The waters of Ibiza and Formentera included within the Natural Park of Ses Salines and its perimeter area, in the case of Formentera to Cala Saona, are at the limit of their capacity to accommodate anchoring of leisure boats, especially in August. That is, the sandy bottoms that are currently used to drop the anchors of the thousands of boats that have passed through these waters this season are no longer able to cope.
“We are reaching the limit of occupancy of the entire anchorage area of the Natural Park,” warns the coordinator of the surveillance service, Marcial Bardolet, and adds that, taking into account the swimming area, which stretches 200 meters from the coast, “which are followed by sandy bottoms [for anchorage] that are limited by the Posidonia meadow, if we continue to increase the number of boats a time will come when we will not know where to put them”.
The rest of the seabed of this protected area is covered with posidonia oceanica meadows and anchoring is strictly prohibited by the Balearic Law for the protection of this marine plant, which is also included as a natural asset in the UNESCO declaration of Ibiza as a World Heritage Site.
Bardolet acknowledged that the trend for the coming years looks set for the recreational boating sector to continue to grow : “We have to see if the increase this year is due to the rebound effect of covid or if, indeed and as we see in other parts of the Mediterranean as in Sardinia, the marine industry is still booming and everything indicates that we will have more boats.
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