Tourism is Good for Business, But Bad for Comfort

It looks like one of those fakes, but apparently it is kosher. Now six people have died in a couple of days on the final slopes of Mount Everest. So many people were making that last stagger to the top that there was a jam. But look at them!

Tourism these days is sacred. Everyone has the right to see the world (even from the top!). Spain had 82.6 million foreign tourists last year, and another indeterminate amount of national tourists besides. They all went, apart from those Spaniards who chose to visit their grandparents' pueblo for a few slightly uncomfortable days, either to look at some monument or maybe a museum - the Alhambra (2.76 million visitors) or the Museo del Prado (3.6 million in 2018) or away to the beach. 

 Mojácar has a beach. It's nothing special, but it is coated with bars and restaurants to serve both the residents and the visitors - those who aren't staying 'all inclusive' in one of the cheaper hotels. These hotels, in the unfashionable Marina de la Torre area, are owned by Catalonian companies, and the staff is South American. The food is prepared in Málaga and sent up to be reheated in the hotels' kitchens. Sometimes the hotels are successful, other times they aren't like the doomed Hotel Moresco, which adorns the right hand side of the village, closed since 2008 and now housing some okupas, or to say it in English, some squatters.
Another hotel that never got much off the ground is the Macenas Hilton. Two or three stories of concrete shelving, wondrously decorated by graffiti-idiots, and providing a delightful view for the apartments behind. Drive into the next resort, Carboneras, with its power station chimney, and enjoy Spain's most famous incomplete hotel, the Algarrobico. There since 2006.

Mojácar is a delightful village. It has won-bought-acquired the title of Most Beautiful along with a clutch of other resorts. It has narrow streets and white flat-roofed buildings covering the top of a hill - it looks like a pile of sugar lumps, left there under the stark blue sky by playful giants.
As a residential village, it is a nice place to live. You can walk everywhere (the streets are too narrow for anything wider than a donkey) and, if pushed, you can go down to the beach to find a supermarket or a bank.
Mojácar village though, while without any hotels - open hotels at least - still prefers visitors and their wallets (tourism has always been about the wallets) over residents. In the village, there are fifty souvenir shops, and no resident ever goes to a souvenir shop (or, for that matter stays in a hotel). For the local businesses, residents, for all their wealth, aren't necessarily much cop. Oh yes, we drink, we sometimes eat out (although we have our own kitchen at the house) and we are there all year long (a tourist spends about four days average, and probably goes somewhere else for the following holiday). Contrast Turre - an ugly residential town with no beach, no hotels and no tourists - in the winter months with Mojácar. Turre has ten times the night-life.
On Mojácar's beach, it's the same - a number of establishments who serve locals and visitors alike, but who often close for the winter months. Those who own or rent such places (huge, staggering rents from the wealthy local families) will move away during the winter - not really local businessmen after all, just people out to make some business. They want more tourism, just like the souvenir sellers.
But do they represent or speak for those who live here?
Would more tourism bring more out-of-town businesspeople to serve them through the season?
Our politicians work tirelessly for the local business community, and packing in more tourists for a longer season is the apparent dream. Now we have giant pelotones of winter cyclists riding two-abreast (really? Is that the best you could do?). Now we have kids roving the streets at night, looking for some fun. Now we have pickpockets. Now we have fights and vandalism.
Now we have crowds and queues.
Now our mainstream political parties are campaigning for more, more, more, because they speak for the merchants. Not the residents.
If you are living here and don't run a shop, a bar or a restaurant, or God-forbid a souvenir shop selling the same junk as all the others, then more tourism to what is a wealthy-enough pueblo is not the answer.  Your only investment is your home - would you like it to go up in value, or, as Mojácar bursts at the seems, to go down?