Behind the beach clubs, luxury villas and record-breaking property prices, Ibiza is confronting a much more fundamental question: what happens when the people who keep an island running can no longer afford to live on it?
Spain Expat Press Editorial Team
Ibiza has long been accustomed to excess. Excessive demand, excessive summer crowds and, increasingly, extraordinary housing costs. But the consequences of the island’s property boom are now spilling far beyond the housing market.
Teachers are turning down posts. Health workers are struggling to find somewhere to live. Seasonal employees arrive to work in one of Europe’s wealthiest tourist destinations only to discover that their salary may not secure them even a room.
In April, another makeshift settlement occupied by workers living in caravans, tents and improvised shelters was cleared. The eviction was the sixth of its kind on Ibiza since 2024, according to EFE – an uncomfortable counter-image to the luxury for which the island is marketed internationally.
And the question facing Ibiza is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid:
If ordinary workers cannot afford Ibiza, who exactly is going to run Ibiza?
Where are the teachers?
The problem is already visible in the classroom.
In May, all 13 teaching posts advertised on Ibiza in one round of vacancies remained unfilled. The teaching union STEI described the situation as alarming and warned of the consequences for educational standards. Housing costs were cited as one of the principal reasons teachers were reluctant to accept temporary postings on the island.
There have been striking individual cases. One teacher who had arranged to buy the 50-square-metre flat he had been renting for €270,000 found the agreement terminated when comparable properties in the building began selling for more than €500,000. Unable to find another home, he faced returning to Mallorca. The UGT union says some temporary teachers have spent their first days on Ibiza sleeping in their cars.
The problem becomes particularly acute as summer approaches. Teachers renting properties during the academic year can find themselves expected to leave at the end of May, when landlords can command substantially higher prices from tourists.
And where are the nurses?
Healthcare is facing much the same dilemma.
Health workers have reported sleeping on friends’ sofas, in cars and even in tents because they cannot afford accommodation. Unions say the cost of housing is making vacancies in hospitals and health centres increasingly difficult to fill.
The problem is hardly new. Can Misses hospital has previously converted unused hospital rooms into accommodation for doctors and nurses arriving on the island without somewhere to stay.
The Balearic government has gone as far as legislating for temporary accommodation programmes for healthcare workers and public-school teachers in Ibiza and Formentera where posts are deemed difficult to fill.
That alone says something extraordinary about the scale of the problem: housing has become part of the infrastructure required to provide healthcare and education.
Who will serve the tourists?
Then comes the industry on which Ibiza’s prosperity depends.
Hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, cleaning companies and countless other businesses need tens of thousands of workers to make the summer economy function.
But those workers need somewhere to sleep.
Hotel employers have described the efforts required to house seasonal staff as “titanic”, with some businesses providing accommodation themselves simply to secure enough employees for the season.
The phenomenon extends beyond Ibiza. Hotel groups operating in Spain have begun acquiring accommodation specifically for staff as soaring rents in tourist destinations make recruitment increasingly difficult.
It produces one of the strangest contradictions of modern Ibiza: an island can be rich enough to attract some of the wealthiest visitors in the world, yet too expensive for the people required to serve them.
A housing crisis that no longer stops at the front door
For years, Ibiza’s housing problem could be discussed primarily as a social issue: rents were too high, young people could not buy homes and residents were being squeezed by the tourist market.
That description is becoming inadequate.
When teachers cannot be recruited, it becomes an education problem.
When nurses cannot afford accommodation, it becomes a healthcare problem.
When hotels struggle to house employees, it becomes an economic problem.
And when people with full-time jobs are living in cars, caravans and improvised settlements because conventional housing is beyond their reach, it becomes something more uncomfortable still.
Ibiza’s extraordinary international success has helped make property on the island enormously desirable. But an island cannot function on property values alone.
Someone has to teach the children. Someone has to staff the hospital. Someone has to drive the buses, clean the streets, cook the meals and serve the millions of visitors who arrive each year.
So perhaps the most important question facing Ibiza is no longer how much its homes are worth.
It is who will still be able to live there.
