At an Ibiza estate with a long history of celebrity hedonism the former England rugby player James Haskell, now a DJ, posed for a selfie with undisguised impatience.
Next to him, moneyed regulars sipped cocktails around the pool on which a bronzed George Michael floated for Wham’s Club Tropicana video. The drinks here though are not free, but cost €19 (£16) a pop.
Pikes, which was Ibiza’s first boutique hotel when it opened in 1978, represents one luxurious side of life on the Balearic island. The other is exemplified by a slum within sight of Ibiza’s sandstone castle, made up of makeshift tarpaulin tents, cars, caravans and even a parked coach used as a dwelling.
“I call this the island of Sodom and Gomorrah,” said María Dolores García Gómez, 59, sitting in her cramped caravan, strewn with cartons of paella stock and fruit juice. “I’ve lost everything.”
García Gómez is from Seville, but has lived in Ibiza since 1993, working for three decades as a chambermaid and pot washer in hotels. Last year she lost her job, and could no longer afford the studio apartment where she lived with her daughter and grandson. She received severance pay, but receives nothing else from the Spanish state, she said. There is not enough social housing in Ibiza. So she came here.
Advertisement
Her daughter, Nabila, lives with her, but is on medication for a mental health problem that gives her suicidal thoughts and means she cannot work. Her grandson has gone to live with his paternal grandparents.
“I’m begging,” García Gómez said, her eyes filling with tears. “I go to the supermarkets asking for food.”
More and more Ibizans are in her position. The island, listed as a Unesco world heritage site for its biodiversity and culture, is creaking under the pressure of ever more tourists. Last year a record four million people visited, and even more are expected this year. Meanwhile, almost a quarter of the properties in Ibiza and its neighbour Formentera are thought to be worth more than €3 million. Last month, a ruin went on sale for €2.1 million.
That leaves little room for the 160,000 permanent residents. With the cost of living crisis preventing many from buying, rents have soared, in some cases by 50 per cent in the past year. A two-bedroom apartment now goes for up to €2,200 a month, which is unaffordable for many working in the tourist industry that makes up 84 per cent of Ibiza’s economy.
Slums have sprung up on private and public land and in forested areas all over Ibiza’s 220 square miles. They house foreigners here for work and out-of-luck residents such as García Gómez.
Advertisement
Inspired by campaigners in the Canary Islands, who last month staged a 20-day hunger strike against mass tourism, about 500 Ibiza residents gathered on Friday last week outside the island’s council office. They chanted and waved placards with messages like “enough is enough” and “my lawyer lives in a rented car”.
Noelia Garcia, 19, who works in the shop of a Hard Rock Café, said: “I feel angry because in some years I, who was born here, will not be able to live here.” Jake Allan, her boyfriend, 19, whose parents are British but who was born in Malaga, said: “Its abusive.” He works in a chemicals factory in Ibiza. The two said they were going to Granada this winter because it was cheaper to be there without work than in Ibiza with work.
The protesters want the council to reduce the number of tourists, limit the number of vehicles on the island and do more to clamp down on unlicensed Airbnbs. Similar protests went ahead yesterday in Mallorca and Menorca.
“We’re not against tourism at all. Of course we’re not,” said Xacquelina Perry, in her sixties, who came from Wolverhampton to live in Ibiza 40 years ago and never left, and is part of the Prou Eivissa campaign group that organised the protest. “It’s the model of tourism that we don’t like.” she added. “We want tourism like the 1980s: people come for the island, not the clubs.”
Ibiza has for decades been a sunkissed haven for Britons, Spaniards and others. But in the 1990s it began to be advertised as a party destination, while a wealthy elite also piled in. Lionel Messi, Rafael Nadal and Shakira are among those who have bought properties on the island. The DJ David Guetta’s ex-wife Cathy owns Villa Titanium, a 12-bedroom modernist property worth about €30 million.
Advertisement
Leonardo DiCaprio is known to fly in regularly on his private jet, and was seen last summer sharing a boat ride with Mick Jagger. Earlier this year DiCaprio invested in a Spanish solar power startup operating in Ibiza, according to the local press.
Ibiza’s clubs, at the same time, are regularly ranked by magazines as the world’s top establishments in an $11 billion electronic music industry. Between them they earned €141 million in ticket sales alone last year, a 75 per cent increase from 2019.
Local laws ban short-term rentals in residential blocks, but they are widely flouted. This month the council fined 13 Airbnb hosts a total of €460,000 for illegally advertising apartments. Statistics suggest that at the height of summer there are about 100,000 more people on the island than there are licensed places for tourists. A search on Airbnb last week for somewhere to stay for two people for two nights next weekend found 514 options.
The clubs blame the pressure on accommodation on the rental sites. “The moment you rent any home to tourists, you distort everything,” said José Luis Benítez, manager of the Leisure Association of Ibiza, whose members include Ushuaïa, Hï and other clubs and restaurants that together employ about 3,600 people.
This month the Balearic islands government hardened laws banning the sale of alcohol in shops at night, threatening €3,000 fines, and preventing party boats from operating within a nautical mile of shore, in an effort to curtail mass tourism. Again, enforcement will be key. A Prou Eivissa video showed dozens of what it said were party boats bobbing in the waters within metres of Ibiza’s coast.
Advertisement
The housing shortage means that employers are struggling to attract the thousands of seasonal workers needed to serve drinks and scrub floors. Vibra, the largest hotel chain in Ibiza, has allocated an entire branch of 400 beds to house staff.
A lack of workers also affects the island’s public services. There are also not enough hospital and prison workers, as well as teachers, a number of whom have taken to flying in daily for work from Mallorca, 45 minutes away. “This is the only choice I have,” one told Spanish media recently.
Iván Fidalgo, of the National Civil Guards Association in the Balearics , said the force was only half strength, because “nobody wants to come to Ibiza” with prices so high. Last year several officers lived in cars, a situation he said was likely to be repeated this summer. He wants the government in Madrid to pay police a premium to work on the island, as it does for the Canaries. “It’s impossible,” he said. “You won’t find accommodation and if you find it it’s going to be so expensive you can’t afford it.”
That means, he said, “if you have to go to a police station to make a report of a crime or whatever, probably you will find 10, 15 people ahead of you and you will have to wait for hours.” At the same time, Ibiza’s infamous drug and mafia networks run amok.
Every day, more people come to the slum where García Gómez lives. But the slum is next to a hospital and a school, which means that people are not allowed to live there. The council has threatened inhabitants with fines and the seizure of their vehicles if they do not leave. Last Wednesday it installed a height barrier, blocking vehicles of more than 2.1 metres from entering the land. That has also stopped caravans from leaving.
Advertisement
García Gómez thinks the treatment amounts to “psychological abuse”. She was not going anywhere, she said, unless she got a council home, for which she was on the list, and work. “I’m ashamed to be Spanish,” she said. “I wish I had been born abroad.”
