Another day, another picturesque destination on the brink of desperate measures due to overtourism. This time it is a stunning coastal village on Menorca that has threatened to close its streets to tourists altogether amid a row about unmanageable numbers of visitors.
Up to a million visitors
Binibeca Vell is a small coastal development on the south coast of the Spanish Balearic Island. Built in the 1960s in a style borrowing from traditional fishing villages, its developers, it would seem, did too good a job. The village’s sinuous cobbled pathways, bell tower, and irregular whitewashed buildings, owned by just 195 residents, regularly attract 800,000 tourists a year, mostly concentrated in the high season months between May and October.
And with the post-Covid travel boom showing no signs of diminishing, predictions for visitor arrivals in 2024 are off-the-scale. Up to one million tourists are expected to descend on the village this year and, with no regional or centralised solution in sight to issues of noise, anti-social behaviour, and litter, residents have declared they will vote in August on how best to take matters into their own hands.
Uncivic attitudes
Binibeca Vell is not a place of adventure, but a private housing development where people reside.
Óscar Monge, Binibeca Vell homeowners representative
Fed up not just with the congestion, but with bad tourist behaviour that has been captured on the village’s website, Binibeca Vell’s population introduced “visiting hours” last year. They ask visitors to arrive after 11 am and leave by 8 pm to allow residents “to have breakfast peacefully on our terraces and sleep peacefully without noise,” said Monge. The website also pleads with visitors to “avoid uncivic attitudes” including entering homes, taking items, sitting on furniture uninvited and climbing on balconies. Another proposed solution would block access to the village’s interior streets and lanes, meaning the only way to get there would be from the coast.
Impasse with local authorities
But it is difficult for the villagers to enforce their own rules and they are at an impasse with local authorities, who have failed to renew commitments to help with the cost of litter disposal, tour guide training and reduced public transport. Hence the threat to close the village entirely, though this would be problematic for those in the community, numbering around 100, who rely on tourism for an income.
The Menorcan government currently seems to be calling the villagers’ bluff, its head Begoña Mercadal, telling Eldiaro.es the village could go ahead and stop visits if it chooses to do so. “We fully acknowledge that it is private property and, therefore, if they want to close it, that is their right,” Mercadal said.
