Celestino Alomar Mateu, Tino, former Tourism Minister of the Balearic Islands, died this Monday in Mallorca, at 76 years old, victim of cancer. Graduated in Geography and History, a civil servant — with posts at Moncloa, the Spanish embassy in Mexico, the general management of RTVE, the Madrid Assembly, and the Coast Guard headquarters — Tino Alomar was publicly noted for maintaining an articulate discourse and knowing how to deal firmly and skillfully with hotel magnates to implement the pioneering ecotax, the tax on tourist stays. It was a global milestone of the multiparty left-wing government of Francesc Antich in 1999, which also preserved and purchased natural spaces on the coast.
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Alomar fought for the PSOE to implement the ecotax, which after the anathemas against it is now accepted in many territories. Before that, he closed the complex historic pact of the island progressives to remove the PP from power for the first time in the democratic era. The ministers recognized themselves as members of a government of people born in towns and with university education who at the start of the 21st century changed the course, the political inertia that was tradition, the classic surnames, and the conservative elites that dominated the capital, Palma.
Tino Alomar had the experience of knowing from within the allied organizations, nationalists, communists, and islanders, and of having been a senior official and technical collaborator of the right and center in the Tourism departments. All, politicians and businessmen, recognized each other. The hotel giants — already historic — came from Mallorcan rural lineages and families. Celestí Alomar Mateu lived in reality.
He did not want to be defined solely as a tough politician with a broad-spectrum biography; after all, he passed through the radical left (in anti-Francoism he was involved in forceful actions at the University of Barcelona rectorate), he was a member of the communism of PSUC and Bandera Roja, promoted the island socialism of PSI, was with the centrism of Suárez, the autonomism of his mentor in the Administration Josep Melià, and finally the official socialism.
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He was not a turncoat but scorned the action of his party, the PSOE, by supporting the application of Article 155 of the Constitution in Catalonia in 2017 and ended up becoming one of the firmest critics of the tourism model he had helped launch and tweak in its growth version, which he refuted.
“An island cannot grow indefinitely,” he said, “tourism cannot be a bed factory.” Comfortable in the power structures and mechanisms of public administrations, retired from public politics, he advised the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Tourism Organization. Until the last weeks, he acted as an oracle, an activist on platforms and opinion pages against tourist overcrowding and the gentrification of cities. The President of the Congress, Francina Armengol, has lamented with complicity and feeling the passing of her colleague.
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