Tourism is the main industry of the Balearic Islands. As such, it is given priority by both the Spanish and the regional governments and, as a result, it has freedom to reshape the island at its convenience. The Balearics, thus, have suffered a process of deterioration of their landscape, labelled Balearisation, with the government's consent and encouragement. Furthermore, since the tourist industry requires that the resort become a commodified place empty of previous content, in which the tourist can fulfil his/her dream, symbolically differentiated from the world of work (Urry 2000), there arises a conflict between the void necessary for the government-sponsored tourist industry and the space in which, as Foucault claims, relations of proximity define human existence and in which cultural producers explore such relations. Superimposed on this situation, the increasing number of foreign property buyers and great numbers of migrant workers who choose the island as their home meet as a response among some locals the simplistic idea of a foreign invasion. From these starting points, I will examine the literary representation of alterity and space in the island of Mallorca through the concept of heteropias of difference, borrowing Edward Soja's term (1996). The talk will be based on a corpus of Mallorcan works, published from 1968 onwards, which are directly opposed to the monolithic stereotype constructed by the local and national governments and the tourist industry in the interest of selling the island to its visitors. Specifically, I will focus on the literary representation of space linked to the government-backed tourist industry: the spaces associated with diasporic communities, the newly developing trend of foreign property buyers and the psychological implications of buyout of the island, which will allow us to observe the ambiguous perspectives of admiration and rejection toward the Other that can be inferred from them.

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