of the world’s most “tourist-oriented” societies, in its continuously debated chiaroscuros.

One of the issues most widely discussed by academics concerns the causes that led to the famous tourist boom of the late 1950s. Despite popular stereotypes (the entrepreneurial skill and intrepid daring of a business elite that rescued society from poverty), the issue is still open to debate, given the lack of agreement among historians, economists, sociologists and geographers.

Firstly, it must be remembered that there was already a tourist tradition. As Joan Buades has convincingly demonstrated, the first tourist boom took place in the early decade of the 20th century. It must not be forgotten that Fomento del Turismo de Mallorca (the Office for the Promotion of Tourism in Mallorca) has been around for 100 years. This figurehead of the “pro-tourism” lobby popularized the well-established romantic, upper class tourism of the 19th century by transforming it into a standardized “Fordist” model of tourism. Promoted and protected by the public sector, particularly by Spain’s authoritarian regimes, only the wars and, above all, Franco’s disastrous handling of the economy dampened the flames of a seemingly unstoppable phenomenon. Perhaps with a certain sense of nostalgia, Buades recalls a diversified, balanced economic model which was still in the growth phase, was yet to become consumerist and generally left the immediate coastline untouched, prior to the boom in car travel and air transport and heavy development into infrastructure.

This gives us a better understanding of subsequent development processes and certain inertias that are, at minimum, worrying. At that point, with Joan March as a prime example of the case of the Balearics, the landowning aristocracy’s replacement by a middle class that had grown rich during the wars led to a change in the structure of property ownership and in business practices. Generally speaking, the emerging business class might be described as combined financiers and entrepreneurs, but also as accommodating and opportunistic, having inherited the agrarian practices of a landowner, the habits of a contemporary smuggler, the practices of an emerging industrial middle class and the skills involved in running a close, traditional network of small local businesses. Decades afterwards, when the conditions were right for the first big post-war boom, the tourist entrepreneur’s modus operandi was the result of the readjustment of those different influences, in which the more traditional, conservative element came to gain the upper hand. This had a lot to do with the socio-economic origins of the new class of hotelier (who was basically uninfluenced by the preceding industrial, entrepreneurial and financial legacies), with the local banking system’s fear of investing in businesses that offered few guarantees, and with the authorities’ attitude of condescension to property owners.

As a result, what prevailed was a property-based family-run approach to tourism, short-term thinking, a huge dependence on investment and on the foreign demand for tourism, an incredibly big black economy and lack of respect for rules and regulations, and a radical dislike of any form of public regulation, within a general framework that was also unique. A relatively fragmented property network, the existence of an extensive, experienced small-scale economic network, very low costs in terms of land and manpower, mainland areas with big populations willing to emigrate, a relative proximity to issuing markets, the very low value of the peseta, the Franco regime’s desire for foreign capital, and the sheer force of its ideology of ongoing development all led to unprecedented colonization by tourists. Minorca, on the other hand, which received less investment from the regime in punishment, had an aristocracy with a remarkably enlightened past that took pride in conserving the best lands. It therefore promoted a more solid, independent, diversified economy that has not fallen into the trap of its larger sister island’s tourism monoculture.

While the supposed beginnings of tourism were not actually legendary, it was in some way a “founder” moment that defined tourism’s later positive and negative aspects. At any rate, unlike most Spanish regions, the Balearics entered the new European labour division when tourism started to attract the West’s working and middle classes. As a result of the tourism revolution, the Balearics came to rank as one of Spain’s richest regions (as well as also being well situated in terms of its quality of life), thanks to the construction of a huge number of hotels (which still represent most of its hotels today), infrastructure development, equally big foreign investment, and the arrival of immigrants, tourists and manpower from rural areas that moved over to the service sector.

Through this tourism monoculture, the Balearics became part of the European economy. At the same time, the archipelago also became dependent on the tourist industry’s issuing markets and thus subject to the highs and lows of international economic cycles. With the 1973 oil crisis as a recognizable landmark, the Balearic economy was dragged down by the crisis that affected Europe’s post-war model of growth and development. At that time, the Spanish economy was following a different tempo. That is, the first boom entered a crisis but it was a relative one, since the economic results were actually quite good within the context of the Spain of the period. Nevertheless it was still a crisis. Emergence from the crisis followed the pattern of a European process of restructurization that heralded globalization, and this was the context for the second boom of the 1980s. The neo-liberal framework that surrounded the second boom (which transformed the structure of tourism capital by centralizing it in a complex yet hierarchical network of small, medium-sized hoteliers, chains and tour operators) accentuated the flexibility and unregulated nature of manpower in the tourist sector as well as increasing productivity by speeding up the pace of work and reducing the price of production factors, thus reintroducing a growth in profits, income and the GDP. Even so, the relative crisis of the early 1990s could not be avoided, after which reforms and adjustments had to be made to reactivate the economy in the middle of the decade.

This succession of well-differentiated phases is clearly reflected by the distribution of the demographic, ecological and regional effects. Initially, these took the form of the heavy development of coastal areas with clusters of high-rise buildings, mainly hotels, in Mallorca’s two big bays. The second phase, on the other hand, followed a horizontal, more disperse (although equally heavy) development pattern, along almost the entire Balearic coast, with the exception of Minorca. The third phase of building and tourism development, characterized by the construction of terraced or single-family housing, took place in inland areas of the islands, making the construction industry the driving force behind the Balearic economy and the promoter of a new influx of tourists but not to the islands’ hotels. As well as the “extrinsic” causes (international investment cycles), there are also “intrinsic” reasons for this change. Firstly, calls by conservationists (pioneers in Spain given their premature development, importance and degree of popular support) managed to draw attention to the environmental effects of the tourism anarchy. Secondly, the demands of the new tourist went beyond the limits of the sun and sand model of tourism. Finally, with democracy came modernization, enabling local authorities (the autonomous community and town councils, initially, and the island councils later) to acquire regulatory powers over territorial and urban planning which, with great difficulty, gave rise to legal improvements and a certain regulation, at least in comparison with other similar coastal areas (see the Dalmatian coast).

In short, what we are talking about are booms and “Balearizations” in the plural. Each one of them was the result of an auspicious moment for heavy investment into tourism. This was followed by subsequent economic expansion (with a considerable multiplying effect, given the dynamism and flexibility of the business fabric of the Balearic’s small and medium-sized entrepreneur, and concluded with a period of relative stagnation. The subsequent recovery was not mechanical. The general evolution of the structure of the economy and its cycles was and has been attributable to numerous different factors related to institutions, values and images, and the social agents that have created them. Consequently, it was contingent and unpredictable but by no means random. In the case of the Balearic Islands, the different factors that led from one model or pattern of development to another were the result of complex interactions, in which popular pressure, a search for new sources of business and the intervention of the authorities all brought a particular phase “to a close”.

This succession of booms offers a picture of chiaroscuros. On the one hand, from an environmental perspective, during the second half of the 1990s (at a time far removed from the beginnings of the tourist industry), an absence of factory chimneys did not prevent production figures of solid urban waste, CO2 emissions and energy or water consumption from rising far above those of the GDP, often with two-figure increases. This type of impact, even when it describes a prime example of a consumerist society, can largely be externalized: that is, exported in the form of ecological ills after being industrially metabolized through power stations and technological parks. However, it is much more difficult to conceal the transformation of the landscape. The path described by the booms could be seen as an inventory, reflecting a loss of intangible assets in coastal areas, picturesque rural settings and also urban ones, as demonstrated by Palma where, since the redevelopment of the 1990s, one can scarcely find even minor traces of the dense public space that a city is supposed to represent (that Mediterranean invention par excellence).

Meanwhile, the transformation of the social fabric is itself two-sided. From the perspective of modernization, society’s remarkable upward mobility, different waves of immigrants, and a constant flow of visitors have all enriched and emancipated the islands’ traditional morality, not without tensions. Nonetheless, other factors that are also present include the vulnerability of big social groups and a lack of public initiatives to promote the integration of new citizens (despite improvements on the past), the structural dependence of professional activities where little or no training is involved, a big black economy and informal attitude to rules and regulations, and rocketing real estate prices. It should be remembered that the Balearic labour market has always influenced the external labour market and wage flexibility, not the internal, high quality market that a model based on quality and a knowledge-based economy both promote. Manpower here adapts numerically to cycles, with record figures for temporary employment, staff turnovers and income inequality in comparison with mainland Europe. Likewise it is composed of clearly differentiated socio-labour segments, by sex and place of origin (“non-locals”, “non-islanders”, “foreigners” from the EU, or “immigrants” from outside the EU). Added to this, there is a chronic deficit in the development of the welfare state, leading to a division between those citizens who have access to social security coverage (in the Spanish autonomous community with the most commercialized public protection) and those who do not, who are often precariously employed on a daily basis in a service-related or hazardous job.

This contradicts the impressive economic figures that make the Balearics the mirror in which everyone would like to see themselves reflected: figures that do not reflect the falling value of the islands’ natural assets or its social deficits. Nevertheless, the citizens of the Balearic Islands have reacted, often showing themselves to be more capable of reflection and more entrepreneurial than their politicians and, no doubt, than their hegemonic business class. With the experience of the fight against the Franco regime and society’s rebellious sense of ethics as its driving force, this has rather successfully been combined with a democratic civic sense, dynamizing and enriching a public opinion that no longer coincides so easily with the stereotype of a reactionary, sheep-like Mediterranean society. Many of the sources of unease have been interwoven by this social agent into a social discourse that is present among other social protest groups in the Mediterranean, in areas like the lands beside the River Ebro, with the difference that in the Balearics it has been the main subject of political debate in the last decade: the defence of a region that is being consumed and destroyed.

The sensation of a loss of meaning, experienced traumatically and expressed in this shared idea of the region, is nevertheless triggered off by different ideas: 1) a natural resource: a synthetic variable of the environmental repercussions and level of sustainability; 2) quality of life threatened by the congestion and saturation of areas and infrastructure: the degree of habitability; 3) a traditional world colonized by modernity; 4) a sense of belonging to a group that is culturally, linguistically and morally attached to a certain place; 5) communal assets, such as the landscape or peace and quiet, destroyed by the changing use of private real estate. Whilst the first two notions have had a considerable statistical impact and are difficult to refute, the third is the most controversial. Certain aspects of traditional morality can and must be upheld: a strong sense of family and community integration, trust, a sense of the foreseeable, but others cannot, such as its hierarchical, client-based or authoritarian order. The fourth, now not so important, calls for a defensive strategy of reclusion that is unrealistic, given the composition of Balearic society. Meanwhile the fifth, the one that has perhaps become most prevalent in recent years, is still rather undefined. Also it is hard to reconcile with the public control of that unevenly distributed yet widespread phenomenon from the last decade: that cushy number, unregulated residential tourism. Despite its complexity, this “regional polisemy” is the result of a mutual sense of dispossession, with the loss of a natural and social environment.

It should not be forgotten that the landscape, that “socio-ecological algorithm”, is a consubstantial part of the basic Balearic tourist product. For most tourism models, the progressive destruction of the landscape clearly represents the deterioration of a purchased product. This is important, because it is not clear whether another tourist boom will reoccur. Although this issue has been the cause of statistical and political controversy since the change of millennium, for the first time in the “tourist era” the GDP and income growth rates no longer rank first among Spanish statistics, for the first time the number of visitors to hotels has not risen (although this is not the case of tourist visits) and for the first time the amazingly high profit rates of the past have been “normalized”. Discussions revolve around whether the incapacity of the tourist and residential development industries to reactivate the economy as a whole is merely temporary or whether it is structural, even if tourist cycles do give rise to a new boom. Although this is an open-ended issue, more and more people are against the idea of taking a leap in the dark in search of a new tourist boom.

Evidently, a change in the type of development typical of the tourist era involves structural reforms. We have seen how structural change is not a linear process, and still less an undefined, irreversible moral and material process. That is, there is no reason to believe in an endless chain of booms, where the end of one phase is attributable to different forces but where the beginning of the next reproduces an incessant search for maximum short-term profits, a competitive strategy based on lower costs and prices, the falling value of the landscape and hierarchical decision making. An alternative strategy based on public tenders for large-scale infrastructure can only aggravate the problems of inflation and the reduced value of the landscape, making the destination less attractive and converting public spending into disinvestment that only worsens the environmental deficits. Another possible way, based on the training of human resources and the acquisition of knowledge, will not easily be possible without promoting greater economic diversification, unthroning the new construction sector and dealing with the aforementioned social deficits.

Thus the great enigma of the Balearics is that in spite of the archipelago’s paradigmatic nature, it cannot find a tourism model able to deal with the current challenges that it faces in a carefully thought-out way. Either it goes back to the idealized model of the 1930s or it carries on blithely without a second thought.