At some point during their holiday in Mallorca, at least half of the tourists who visit the island will pass through Valldemossa, a picturesque town of stone houses located 20 kilometers from Palma, at the foot of the Tramuntana mountain range. In other words, roughly, more than 800,000 tourists passed through a population that barely exceeds 2,000 inhabitants last year. It is in the middle of the route of the 14,000 cars that travel daily along a winding road that borders the Mediterranean coast and that connects the municipality with Deià.
Valldemossa is the spearhead of the tourism of inland Mallorca, but the phenomenon is not recent; in this town it started about three decades ago, a fact that sets it apart from other municipalities in the interior of the island, where the mass tourism process has recently begun. With three decades of mass tourism behind them, you could almost say that the inhabitants of Valldemossa have become used to, or at least resigned to, their town becoming a beautiful backdrop for holiday photos.
This is what the cashier who sells tickets to enter the Charterhouse, a monumental space that contains a church, a monastic pharmacy, a room with works of art that belonged to Archduke Louis Salvador of Austria and another that exhibits posters by Joan Miró. The entrance costs 12 euros and the seller says that this has not been a good year, because the tourists sell without money. Very close you can visit the cell where the pianist Frederic Chopin and the writer George Sand spent a winter, precursors, without knowing it, of that mass tourism that suffocates the locality at certain times.
The central streets of Valldemossa are perfectly cobbled and lined with perfect one-story houses with green shutters, because Valldemossa is a perfect town, almost, almost a perfect theme park for that Instagram tourism, manicured to the extreme for its inhabitants, who live on a good part of the money left by visitors. It is noticeable when we walk through the streets, where there used to be traditional shops and now souvenir shops, Ibizan clothes, pearl shops or cafes serving the famous coca de patata, the gastronomic symbol of the municipality, over Mallorcan ensaimada .
Walking there on an August morning means crossing paths with tourists of a dozen nationalities, according to the languages heard during the walk, but in recent years there has been a significant novelty, because there is a growing presence of tourists from the United States, according to the tourism office. There are more tourists from the US because two years ago United Airlines opened a direct route between New York and Palma with full capacity on all flights since it was launched. There is also a presence of American tourists who arrive by bus from the port of Palma, where they have just disembarked from cruises of several days in the Mediterranean.
They may not know it, but one of their best-known compatriots lives in Valldemossa for long periods. The actor Michael Douglas is the owner of s'Estaca, a spectacular villa on the coast of the municipality that was ordered to be built in 1867 by the Archduke of Austria. It is not unusual to see the actor having a coffee in one of the town's bars, camouflaged among the thousands of visiting tourists. Douglas, Miquel de s'Estaca, as they call him in the town, opened Costa Nord years ago, a cultural center that ended up being a failure, where Philip Glass, Van Morrison, Michel Camilo performed with the guitarist Tomatito or Paquito d'Ribera, among other great musical figures.
The center cost 2.3 million euros and was his way of ingratiating himself with the City Council after building a house in S'Estaca attached to the main building without a license. Now it is dying without any function in the center of the town, near the tourist office, where most tourists pass without stopping, according to the two young people at the counter. There is a rush to buy a potato cake and take a photo in the gardens of La Cartoixa.
