Majorca's lazy anti-tourism campaign attacks middle-class visitors
A protest group from the town of Soller has launched an Instagram page called 'Welcome to Sollerland', posting AI-generated images highlighting the problems of overtourism in the area.
Soller is a popular town in the north of Majorca, known for its handsome port and historic tramline. However, it has suffered from serious overcrowding in recent years, and plans to launch a 'non-resident traffic zone' in the centre of town to reduce tourist traffic. Just last week, the Sa Mola tunnel entering the town had to close due to heavy traffic.
The account has posted a variety of AI-generated scenes. These include cartoons of people stacked high on a tram, thousands of people swarming Repic beach, swarms of tourists in sunhats taking selfies, and images of locals holding up signs in Catalan.
One computer-generated child stands on the beach holding up a sign saying 'jo jugava aqui' – 'I played here', for example. Or a man in a crowded square: 'I used to drink coffee here.'
'If you ask AI what this summer will be like in Soller, this is the answer,' the protest group says. Municipal figures suggest that residents own 3,000 cars compared to the 20,000 which can occupy the town on busier days.
I am sympathetic to the mass tourism protest movement across Europe, and appreciate that the residents of islands like Majorca are at their wits' end. Joana Maria Estrany Vallespir, a leading voice of the protest group SOS Residents, says the plight of locals went far beyond the obvious things like busy beaches and boozy Brits.
'There is a scarcity of water,' she said. 'Hospitals and public places are full. Rich foreigners buy houses in the countryside, but they don't live here. Our way of life is being threatened.'
It is understandable and right that Majorcans are making a stand. Wouldn't you, if you had to wake up at the crack of dawn to visit your favourite beach? If a drive that used to take 10 minutes now takes 30? And while I appreciate the ingenuity (and headline-grabbing credentials) of this AI campaign, it misses the mark.
If the tourism problem in Soller is so bad, show us. Wouldn't it be more effective to get an actual resident to go and stand in Plaza de la Constitucion in Soller to hold up that sign? If anything, the use of AI may arouse suspicion that the problem isn't as bad as they are saying. An opportunity missed, and a good example of how AI images can't replicate the emotional impact and credibility of human action.
This isn't to say a bit of photo tinkering can't be effective. I recall a campaign from 2023 by the UK accommodation site, Canopy & Stars, where they took stills from three popular UK sites over 48 hours (Durdle Door, St Ives and the Lake District) and layered them up to show the scale of footfall over that period.
That was clever. Welcome to Sollerland feels lazy, not least because it would have taken less than a minute to create each of these images. Their end goal is also confusing. These hastily thrown together images of cycling groups and selfie-taking tourists aren't going to change the minds of policymakers in the Balearic Government. And, obviously, the locals already know what's going on.
Which means they are hoping to educate the tourists themselves. If this is the case (and yes, I am aware of the irony here) using English on the placards would have had a far greater impact. This is why you so often see 'tourists go home' written on the banners or scrawled on walls, rather than the Catalan equivalent.
If protest groups want to get heard by politicians, they need to mobilise and continue to demonstrate in great numbers as they did throughout 2024. As I am sure they will. And if they want to get a message across to tourists via the international media, they need to be smarter, wittier and more creative with their direct action.
Last year locals continually traversed a zebra crossing in Galicia. In the Balearics we have seen bogus signs at beaches warning of deadly jellyfish. In Venice, on the day the entry charge was launched last year, locals unveiled a great banner saying 'Welcome to Veniceland'. These will go down in the history books chronicling the great European war against mass tourism. The AI Welcome to Sollerland campaign, I am afraid, will not.
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