In a hot, dusty car park overlooking Ibiza’s old town – a far cry from the hedonistic clubs and bougainvillea-fringed villas of the Balearic island – Ami Mohammed Ali sits in his van, patiently brewing the first of three strong cups of tea he will have late in the afternoon.
“The first glass is bitter like life,” says the 33-year-old migrant worker from Western Sahara, quoting an old saying. “The second glass is sweet like love, the third glass is soft like death.” As he adjusted the camp stove and poured from glass to glass to get the right amount of fizz, Muhammad Ali thought about his home, free of a trace of life’s bitterness. What if this van was his home for the next six months?
“I don’t want to complain too much because I come from a refugee camp with thousands of other people,” he says, “and I have a much better life than many of my compatriots in the desert.”
Mohammed Ali is one of many locals and foreign workers who have been shut out of Ibiza’s rental market, with exorbitant rents for cramped shared accommodation leaving many with no choice but to live in vans, caravans or tents.
In Ibiza, like neighbouring Mallorca and the Canary Islands, it is becoming increasingly clear that neither the island nor the housing market can cope with the huge numbers of tourists who arrive each year.
“Over the last five years, and especially since the pandemic, people feel that everything is saturated, with more and more tourists, overloading roads and public services,” said Rafael Giménez of Prou Eivissa (Enough Ibiza), a group that campaigns for limits on the number of visitors and vehicles on the island.
“Ibiza is an island, so naturally housing is limited. The laws of supply and demand are completely broken.”
Tourism accounts for 84 percent of the island’s economy, and last year a record 3.7 million tourists visited Ibiza and the tiny neighbouring island of Formentera, with a population of about 160,000.
Jimenez stressed that Prou Ibiza is not against tourism. The issue is overtourism, an issue that sparked tens of thousands of protests in the Canary Islands last month and was behind Plow’s demonstration of hundreds of people in front of the Ibiza provincial government building on Friday night, he said. Similar protests are planned for Mallorca this weekend.
“Tourism has always been here, it’s been there since I grew up, but it’s been balanced,” he says. “It’s not that we don’t want tourism – not at all – but when it starts to directly affect your livelihood, things get out of hand.”
Jimenez says it’s not just the rise in villas and tourist apartments that’s the problem. “More tourists and more tourist facilities means more workers are needed from elsewhere to work in the shops, bars and restaurants,” he says. “Those workers need more housing and we’re seeing a population explosion – not because Ibizans are having babies, but because mass tourism means more people need to come to Ibiza.”
These days it’s common for a three-bedroom apartment to be shared by around eight people, and rents have almost doubled in the past decade, rising from 800-900 euros a month to at least 1,500 euros, and more in high season, he added.
Uruguayan chef Leonardo Nogueira traded in his €800-a-month one-bedroom apartment for a camper van last year. Photo: Patricia Escliche/Observer
Iván Fidalgo, regional coordinator for the Spanish Civil Police Association and a civil police officer himself, said the lack of affordable housing in Ibiza was making life very difficult for civil servants and the force was struggling to find new officers to replace those who were retiring.
“Nobody wants to be posted here,” he says. “Nobody in their right mind wants to live and work in Ibiza because they won’t find anywhere to live.”
Fidalgo said this is undermining the police’s ability to do their jobs, adding that police are also being forced to come up with drastic solutions to their housing problems.
“When summer comes, some of our colleagues will be living in vans or mobile homes, just like they did last year and the year before,” he said. “We just feel helpless.”
Federico Fudge, a spokesman for the Ibiza and Formentera renters’ association, says the situation is the result of uncontrolled tourism, exacerbated by vulture fund speculation and a recent influx of highly paid digital nomads from Scandinavia who can afford rents far beyond what locals can earn.
Earlier this month, Marga Progens, head of the Balearic Islands region, acknowledged growing anger over unbridled tourism. “The government understands that restrictions are necessary,” she said. “We have to find a way to allow tourism activity and the well-being of the Balearic Islands’ inhabitants to coexist.”
Mariano Juan, vice president of Ibiza’s parliament, said he understood the unrest that sparked Friday’s demonstrations but that the problem was not tourism but illegal tourism. He said Ibiza’s licensed tourist capacity had fallen from about 109,000 beds to just under 100,000 over the past 20 years as small hotels closed or reduced the number of rooms they had to focus on quality over quantity.
Skip Newsletter Promotions
Analysis and opinion on the week’s news and culture from the Observer’s best writers.
Privacy Notice: Our newsletter may contain information about charities, online advertising and externally funded content. For more information, please see our privacy policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and are subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
After newsletter promotion
“If the organizers of the protests are proposing to reduce the number of legal tourist sites, they may not be solving the root of the problem, which is the illegal market,” he said. “The problem is thousands of ads on Airbnb and hundreds on Booking.com. Social networks have made it so easy to find illegal accommodation that it’s all just proliferated.”
The key to fighting tourist overcrowding, he adds, is a “mortal battle against illegal tourist rentals.” To that end, the Ibiza government is cracking down on illegal landlords, who can be fined €40,000 for simply advertising an illegal rental, he says. Juan says the council has already collected more than €2 million in fines in total and has filed nearly 200 lawsuits against illegal tourist apartments on various rental platforms. Meanwhile, the council is working with Airbnb and others to root out illegal landlords and using council inspectors to conduct undercover bookings.
Huang also noted that measures to limit the number of cars entering the island by ferries will be discussed by the local council in the coming months, and said authorities are working hard to attract different types of visitors.
“For many years, our association has worked to promote family, sports, gastronomy, medical and conference tourism,” he adds. “Five or 10 years ago, we dreamed of a tourist season lasting five or six months, not just three months of sun and party. Now we are experiencing a seven-month season… so we have already succeeded in changing the tourism model.”
Ami Mohamed Ali from Western Sahara pours tea in his van. Photo: Patricia Escliche/Observer
Meanwhile, the island’s parking lots and campgrounds have become home to brick-and-mortar homeless people, some of whom have embraced the freedom of mobile homes to avoid the financial and emotional stress of cramped shared apartments.
Leonardo Nogueira, a 45-year-old Uruguayan chef who cooks from his private villa, traded in his 800-euro-a-month one-bedroom apartment for a Fiat camper van last year. So far, he has no regrets, and he has plenty of space for the essentials: a coffee pot, yerba mate, guitar, surfboard and bike.
“It’s really hard to find somewhere to live here,” he says. “I know couples who have broken up and are continuing to live alone on couches, alone in bedrooms because they have nowhere else to go. Here I have solar panels, electricity and heating. I’m now a self-sufficient, sustainable snail.”
Equally calm is Felipe Cairis Carrasco, an Argentine musician who fronts a cumbia band that plays in clubs, bars, weddings and birthday parties, but has left the rental market and now lives in 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, and it’s not the most luxurious place, but it’s not bad compared to the conditions migrant workers have – small, awful rooms. And it’s better than spending 700 euros a month on a place you share with 10 other people. We’re creating a little community here.”
That community spirit is evident in the way the car park residents greet each other when they return home after a long day at work, and in the way Muhammad Ali befriends the Moroccan man in the tent next to his van, cooking him a meal so he doesn’t have to settle for sandwiches. Most residents are also united by fear of being fined and evicted by the police.
But this calm is not universal. One Romanian man, who asked not to be named, has lived in a caravan for two of the 10 years he spent in Ibiza. “The situation is not changing, it’s only getting worse,” he says. “This is a rich island.”
