The mistake of the tourist accommodation places pool

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GOB has asked the Island Council to abandon the use of the tourist accommodation places pool and to require guarantees of water availability for any new tourist concession that is made.

As is well known, the Island Council of Menorca resorted to a subterfuge to avoid the moratorium on tourist accommodation places that has been decreed in the Balearic Islands. The Prohens regional government, which in tourism matters has become characterised by making its discourse point in one direction and its actions in the opposite direction, enabled a way of bypassing the aforementioned moratorium.

It is a mechanism that collects tourist places that are voluntarily deregistered or have been inactive over the last three years, and puts them back on the market. These are tourist places that have ceased to operate, that are inactive, that were not operating. Removing them would not imply any kind of compensation for their former holders.

This would be a gift at a time when Menorca’s water reserves are unable to meet demand and the housing market is inaccessible to the resident population.

Increasing tourism pressure even further

But by making them available again to whoever wants to use them, the Island Council is in fact increasing tourism pressure. And it is doing so at the worst possible time. When even voices from the tourism sector acknowledge that the island is suffering from excessive pressure.

For these reasons, GOB has contacted the Island Council to ask whether the places being brought back into operation undergo any kind of procedure to guarantee that there is sufficient water availability to supply them. Let us remember that tourism activity already consumes more water than the resident population and that in residential developments consumption is four or five times higher than the usual consumption in traditional population centres.

Through the places-pool mechanism, the Island Council has reactivated more than 800 tourist places that were not operational, equivalent to around 160 homes that will once again be used to accommodate tourists instead of residents.

A serious mistake, in GOB’s opinion, because Menorca needs precisely the opposite.