Thousands of residents marched through Mallorca on 26 July against the scale of the island's tourism industry, arguing that the current volume of visitors is straining housing, water and local infrastructure past what the population can absorb. The date was picked so that smaller demonstrations could build towards it over the preceding weeks.
The timing carries an obvious point. The total solar eclipse on 12 August has produced a surge in bookings, and organisers say hotel reservations for the date are already full. An island that says it cannot absorb its current visitor numbers is about to receive an unusually concentrated additional wave of them.
The grievance is not really about visitors, and the protests have been careful to say so. It is about what tourist accommodation does to a housing market. Every flat converted to short term letting is a flat removed from the residential stock, and in a constrained island market that arithmetic shows up in rents faster than in almost any mainland city.
Tactics have hardened over the year. Activists in the Canary Islands have glued shut key boxes used by holiday rentals, which is a small act with a clear message: the physical infrastructure of short term letting is now treated as a legitimate target rather than a neutral feature of the streetscape.
For the industry the difficulty is that the protests are not asking for a marketing response. They are asking for fewer beds, which is the one thing a tourism economy built on adding beds is structurally unable to offer.