In the European imagination, the Balearic Islands glow — a place people flee to, to escape work and winter. Cheap flights, endless places to stay, and the deep-rooted belief that mass tourism is an unquestioned good have made tourism the lifeline of the Spanish economy. Yet what looks like prosperity from the beach-bar terrace is, up close, a model cracking under its own weight.
The Balearics report Europe’s highest tourist load per resident: more than 18 million visitors a year for an island group of 1.2 million people, and tourism is treated as the “locomotive” pulling the national economy along. But those who actually run that engine tell a different story. Behind the renovated old towns, industrial estates and working-class suburbs sit close to the tourist zones, where much of the work — distribution, hotels, gastronomy, agriculture, construction — is seasonal or informal. And behind all of it sits the vast, largely invisible work of care.
That labour is disproportionately done by racialised and working-class women, many of them migrants from Latin America and Morocco, in hotels, households, kitchens, cleaning and elder care. Their presence is everywhere and their voice is rarely heard in public debate. Under global capitalism, care has become something poorer women sell to wealthier households — a way of covering what philosopher Alison Jaggar calls the “care deficit”: the gap left when wealthier societies send more women into paid work without building the public childcare and eldercare to match it. That gap gets filled, disproportionately, by migrant women’s labour.
This is not just a story about individual households. It is what happens when growth depends on care, land and labour being taken from somewhere and made to look free. High-income regions benefit from cheap migrant labour, while the communities that provide it become locked into sustaining the very model that deepens their own precarity. In the Balearics, this same logic drives a deep housing crisis: rising rents and property speculation push out teachers, healthcare workers and other residents the islands actually need, further straining the public services that are left.
The tourism economy depends on all of this staying out of sight. Visitors are not meant to see the buses that carry cleaners to hotel zones before dawn, the shared flats where workers sleep in shifts, or the water shortages quietly threatening the islands’ ecosystems while the pools stay full. But the model is reaching its limits — housing, water, social services and workers’ patience are all being stretched thin, and climate change threatens the very things the industry sells: beaches, biodiversity, stable weather, and the promise of endless abundance.
The Balearics are not uniquely broken. They are a microcosm of a global system built on unequal exchange — where growth in one place is paid for by exploitation or ecological loss somewhere else.
Recognising this means rethinking what prosperity should look like. Care work needs to be recognised as essential labour, properly valued and protected. Housing and public services need urgent attention, so that the people who keep these islands running can go on living in them. Tourism and global labour chains need reconfiguring, to reduce exploitation and account honestly for their ecological and social costs. And prosperity itself needs redefining — measured by wellbeing, ecological stability and fairness, rather than visitor numbers or hotel occupancy.
As the writers Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore put it, learning to dream — seditiously, collectively — is something many of us have been prevented from practising for a long time. The kitchens, classrooms and community spaces where those dreams get shared are themselves worth reimagining: not as drudgery, but as places that could be filled with the chance to rest, create and recover. That reimagining is where a fairer Balearics has to start.
Drawing on the work of Alison Jaggar, and of Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore.