Brits are behaving badly on Majorca however the Germans are even worse!

The summer season is still limbering up here in sunny Majorca. But the incoming flights are already jam-packed, the hotels busy, the beaches filling up and, after weeks of appalling behaviour in some of the island’s most notorious party zones, the locals are pushing back — hard.

So far there have been beach sit-ins, threats to close the airport, increasingly aggressive anti-tourism graffiti — ‘Tourists Go Home!’ and ‘Tourists F*** Off’ — while a slew of protest groups, some with links to notorious Catalan, Valencian and Basque groups, have been popping up.

Earlier this month, a crowd of 15,000 (mostly locals but with a smattering of international protesters keen to wade in) took to the dappled streets of Palma, chanting: ‘Let’s save Majorca — foreigners out!’

There is certainly plenty to make them feel cross.

Even by Majorcan standards, the behaviour of some tourists seems to have hit a new low lately. And contrary to recent reports, the Germans, rather than the Brits, have been at the heart of it.

Yes, over recent weeks, there have been several shocking incidents involving UK nationals.

There was, for example, the shameful ‘stag-do set-to’, when a group of drunken builders from St Albans took offence at being politely asked not to hurl cans and litter into the pristine waters at an upmarket family beach bar, and then beat up everyone they could lay their hands on, including two police officers and a waiter.

‘People were running from the tables, grabbing their babies, terrified,’ says Gaston, restaurant manager at the Balneario Illetas beach club, in a quiet voice. ‘It was very shocking. It is a strange way to behave.’

And, of course, he’s right. Both the groom — a chap called Connor Lorimer, who runs a construction company — and his best man, were among the eight thrown into the cells.

But that wasn’t the worst of it; not by a long shot.

A few days before that, riot police were forced to use rubber bullets on a group of neo-Nazis running wild in the German-dominated ‘beer and sausage’ resort of S’Arenal.

‘Rubber bullets, in Majorca?’ says Jason Moore, who runs the Majorca Daily Bulletin. ‘It felt like we were in Belfast.’

But appalling though all that sounds, it’s depressingly run-of-the-mill for residents.

Last month, again in S’Arenal, two German tourists fell to their deaths from hotel balconies in separate incidents. One had been drinking through the night, passed out on the balcony rail and simply toppled over.

But for the residents, what really bothers them is not the quality of tourists but the quantity. Because the whole island is beginning to buckle under the strain, with growing pressure on resources, public services, housing and congestion.

In the old days, the holidaymakers here were mostly Brits. Some came to drink, others for sun and fun. They loved it and it was cheap, so many of them bought apartments and villas and retired here.

But by the late 1980s, the Germans started arriving in Majorca, and now every year there are at least four times more of them than Brits. And everywhere I go I’m assured they are just as bad as the Brits, if not worse.

‘Go to S’Arenal. It’s the German party HQ. They drink and drink and drink,’ I’m told. And so I do, and it is one of the most surprising places I have been.

It’s an almost entirely German resort, with a main strip known to everyone as ‘Beer and Ham Street’. It’s full of beer cellars, sausage shops and, by mid-afternoon, huge groups of very drunken Germans in identical football tops shouting ‘Ole, ole, ole!’ over and over again while swigging from giant 2.5 litre beer steins the size of elephant legs. (For each elephant leg, you’re given a football shirt.)

Women — there are a few, but it’s mostly male — are also hard at it.

I bump into a lovely group of girls who tell me they are in a football team back home in Frankfurt. They have been playing hard since 2pm and are already seven Smirnoffs down.

You wouldn’t know it; they look fresh as daisies. ‘We are better at drinking than the British. We can keep going and going and going,’ boasts Jana, a 20-year-old trainee teacher.

As we chat, a young chap in a purple football shirt is being led away by a pal to a quiet spot to be sick. Another lies with his head on the wall.

I meet a very cheery young metalworker called Carsten, dressed in a matching shirt and shorts, who tells me he is on his sixth visit and prefers vodka and lemon to beer, and will usually put away at least three litres of it — ‘I’m a big guy!’

‘I love it here,’ he adds, ‘because it’s a little sunny Germany — though I don’t eat Majorcan food.’ Which is a good thing, because there isn’t any. It’s all salami, bratwurst and German beer.

Even in the endless tattoo parlours, the decorative offerings include salamis and bratwurst, but the most popular inking is a huge, frothing beer stein that costs between €80 and €100.

‘They come in very drunk and egg each other on,’ says the man on the door. ‘They will not remember what they’ve done in the morning.’

I have never seen so many people drink so doggedly for so many hours.

All night the Germans go at it — beers and shots — until they are completely saturated. Some get right through to a refreshing glass of prosecco back at their hotel’s breakfast buffet. But they insist they are a different type of drunk to Brits.

‘We are not aggressive. We love to sing. We are peaceful,’ Sarah, a carer for the elderly and here for her hen night, tells me.

Maybe. Though the neo-Nazis weren’t much fun. And a barman tells me they are already braced for the Germany-Scotland Euros football match on Friday. ‘It will ALL kick off,’ he says.

But, of course, on a beautiful sunny island like this, tourism is only part of the problem.

Over the past ten years, the permanent population has risen from 700,000 to 900,000, adding more pressure everywhere.

Thanks to the post-Brexit 180-day rule, which decrees that Brits cannot spend more than two blocks of 90 days in Europe each year, the British contingent is on the wane. Some of them are also a bit weary at being the butt of endless Brexit jokes.

‘As an expat, everything that happens at home is somehow always your fault, but they never stop!’ says Jean, 68, originally from Macclesfield, Cheshire, who has lived here for more than 30 years.

So, again, it is the Germans who dominate. An estimated 50,000 of them, many supremely wealthy. They own super-yachts, luxury villas and apartments and, according to some locals, make their presence rather more strongly felt than the ‘more liberal Brits’.

They also stick together in pretty towns such as Santanyi and Cala Ratjada, which feel more German than Majorcan, with German shops, German art galleries, and sun- dappled markets with pretty stalls manned by Germans selling German produce to other Germans.

The jury is out on what one local refers to as ‘the German occupation’.

Some locals complain that they’re now spreading out from the touristy towns to snap up properties in villages in the central heartland, traditionally a safe and cheaper space for Majorcans to live.

A few feel their hands are tied. ‘You can’t start banning Germans — the EU will go bananas!’ says one. Others insist very firmly that the Germans are absolutely fine, wonderfully organised and that no one is tourist-phobic, they just want some limits.

Meanwhile, no matter how quickly the authorities hose down anti-tourist graffiti, up pops more, along with posters and stickers in windows, on lamp posts and scrawled on walls in the backstreets.

There is no question that this beautiful island is in a very delicate balance. The next protest is scheduled for Saturday.

‘This last protest was just the aperitif,’ says Jaume Garau, leader of a new Tourism Congress. ‘The next will be very big, because some Majorcans are frustrated, divided and fragmented. We have to do something. Our group wants long-term solutions, but many want a quick fix because they can’t take any more.’

At the moment, the protests are peaceful. The danger, of course, is that as more and more protesters join the fray, things will tip over. That one protester will hurl something… someone is hurt… things flare up… and visitors then get the heebie-jeebies and head to Malaga instead, and the entire tourism industry is affected.

That would be utterly devastating for the economy and a crying shame. Because aside from perhaps the hellhole drinking strips of S’Arenal and Magaluf, Majorca is an amazing place —bright, vibrant, beautiful and, for the past 70-odd years, unfailingly welcoming.

But maybe now is the time for the government to stop laying out the red carpet for everyone else with such gusto, and focus a bit more on its own people.