Simon Calder

Yes, I certainly can.

And first of all, I'm so sorry about the connection problems.

I'm speaking to you from Newcastle upon Tyne.

I thought I had a very good signal, but there we are.

I'm out in the open and I will carry on as much as I can.

Yes, I actually carbon date.

The first time I saw anti-tourism protests in the island of Mallorca was actually going back to 2015 when somebody was going around with graffiti saying tourism equals education.

terrorism.

We've had many, many other small-scale protests, including, for example, quite an entertaining kind of social media thing, or at least it entertained quite a lot of people on social media, where they went around putting

fake signs up saying you know warning of jellyfish and and things like that on popular beaches so that has now um grown into what we are told is going to be a really important um uh collapsing of of

Mallorca on the 26th of July.

And yeah, if you are planning to go out to the island, as I am intending to do this very Wednesday, obviously people are a little bit concerned about what they will find there.

The idea is these are being plastered on the, for instance, on the roads between Day and Solaire.

These are beautiful villages, towns really, where they are very popular with day trippers and indeed cyclists who regard Solaire

mallorca is possibly the greatest place in europe to uh to cycle and the idea is yep they can't cope with any more tourists and the island has become a theme park and they cannot and this is the crucial thing i think they cannot obtain decent housing now i believe that that is actually getting to the nub of these protests both in

Spain and other countries as well.

And that is that an awful lot of places which previously would have been the preserve of local people, apartments, for instance, in the city of Palma, the capital, are now Airbnb and similar locations.

So basically people who were renting apartments now realize that they can actually make more money by selling to tourists.

And that has unbalanced everything.

I don't think so.