Balearic Islands

Tourists driving to Menorca could soon need a permit and pay to bring their car

Published

2 hours ago

September 23, 2026

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Bringing a car to Menorca could soon come with a permit and a price tag. Credit: vivooo / Shutterstock

Drivers who’d normally just roll off the ferry and head for the beach could soon be filling in an online form and paying a fee first. Menorca’s parliament has taken the first step towards a permit system for tourist cars, with the real limits still to be decided.

The Consell de Menorca could set a summer cap on cars

The Balearic Parliament gave its first approval on Tuesday September 22 to a change in the law that protects Menorca as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. That change would let the Consell de Menorca, the island’s governing council, set a limit on how many vehicles can be on the island each summer and control when they’re allowed to arrive.

Gone would be the days of simply turning up and driving off the ferry. The Parliament backed sending the proposal forward for full processing, with 46 of the 56 deputies present voting in favour. Vox abstained, calling it excessive bureaucracy, and Més per Menorca, despite supporting the goal, voted against because they wanted it fast-tracked instead.

A capacity study handed to lawmakers alongside the bill put a recommended ceiling of 120,000 vehicles on the island each summer, split into 86,023 for residents and just 33,977 left over for visitors and businesses. However, that figure isn’t locked in yet. The actual cap will be decided each year, or every two years, by the Consell, based on its own studies into how much traffic Menorca’s roads can realistically take on.

Second-home owners kept to one car, and most tourists need a good reason

For British and other foreign owners of a second home on Menorca, the rules are already quite clear. The island allows one vehicle per property and no more. People with reduced mobility, and anyone with a genuine professional reason to bring a car, would also be exempt.

So would residents’ own vehicles, emergency services, public transport, taxis, commercial delivery vans and agricultural or industrial machinery. Everyone else, in short, ordinary holidaymakers who prefer bringing their own car over on the ferry, would be counted against the new summer quota.

Formentera already shows what this could look like

Menorca wouldn’t be the first Balearic island to try this. Formentera has run its own vehicle permit system since 2025, and this summer its daily quota of 1,732 cars and 122 motorbikes sold out during peak weeks. Anyone wanting to bring a car has to apply through formentera.eco and pay a daily fee, up to €9 a day for a car in July and August, with fines of between €1,000 and €10,000 for driving without one. Rental cars picked up on Ibiza or elsewhere aren’t allowed in at all.

Mallorca passed a similar law of its own in June, and it’s still working its way through parliament there too. So this is quickly becoming standard practice across the Balearics rather than just on one of its busiest islands.

The system won’t be ready before summer 2027

Menorca’s version has a long way to go yet. The council wants its full council session, the plenary, to approve the detail before the end of this year, with cameras already being agreed with the port authority for installation at Maó. However, officials are targeting summer 2027 for the scheme to actually start, not next year’s season.

So anyone planning to bring their own car to Menorca can go ahead as normal for now. It’s next summer when travellers must start to pay attention, and with Formentera’s permits already selling out and Mallorca close behind, it’s worth checking what Menorca decides before booking the ferry.

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‘Enough’: Ibiza rises up against plan to nearly double its airport’s gates

Published

4 days ago

September 19, 2026

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Ibiza airport set to almost double its gates despite tourism fears. Credit: Wolf-photography / Shutterstock

A VIP lounge is expanding alongside boarding gates that Aena says exist purely for ‘security reasons’, and Ibiza residents say the contradiction speaks for itself. On Sunday September 20, young islanders, architects and environmentalists march against a €267 million airport plan they believe is really about more passengers.

Ibiza airport’s departure boards could look very different within a decade. Aena, the state-owned operator, plans to raise the number of boarding gates from 17 to 32, adding eight new airbridges as part of a project valued at between €230 million and €267 million.

The company says the work answers new European rules requiring a clear split between Schengen and non-Schengen passengers, alongside tighter security and border checks. “We are not carrying out any works on the airfield. The number of take-offs and landings will remain exactly the same as it is today,” said Javier Marín, Aena’s executive vice-president, when the project was first outlined in detail in July.

Why a VIP lounge upgrade is fuelling suspicion

Marga Torres, president of the Asociación Jóvenes de Eivissa (Ibiza Youth Association), is not convinced. She points out that Aena is expanding its VIP lounge at the same time as adding gates it insists are only about security.

“We don’t see any sense in justifying more boarding gates on security grounds while also expanding the VIP lounge,” Torres said. She linked the timing to United Airlines’ recently announced nonstop flights between New York and Ibiza from 2027, arguing that the gates, the VIP works and the new transatlantic route all point the same way: towards more passengers.

Leaked planning papers point to a bigger goal

Residents’ suspicions gained fresh weight as well this month as licensing documents obtained by Periódico de Ibiza on September 17 set a target of more than nine million passengers a year, approaching 10 million, as part of a wider €500 million package of 55 works planned across the airport.

That is a notably more expansive goal than the terminal-only, no-extra-passengers message Aena’s executives have given in public. Joan Carles Palerm, president of the environmental group GEN-GOB, said “the most serious impact will be on a global scale, from a possible increase in passengers.”

Architects, environmentalists and young islanders unite

Sunday’s demonstration draws an unusually broad coalition for Ibiza. Alongside the Asociación Jóvenes de Eivissa and GEN-GOB, the island’s official architects’ body, the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de las Illes Balears (COAIB), the water-focused Alianza por el Agua (Alliance for Water) and the Asociación de Vecinos Rafal Trobat neighbourhood group have all added their names.

Not every voice is calling for the project to be scrapped outright. Rafa Tur, spokesperson for Rafal Trobat, said: “We have to update the infrastructure we already have,” pointing out that the current terminals are not built for the traffic that already exists.

Ses Salines park sits in the expansion’s shadow

Part of the objection is environmental. The airport borders the Ses Salines natural park, a protected wetland straddling Ibiza and Formentera, and campaigners fear construction work, extra light and noise, and any resulting rise in flights could disturb its bird life and already-stretched water table.

Housing and water pressures were already stretched

Behind the specific gripe over gates and lounges sits a wider, more local strain too. Ibiza’s roughly 168,000 residents already share their island with more than nine million air passengers a year, a figure Aena itself expects to climb to 9.7 million by 2031 even without the pier expansion.

The Balearic government has faced growing pressure over exactly this kind of rise; opposition parties have separately proposed capping the islands’ total visitor numbers at 17.8 million a year. Housing shortages, water restrictions and packed beaches, recently visible in the shift towards visitors bringing their own food and drink rather than spending in bars and restaurants, have left many islanders primed to read any airport growth as more of the same.

For Torres and the groups marching on Sunday, the airport works have become a test of whether islanders get a say before the construction actually begins. “We also have the right to decide, and to be taken into account when planning what happens in our own territory,” she said.