Tourists heading to Spanish holiday hotspot Mallorca have been issued a warning over a 17-hour-a-day ban in the region.
Banyalbufar Council is banning anyone from using tap water for 17 hours a day each day in order to avoid an ‘extreme emergency situation’ before peak tourism season at the end of the school term when holidaymakers from the UK will doubtless flood into Spanish resorts like Mallora, Majorca and Magaluf.
Joan Vives, deputy mayor of Banyalbufar, said: “After the water crisis we suffered and having restored the municipal network in its entirety now, the tankers can no longer guarantee us the minimum supply of water to supply the growing population of summer where consumption is increasingly high.”
As a result, from July 15 the area will have “no water supply” in its network from 11pm to 4pm every day.
It will mean drinking water cannot be used to clean cars and terraces, refill swimming pools and water tanks or even water plants.
Daily water consumption per person will also be capped at 75 litres in the area which only has 600 local permanent residents.
There is no set end date for the measures, which will be put in place “until the situation improves.”
Other spanish areas such as those in Catalonia have also wrestled with possible bans on drinking water due to supply issues.
Arrivals to Spain are projected to reach 92.6 million in 2024 from 85.2 million last year, an increase of 8.7 percent. This year marks a full recovery in arrivals as they rose above the pre-pandemic levels of 83.5 million in 2019, reported BMI.
The strain on these key infrastructures has been the focus of over-tourism protests across the country for several months. In April, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets in the Canary Islands to demand changes to the mass tourism model, holding signs saying “The Canary Islands are not up for sale!” and “Respect my home”.