Party towns, new rules: San Antonio slumps while Magaluf and Benidorm push more upmarket

For sale, to let and transfer signs now hang over empty units on San Antonio’s West End, the Ibiza strip that spent decades selling cheap pints to young Brits. Carrer de Santa Agnes still fills up with people after dark, but nightlife bosses say this last season felt hollow.

Nightlife bosses in the Asociacion Empresarial de Ocio Nocturno Noches de Ibiza (AEON) called it “the worst summer in history.” Fewer people came, they told elDiario.es, and police felt thinner on the ground. A British bar owner on the strip, who would not be named, told The i Paper that over six years Ibiza has grown too costly to reach and to stay in.

Why a rainbow mural did not rescue San Antonio

Street artist Okuda San Miguel’s “Infinite Rainbow” was a floor mural painted across Santa Agnes about 18 months ago. Town hall money, including European funds of €80,000 for some venue makeovers, was meant to pull the old turismo de borrachera (drunken tourism) quarter toward shops, food and a less wrecked night out. It flopped.

Repairs to flaking paint and the one vertical stretch of the mural put barriers on the roadway until mid-summer. Traders say that choke point did more harm than the artwork did good. AEON’s complaint is to the point: trying to rename a worn-out street before you change what it sells is backwards. A public vote this April to drop the “West End” label collapsed for lack of turnout.

Sant Antoni council opened a €5.5 million boulevard on Vara de Rey in early July, tying the party streets to the Cafe del Mar sunset crush. That has not stopped “se vende” notices or the sense of a place past its peak. A late-night punch-up on the mural itself, filmed weeks before the boulevard opened, showed the same problems still live on the painted tarmac.

Quiet beaches and thinner spending have already been a theme on the island this year, as Euro Weekly News reported when Platja d’en Bossa looked half empty in peak August. Islanders are also protesting against plans to almost double Ibiza airport’s gates. West End bars sit in the middle of that squeeze: costs up, old drinkers down, and a paint job that did not reset the product.

Magaluf already spent a decade rewriting the strip

Magaluf’s Punta Ballena story is already further down that road, from a €6.7 million seafront plan to this summer’s promenade opening concert.

Calvia’s former tourism director Xavier Pascuet said drinking tourism has fallen by almost 40 per cent as families have taken a bigger share of the market. Party nights are these days “part of the offer rather than the identity.”

Fines of up to €500 for street drinking and €400 for rowdy behaviour now sit on the books, with shops barred from selling alcohol between 9.30pm and 8am. Magaluf is not “finished” as a night out. It is just no longer selling itself as one long stag weekend.

Benidorm’s hotel grade rose. Neighbours still see the mess

Visit Benidorm’s own count is stark: 14 four-star hotels in 2000, 59 by 2025. A decade ago, 13.7 per cent of visitors said pubs and clubs were why they came. From January to August this year that share was just 9.8 per cent.

Those numbers describe a slower turn, not a clean break. Neighbours speaking to laSexta Spanish TV in September described people spark out on pavements and the beach, bottles on roofs, smashed car glass and terrace brawls in daylight. One woman called a wrecked windscreen “shameful, but not unusual here.” Others talked of permisividad, a free pass, toward English drinking holidays and homemade alcoholimpiadas, drinking games that end with police intervention.

Hotels in Benidorm were still packing rooms this month, with 93.7 per cent occupancy at the end of August, so the row is not about empty streets. It is about which type of visitor the town wants to keep once the four-star stock has been paid for.

Barcelona Turisme director general Mateu Hernandez put the same test last year: street drunkenness, vomiting, fights and illegal activity are not welcome, whatever the spend. Spain’s tourist office in the UK, via Jose Manuel de Juan, called a turn toward trips without a bar crawl “music to Spain’s ears.”

San Antonio’s West End is the raw version of that policy. Traders there say they have already lost the old crowd. Families and walkers have not yet filled the gap, and a mural on the floor did not change that.