Sustainable Tourism Law

190 SUSTAINABLE TOURISM LAW – It favours a lack of tax transparency and fosters an informal economy, without creating jobs; – It undercuts town and country planning; – It increases rents for residents and even the price of home sales. Below we look at each of the aforementioned arguments. a) holiday apartment rentals changes the tourism model a) One of the techniques used to improve the quality of tourist accommodation when regulating tourist areas in coastal regions is the obligation to separate residential and tourist purposes (especially for accommodation). The underlying problem is easy to imagine: the out of control development that took place in most tourist areas in the past, even on a single block or plot of land, led to the creation of a mixture of residential (homes) and tourist accommodation buildings (hotels or holiday apartments), as well as other establishments for additional purposes and leisure services. This mixture of purposes quickly led to many problems, seeing as permanent residents have certain habits, aspirations and schedules that are very different to those of tourists staying in neighbouring hotels: the latter only stay for a few days, are looking for fun and entertainment in general, and cause a higher level of noise than residents. The solution to this problem of mixed residential and tourist uses has been sought in different regional regulations, mainly through the technique of separating residential and holiday accommodations. In the specific context of the Balearic Islands, this technique mainly comprises the so-called ‘exclusive use principle’ set out in a Decree from 1987, in Law 7/1988 and in the General Tourism Act of 1999. The principle stipulates that building plots purposed for a specific accommodation establishment may not house other facilities or buildings that are not strictly linked to the tourism operation in question. Therefore, the plot housing a tourist establishment may not house residential buildings, nor may residential and tourist uses be shared in a single building (art. 32 of the Tourism Act of 2012). In this vein, I believe that the incompatibility of uses between residential and tourist purposes remains fully valid and should continue to be enforced: residents continue and will continue to have very different habits to tourists, which means the mixture of residents and tourists (at least in the same building) will