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Palma de Mallorca
The Balearic Islands consider banning tourist cars to avoid summer gridlock. Tourism officials say they may stop people arriving in smaller islands by car as the islands prepares to receive a record number of visitors this summer, The Guardian newspaper reports.
Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera, which have a population of 1.1 million, are expecting 13.5 million visitors this season.
Traffic jams are not the only problem. local officials and environmentalists say the region are close to the point where they will have neither the water nor the energy resources to meet demand.
Menorca, for example, was declared a biosphere reserve in 1993 and environmentalists say it cannot sustain more than 200,000 visitors on any one day, in addition to its 86,000 permanent residents. However, it exceeded that number on more than one occasion last year.
And, cruise ships are adding to the pressure. On a single day recently, 22,000 passengers disembarked from cruise ships in Palma de Mallorca, the Mallorcan capital.
More than 500 cruises are expected to dock in Palma this year, carrying 1.5 million passengers.
The airport on Mallorca is also struggling to cope. Designed to deal with a maximum of 66 flights an hour, officials say in the high season this may rise to as many as 100 flights.
Read the full story in The Guardian here: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/08/balearic-islands-consider-banning-tourist-cars-summer-gridlock
News source: www.theguardian.com
