After the end of the Easter holidays Mallorca draws a first balance. According to the data, the corona situation is stable. However, only a few hotels were open and there was a curfew in the evenings.
By Reinhard Spiegelhauer, ARD studio Madrid The weather has recently been a little worse than it was before Easter. Three weeks ago, the first holidaymakers were able to let the sun shine on their fur in the beach cafe, but now it’s rather gray and cool. This particularly affected guests from Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein, the two federal states in which there were still Easter holidays last week. But even wrapped up and in the wind – the main thing is to get out of the Corona routine in Germany, said a vacationer from Frankfurt at the end of the week. You enjoy the time, even if the weather could be better – and it will be. About 40,000 Germans were in Mallorca over Easter, now calm is returning for the time being. There wasn’t a big party atmosphere anyway – after all, pubs and restaurants had to and have to close at 5:00 p.m., from 10:00 p.m. there is a curfew. On the Ballermann was “dead pants”. In addition, only a little more than ten percent of the hotels were open, and there were hardly any Germans to be seen in the holiday resorts in the northeast. The area around Palma benefited most. Christina Ostrem, manager of a hotel on the beach in Palma that reopened in early March, says she was “very happy” with the way the Easter business went, and that her hotel quickly got a lot of reservations. There were no corona cases in her house, neither with the guests nor with the employees.
Some vacationers are in quarantine
So far, nothing has been heard of major corona outbreaks during or after the Mallorca vacation. 27 Germans are in a ten-day quarantine in a hotel near the airport, but not all of them are there because they tested positive – there are also close contacts and suspected cases in the hotel. The seven-day incidence on the island has been in the range of 25 to 30 for the last two months. Nevertheless, the vacation trips were an unreasonable risk, says Claudio Triay, spokesman for the medical union. The governments in Germany and Great Britain did not want any vacation trips, he recalls – but since only a few hotels are open, there have apparently been no negative consequences.
Mallorcans hope for more tourists
Most of the islanders see the Germans’ vacation trips rather positively. For them the guests were finally at least a first ray of hope, after half a year practically without any tourism. In the summer it should be even more if possible, at least that’s what Gabriel from Palma hopes. The island longs for tourists, he says, so that the economy can start up again: “We were very happy about the Germans – and we hope that they will come home healthy and tell us how nice it was.”
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