Mallorca hopes for good summer season without 2020 virus spike

Despite a renewed increase in coronavirus infections, politicians and the tourism industry on the Spanish resort island of Mallorca are still hoping for a good summer season.

"The desire to travel is great. We hope for a season that will last well into autumn," the German-language Mallorca Zeitung quoted regional President Francina Armengol as saying.

The manager of hotels in the Melia group in Magaluf, Belen Sanmartin, also expressed cautious optimism.

She was hoping for an occupancy rate of 50 to 60 per cent this summer, the newspaper Diario de Mallorca reported on Saturday.

Magaluf is just coming back to life after Britain put the Balearic Islands on the green list of regions that do not trigger quarantine obligations when returning home.

However, unlike Germans, Britons must present a negative PCR test to travel to the archipelago in the Mediterranean.

Concern

Concern on the islands is high however that there could be a repeat of last summer, when the pandemic initially appeared to be under control but then the numbers shot up again as the summer progressed.

In Spain as a whole the coronavirus figures have been falling steadily since April, but now they are rising again. On the Balearic Islands, the seven-day incidence rate of new infections per 100,000 people has climbed to 94.

One of the factors was a mass infection among Spanish students on high-school graduation trips.