In a hot, dusty car park within sight of Ibiza’s old town, but a world away from the Balearic island’s hedonistic clubs and bougainvillaea-fringed villas, Ami Mohamed-Ali sits in his van, patiently brewing the first of three late-afternoon cups of strong tea.
“The first glass is bitter like life,” says the 33-year-old seasonal worker from Western Sahara, quoting an old refrain. “The second is sweet, like love, and the third is soft, like death.” As he adjusts the camping stove and pours the liquid from glass to glass to ensure a decent head of foam, Mohamed-Ali ponders his living quarters without a trace of life’s bitterness. So what if this van is his home for the next six months?
“I don’t really like to complain because I’m from a refugee camp that’s home to thousands of people,” he says. “Plus, I’m much better off than a lot of my countrymen, who are living in the desert.”
Mohamed-Ali is one of a growing number of locals and foreign workers who find themselves locked out of Ibiza’s rental market. Faced with exorbitant rents for cramped, shared homes, many have little choice but to live in vans, caravans or tents.
In Ibiza – as in neighbouring Mallorca and in the Canary islands – it is increasingly obvious that neither the island nor its housing market can put up with the huge numbers of tourists that arrive each year.
“Over the past five years – but mainly since the pandemic – people have been feeling that everything’s oversaturated, that there are more and more tourists, and that leads to roads and public services becoming overloaded,” says Rafael Giménez, of Prou Eivissa (Enough Ibiza), a group that is campaigning for limits on the number of visitors and vehicles onthe island.
“Ibiza’s an island, so housing is limited by definition. The law of supply and demand has totally broken down.”
Tourism accounts for 84% of the island’s economy and last year, a record 3.7 million tourists visited Ibiza and the smaller, neighbouring island of Formentera, whose combined population is around 160,000.
Giménez stresses that Prou Eivissa is not opposed to tourism. The problem, he says, is overtourism, the issue that led tens of thousands to protest in the Canaries last month, and which was behind Prou’s hundreds-strong demonstration outside the seat of Ibiza’s government on Friday night. Similar protests will be held in Mallorca this weekend.
“Tourism’s always been here – it was here when I was growing up – but there was a balance,” he says. “It’s not like we don’t want tourism; that’s not the case at all. But when it starts affecting your life directly, then things have got out of control.”
Giménez says holiday homes and the proliferation of tourist flats are not the only problem. “The fact that you have more tourists and more tourist properties means that you need more workers from elsewhere to work in the shops, bars and restaurants,” he says. “Those workers need more housing and there’s been a demographic explosion – not because Ibizans are having children, but because mass tourism has required a lot more people to come here.”
These days, he adds, it is common to find up to eight people sharing a three-bedroom flat, and rents have almost doubled over the past decade, rising from €800 or €900 a month to at least €1,500 – and much more than that in the high season.
Iván Fidalgo, a Guardia Civil officer and local coordinator for the Spanish Association of Civil Guards, says Ibiza’s lack of affordable housing makes life very difficult for public sector workers, and has left his police force struggling to attract new officers to replace retiring ones.
“No one wants to be posted here,” he says. “No one in their right mind is going to want to come to live and work in Ibiza because they won’t find anywhere to live.”
Fidalgo says this is undermining the force’s ability to do its job, adding that guardias civiles have also been forced into drastic housing solutions.
“Come summer, there will be colleagues who are living in vans or caravans as they did last year or in previous years,” he says. “We just feel powerless.”
Federico Faggi, a spokesperson for the Ibiza and Formentera tenants’ union, says the situation is the result of uncontrolled touristification, exacerbated by vulture fund speculation and the recent influx of northern European digital nomads whose high salaries allow them to cover rents far beyond the means of locals.
Earlier this month, Marga Prohens, the regional president of the Balearics, acknowledged the increasing anger over unchecked tourism. “This government understands that limits are necessary,” she said. “We have to find a way to ensure coexistence between tourist activity and the wellbeing of the residents of the Balearic Islands.”
Mariano Juan, the vice-president of Ibiza’s governing consell, says that while he understands the malaise that prompted Friday’s demonstration, the problem lies not with tourism, but with illegal tourism. He says that Ibiza’s licensed tourist capacity has shrunk over the past two decades from around 109,000 beds to just under 100,000 as smaller hotels have shut or reduced their room count to focus on quality rather than quantity.
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“If the association organising the demonstration is suggesting … cutting the number of legal tourist places then maybe we’re not getting to the root of the problem, which is the illegal market,” he says. “It’s the thousands of adverts on Airbnb and the hundreds on Booking.com. It’s all just mushroomed since social networks made it all easier to find illegal accommodation.”
The key to fighting tourist saturation, he adds, is “a fight to the death against illegal tourist lets”. To that end, he says, the Ibizan government has been cracking down on illicit landlords, who can be fined €40,000 just for advertising an illegal letting. Juan says the consell had already collected fines totalling more than €2m and has almost 200 cases open against illegal tourist flats on different rental platforms. Meanwhile, it is working with the likes of Airbnb to root out illegal landlords and using council inspectors to make undercover bookings.
Juan also points out that measures to limit the number of cars coming on to the island by ferry will be debated in the regional parliament in the coming months, and says the authorities have been working hard to entice different kinds of visitors.
“For many years now, the consell has been working to promote family, sporting, gastronomic, medical and conference tourism,” he adds. “Five or 10 years ago, we used to dream of having a tourist season that lasted five or six months – not just three months of sun and partying. We’re now getting a seven-month season … so we’re already managing to change the tourist model.”
In the meantime, the island’s car parks and campsites are playing home to the bricks-and-mortar homeless. Given the financial and emotional stresses of cramped, shared flats, some have even come to embrace the freedom of a mobile home.
Leonardo Nogueira, a 45-year-old Uruguayan chef who cooks in private villas, swapped his €800-a-month, one-bed flat for a Fiat campervan last year. So far, he has no regrets and there is enough room for the essential creature comforts: his coffee pot, yerba maté, guitar, surfboard and bike.
“Finding somewhere to live here is a real problem,” he says. “I know couples here who have split up but who have to keep living together – one on the sofa and one in the bedroom – because they’ve got nowhere else to go … Here I have solar panels, electricity and heating. I’m a self-sufficient, sustainable snail now.”
Similarly phlegmatic is Felipe Keilis-Carrasco, a musician from Argentina who plays clubs, bars, weddings and birthdays with his cumbia band. Having left behind the rental market, home is now an old caravan he bought for €2,000.
“I don’t think it’s that bad,” he says. “It’s not a house in the mountains; it’s not the most luxurious place, but compared with the conditions of some seasonal workers – a tiny, awful room – it’s fine. And it’s better than spending €700 a month on a place you share with 10 other people.We’re a little community here.”
A sense of that community spirit is evident in the way the car park’s residents greet each other when they arrive home from a long day’s work, and in the way that Mohamed-Ali has befriended the Moroccans in the tent next to his van, cooking for them so they don’t have to subsist on sandwiches. Most are also united by worries about being fined and moved on by the police.
Such equanimity, however, is not universal. One Romanian man, who asks not to be named, has now spent two of his 10 years in Ibiza living in a caravan. “Things aren’t going to change; they’re only going to get worse,” he says. “This is an island for rich people.”