Spain lives its small aerial battles and in all of them drones are protagonists. We are not talking about attacks against key infrastructures. We talk about the administration using the sky to detect violations. To see if you skip a Stop or to see if you have built a swimming pool. Also to certify that you are not living where you belong. For tourism or, simply, because you can’t afford anything else.
That’s happening in Ibiza.
200 people. This is, more or less, the number of people who have been evicted from the settlements of Sa Joveria and Can Misses in Ibiza, explain our colleagues from Motorpassion. The reason is as simple as that they live in a caravan.
As they point out in this medium, we are not talking about tourists, we are talking about workers who cannot afford to live in a house because the price of rooms and homes is so exorbitant that people employed on the island live in a paradox: they need work to live but that same work does not give them enough to live.
The drones. To monitor settlements like these, administrations are using drones that from the air monitor whether a caravan is parked among the trees in a leafy area, outside a campsite. The campaign even started months ago.. In April, the evictions of the two hundred people mentioned above were already registered.
The town hall of Sant Josep has become the first in Europe on having an AI-enhanced autonomous drone for your police. The drones, they assure, will help in cases of car accidents or search tasks for people but they also control tasks of “environmental surveillance, detection of illegal dumping, urban planning discipline and protection of natural spaces,” they explain in Ibiza Newspaper. Something similar happens in Sant Antoni de Portmany.
a clamp. These latest tasks are those used by the authorities to dismantle what they consider illegal settlements. To prevent caravan tourism from collapsing the island, In 2024 they devised a new regulation which limits the number of vehicles that can enter the island. In the case of caravans, they cannot enter if they do not have a parking space already reserved.
To expressly evacuate these vehicles, the Law of Rustic Land of the Balearic Islands It has become the best weapon. And since this regulation was activated, rustic land is practically any space that is not located in an urban area. Camping here can lead to a fine of up to 30,000 euros Therefore, those affected quickly leave these spaces when they are informed of the possible sanction they face.
The real problem is that these people we are talking about are not tourists, they are workers who do not have a roof (at least without wheels) where they can live. Excess tourism has caused administrations to promote increasingly rigid regulations and now these workers find themselves in the middle of a painful clamp, tourists on one side, regulators on the other and drones above their heads.
Is it that much of a problem? Already in May we pointed out that in order to rent an 80 square meter apartment in Ibiza you needed to charge 2,320 euros per month. That’s assuming you didn’t spend a single euro on eating, turning on the lights at home or taking a shower.
And the price of housing is so crazy that There are neighbors who, by themselves, decide to go live in a caravan during high season months. The idea is as simple as leaving the house to wealthy tourists to get a bonus. With unbearable tourist pressure and without sufficient housing, a good number of professionals are looking for accommodation in a kind of house on wheels.
“We started looking for a house, but it was crazy to see what they were asking for (…) Then we started looking at what a second-hand caravan cost and it was the only option we saw to stay,” they collected in Ibiza Newspaper. The words are from Mariana Gómez, a woman who traveled to Ibiza from Colombia to work temporarily in a hotel and who ended up coming to the conclusion that, if she wanted to settle on the island with her partner, she had no choice but to give up “normal” apartments… and opt for a caravan.
And there are some reasons. Although heartbreaking, city councils and regulators have their own reasons for clearing these encampments. In Sa Joveria they claim that 5,000 kg of garbage had been removed during one of the evictions. Those responsible assured Chain Being that this had not been carried out so much to detect illegal housing but rather because of “complaints about poor conditions.”
This same month of July, Noudiari.es explained in an article that in Cala Bou a new illegal settlement had been detected from which “apparently hard-working people left with their backpacks on their way to their jobs.” The problem, they pointed out, is that “a large accumulation of garbage cannot be seen from the outside, but there is debris around the perimeter and in some points you can clearly see the smell of urine and excrement.”
Therefore, the risk of environmental deterioration and the risk of fire increase exponentially in these cases.
Photo | Stijn te Strake and Karol Chomka
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