Spanish views from a small town

The Spanish Mediterranean is known for sun and fun, especially among young people from the colder, more serious north of Europe. As when I was a teenager in Boston, and high school seniors and college students went to Bermuda and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for spring break, so charters of young adults from Britain, France, and Germany come to the Balearic Islands and coastal towns of Catalunya. If the locals back then complained about those students unleashed upon the innocent population, so do locals here now complain about the youngsters from the north. Some have wandered the streets naked in all their glory in the center of Barcelona, others have had to be picked up by the garbage men in Magaluf and sent to the Emergency Room in an alcoholic coma, and others have had to be picked up by the coroner after jumping into the pool from a sixth floor balcony and missing the water. This last practice is called balconing , and is an Anglo-Saxon adaptation of transforming a noun into a verb....

I am the first to admit that I haven't the money to spend on five star hotels and three or four fork restaurants. In fact, when we went to France three years ago, we went by car, searched for the cheapest diesel, stayed at wonderful B&B's, ate mostly food from supermarkets at picnic spots, and bought very few souvenirs, mostly magnets. I think the most money we spent daily was for our accommodations, and I deliberately chose those that were the least expensive without being cheap hostel-type places. We enjoyed ourselves without mortgaging the house. Many people on tight incomes who like to travel, have no option but to travel cheap. The tourism industry has adapted to them, even though the cities and towns they pass through wish they would leave more money. In fact, our regional government of Galicia has stated it would try to change our tourism to target more "moneyed" tourists. Good luck with that. They'll find that there aren't that many who have a fe...