Super-glue armed anti-tourist activists to flood Majorca TOMORROW & demand visitors ‘go home’ to kick off summer carnage
SPANISH activists are urging angry locals to vandalise key boxes outside rentals before the country’s anti-Airbnb and tourism protests.
Locals in over 40 cities across Spain will take to the streets this Saturday, raging against Airbnb rentals and mass tourism that they say is ruining their hometowns.
Locals on the Costas, Tenerife and other British hotspots have been told by activists to damage rental properties by supergluing their locks.
“Please vandalise all the locks you see. Go super glue mad,” reads a message posted on a campaign site.
Below the post is a photo of several key boxes outside an apartment block in the Costa del Sol capital of Malaga.
Nearly 40 organisations from the Balearic Islands will take part in the protest in the Mallorcan capital of Palma.
Majorca, one of the centres of the protests last year, will host the first mass protests of the year this Saturday.
The slogan for Saturday’s protests is: ‘Let’s end the housing business’.
Locals have been saying for the past year that they cannot afford to buy a home, blaming the government for allowing holiday rentals and accommodation construction to drive up housing costs.
Protests will also take place in Valencia, Andalucia, Madrid, as well as Tenerife and Costa del Sol, which are especially popular among Brits.
With the summer holiday season fast approaching, anti-tourism protestors are expected to take over the streets across Spain – as they did last year.
Malaga’s protest on Saturday will be its third in less than 12 months.
In Majorca, after anti-mass tourism protests in May, foreign holidaymakers received so much abuse that organisers even had to apologise.
In Malaga, over 15,000 people took to the streets an anti mass-tourism demonstration in June.
They demanded an end to the problems associated with mass tourism, including pollution, traffic chaos and the lack of affordable housing for locals.
In street demos in Malaga, marchers held up banners, reading: ‘We feel strangers in our own city’ and ‘Malaga is for the people of Malaga, tourism forces us out.’
Some of the banners, in many cases pieces of cardboard the protestors had scrawled messages in felt-tip pen on, said: ‘One more tourist is one less local resident’.
Others read: ‘Padlocks out of our neighbourhoods’ in reference to apartments’ coded key holders.
Before the march stickers were plastered over the front of tourist apartment blocks in Malaga with messages in Spanish reading: ‘F##k off from here’ and ‘Stinking of Tourists’.
Others wrote: ‘This used to be my house’ and ‘A family used to live here’.
Javier Barbero, a spokesman for the ‘Majorca Is Not For Sale’ platform, who will take part in Saturday’s demonstrations in Spain, said: “Majorca is no longer an attractive place to work.”
“The number of people quitting seasonal jobs in tourism and hospitality has shot up because it’s not worthwhile.
“The same thing is happening with education, healthcare and security.
“Not only is the present at stake, so is the future of our children on the island,” he said.
But the tourism industry, which rakes in billions across the globe every year, is responsible for keeping many of the Spanish towns and villages afloat.
The scheme to destroy Airbnb locks was also used by protestors in Italy last November.
Locals vandalised key boxes in Milan and Florence, placing stickers reading ‘Less short lets, more houses for all’ on the safes that had keys for tourists to access their accommodation.
This had the desired outcome – the Italian government went on to ban metal key boxes in a move to clamp down on over-tourism.
What are Spain's anti-tourist protests?
In April 2024, residents across Spain began protesting against overtourism.
Since then, large protests have taken place across the country, especially in tourist areas like the Balearics and Canaries, and cities like Barcelona and Málaga.
In April 2024, between 20,000 and 50,000 people reportedly protested in the Canary islands.
By July, around 50,000 took to the streets in Palma de Mallorca.
Locals say overtourism has reduced their quality of life, increased the cost of living and brought in cheap, “low-quality” tourists who do not contribute to the local economy.
But critics argue that the protests and their messages could be considered ‘tourismphobia’ – an ‘aversion or rejection of tourism’.
Anti-tourism movements have been gaining traction not just in Spain, but across Europe in countries like Italy and Greece.
In response, measures have been implemented across Europe to curb mass tourism.