Biocultural Heritages in Mallorca: Explaining the Resilience of Peasant Landscapes within a Mediterranean Tourist Hotspot, 1870-2016

Abstract

Mallorca keeps an age-old biocultural heritage embodied in their appealing landscapes, largely exploited as an intangible tourist asset. Although hotel and real estate investors ignore or despise the peasant families who still persevere in farming amidst this worldwide-known tourist hotspot, the Balearic Autonomous Government has recently started a pay-for-ecosystem-services scheme based on the tourist eco-tax collection that offers grants to farmers that keep the Majorcan cultural landscapes alive, while a growing number of them have turned organic. How has this peasant heritage survived within such a global tourist capitalist economy? We answer this question by explaining the socio-ecological transition experienced from the failure of agrarian capitalism in the island, and the ensuing peasantization process during the first half of the 20th century through a local banking-driven and market-oriented land reform. Then, the early tourist specialization during the second half of the 20th century and the spatial concentration of the Green Revolution only in certain areas of the island meant a deep marginalization of peasant farming. Ironically, only a smallholder peasantry could keep cultivating these sustenance-oriented marginal areas where traditional farming was partially maintained and is currently being reinvigorated by turning organic. Now the preservation of these biocultural landscapes, and the keeping of the ecosystem services it provides to Majorcan society, requires keeping this peasantry alive.