Majorca has become the latest holiday hotspot to see anti-tourist graffiti appear, after similar slogans have appeared across mainland Spain, the Balearics and Canary Islands.
The latest grafitti has appeared in a Majorcan neighbourhood which has seen a massive influx of foreign buyers over the past few years.
The words ‘Go Home Tourist’ has been scrawled in English over a wall underneath a real estate promotion billboard in Nou Llevant, which has undergone massive transformation with most new properties being snapped up by Germans.
It was billed as a smaller version of San Francisco’s Silicon Valley when the transformation of the neighbourhood five minutes from Playa de Palma got underway.
Locals have been echoing some of the same complaints protestors in the Canary Islands have been making, claiming code-operated key lock boxes have appeared on many of the entrances of new apartment blocks.
One Spanish woman interviewed under a fictitious name in an island paper last year complained it was difficult to communicate with neighbours because most only spoke German and the majority of apartments where she lived were being purchased as holiday homes or rental investment properties.
Overnight pictures of the anti-tourist graffiti were published by local press, less than a month after similar messages appeared in southern Tenerife.
No-one is yet claiming responsibility for the graffiti which appeared in a road called Avinguda de Mexic opposite a recently-completed new apartment complex.
Island newspaper Diario de Mallorca described it as the first example of tourism-phobia in Nou Llevant, and said it was targeted at the neighbourhood’s “new foreign residents.”
In the last four years more than 750 apartments worth up to €2.5 million (£2million) have been built there. Around 70 per cent of the properties are said to have been snapped up by foreigners, mainly Germans.
Nou Llevant was talked about as a little Silicon Valley before its transformation began.
A councillor in the Majorcan capital Palma, which the neighbourhood forms part of, said the council sought a “co-existence” between the residential area and technology or renewable energy companies, so that employees could also live there.
Opposition politicians rubbished the idea, saying it was a residential area for the wealthy and a magnet for foreign investors with a lack of much-needed social housing linked to local incomes.
Residents in the Balearics Islands which include Majorca and Ibiza showed their support for the Canary Islands protesters on Saturday who took to the streets in their thousands, although their demos were much smaller.
Organisers of the demonstrations in Tenerife said 80,000 people joined the protests under the slogan: “The Canary Islands have a limit.” Official estimates put the number of people at around 30,000.
Campaigners have been quick to distance themselves from anti-tourist graffiti which appeared on walls and benches in and around Palm Mar in southern Tenerife at the start of the month.
Messages in English left on walls and benches in and around the resort included ‘My misery your paradise’ and ‘Average salary in Canary Islands is €1,200′.
In an apparent UK backlash, a response left in English on a wall next to a ‘Tourists go home’ message said: “F##k off, we pay your wages.”
At the beginning of last week a picture was published in local press showing the words ‘Go Home’ on a hire car in Tenerife.
Canarias Se Agota, the lead platform behind the Canary Islands protests grouping together a number of ecological associations, has voiced demands which include a halt to two controversial hotel projects, an eco-tax and more sustainable tourism.
Some British holidaymakers have shown their support for the issues raised by the islanders but others have accused them of biting the hand that feeds them.
Six men and women affiliated to Canarias Se Agota, which in English would translate as ‘Canary Islands on the Brink,’ are now on day 12 of “indefinite” hunger strike outside a church in the town of La Laguna in northern Tenerife.
They were filmed being bought to the Saturday protest in the Tenerife capital Santa Cruz in wheelchairs.
