I moved to Mallorca a few years ago, from a German family that mostly took its holidays close to home — by train, within Germany or a neighbouring country. That shaped how I think about travel: as something low-impact, regionally rooted. Living on an island where my partner’s family is from complicates that; here, flying is often hard to avoid. That tension, between what I believe and what island life actually asks of me, shapes how I think about tourism and mobility — including the fact that Mallorca has long been, and still is, a favourite destination for visitors from my own country.
A saturated destination like Mallorca can be read as a kind of laboratory for rethinking tourism under ecological crisis. What some researchers call the “imperial mode of living” — a way of living whose comforts depend on degrading somewhere else — has a clear tourism expression here: ecological degradation, pollution, gentrification, land grabbing, rising costs of living, the commercialisation of places, practices and nature that were never for sale. Responding to it means more than reducing the scale of tourism. It means rethinking its political, economic and ecological foundations from the ground up — what some call detourism.
What a fairer tourism economy would ask for
Equity has to be central. Tourism in Mallorca currently concentrates profit while spreading its social and environmental costs around — a post-growth approach would mean redistributing that wealth: capping private accumulation and income, prioritising residents’ right to a dignified life, restricting second-home and non-resident property ownership, and reinvesting the surplus in ecosystem restoration and social infrastructure rather than more capacity. Alongside that sits what some researchers call the “right to metabolism” — the idea that tourism has to operate within real biophysical limits, which for Mallorca means confronting a resource-intensive, externally dependent way of running the island, and moving from a linear, extractive system toward a circular, territorially rooted one.
Community-based, collectively managed tourism would shift control from private operators toward local people, and toward decommodifying nature rather than packaging more of it for sale. None of this is only about “greening” the industry as it stands — it is about resisting the displacement, precarious labour and ecological degradation that tourism expansion brings, while planning a real reduction in resource use and waste, and diversifying the economy toward agroecology, care and ecosystem regeneration.
What it could look like
In a future shaped by less mobility, fewer flights, cruise ships and large resorts would let coastal ecosystems recover, while existing infrastructure was repurposed into smaller, locally rooted forms — agroecological farms, community-run guesthouses that put profit back into local hands. Access would be managed, not unlimited: something like a flexible daily ecotax and caps tied to the island’s real carrying capacity, assessed through ecological and social indicators, not visitor targets. Public transport would run emission-free, private vehicle access would be limited, and air connections tightly regulated. Water would be a common good again, not something bound up in rights dating back to the dictatorship.
Tourism infrastructure would increasingly be run by worker cooperatives, with collective ownership, fairer distribution of benefits and real labour protections. Shorter working hours across the economy would reduce the pressure that drives high-consumption holidays in the first place, making room for slower, local, low-impact ways of resting. Visitors would come less often, stay longer, and engage more with the place and the people in it — tourism reframed as a privilege that comes with responsibilities, not a right that comes with none.
Mallorca could become a laboratory for post-growth tourism — vacations no longer built on extraction, but on care, reciprocity and ecological limits.
None of this happens by itself, and it is not without real costs: tourism is central enough to the Balearic economy that shrinking it would mean job losses unless it is matched by a universal basic income, stronger public services and a growing social and solidarity economy. But the alternative — clinging to a model that is already cracking — is not really a choice at all. A planned, democratic transition beyond mass tourism is not just necessary. It is possible.
Drawing on work by Ulrich Brand & Markus Wissen, Jason Hickel and researchers of the Col·lectiu Alternatives.