Celestí Alomar

Celestí Alomar Mateu was the Mallorcan geographer who, for four years at the start of this century, made a tourist stay tax the argument of the islands. He was born on 9 December 1949 in Llubí, a small town in the Mallorcan interior, and he died in Palma on 31 August 2026, at 76. Diario de Mallorca, Ultima Hora, dBalears and ARA Balears all recorded the death that Monday. None named a disease. They said a complicated illness had already taken him out of public life in the last months, after a career that never really left the question of what tourism owed the place that received it.

This is that man, the Llubí-born geographer, civil servant and socialist who served as conseller de Turisme of the Balearic Islands from 27 July 1999 to 30 June 2003. He is also written Celesti Alomar and Celestí Alomar Mateu. He is not a singer, an athlete, or any other public person of the surname Alomar. Press called him the father of the ecotax, or pare de l'ecotaxa. That nickname names the argument of the life. It is not a stage name.

He trained as a geographer and historian at the University of Barcelona, the old central university, and he entered the senior corps of Spanish state civil administrators, the Cuerpo Superior de Administradores Civiles del Estado. A 2007 report also describes him as a technician of information and tourism. An El País profile published on 23 September 1990, when he was 40 and newly appointed to professionalise the Institut Balear de Turisme, remembered him as an antifranquista. In 1969, the paper wrote, he watched a classmate throw a bust of the dictator out of a university window. He was expelled from the Faculty of Chemistry. He passed through the radical left, the Communist Party, and then, with Antoni Tarabini and Paco Obrador, helped found the Partit Socialista de les Illes. Catalan Wikipedia and dBalears date that founding to 18 February 1976, still in clandestinity. The party later became the Partit Socialista de Mallorca. The same 1990 profile called him a skilled manager and a hard negotiator who knew both the charm and the sadness of power and of opposition. It also noted years in Madrid, with time out for electoral campaigns of the CDS, before the return to island tourism administration. El País says he had remained in Madrid until 1986.

That administrative path is what made the later political fight possible. He was manager of Ibatur, director general of tourist planning in the Balearic government, and, for a few months in 1994, director general of tourist policy in Madrid, appointed by the trade and tourism minister Javier Gómez-Navarro. The Política Turística post ran from 4 February 1994 to 22 July 1994. From 22 July 1994 to 7 June 1996 he was director general of tourist strategy in the last government of Felipe González. Ultima Hora also records an earlier stretch among the information staff of the Moncloa under Adolfo Suárez, when the Mallorcan Josep Melià was secretary of state for communication, and a posting as information counsellor at the Spanish embassy in Mexico. By the time the left won the islands in 1999, Alomar was not a newcomer to the hotel lobbies. He already knew how visas, promotion budgets and coastal administration actually worked.

On 27 July 1999 he became conseller de Turisme in the first Pacte de Progrés, the government led by Francesc Antich. He sat in the Balearic Parliament from 12 July 1999 until 3 April 2007, elected in 1999 and again in 2003. The measure that carried his name was the ecotax, a charge on tourist stays whose proceeds were meant for the environment, heritage and culture rather than for yet more promotion of the strongest industry on the islands. The political deal was struck in 2000. Parliament voted the tax in April 2001. It began to be collected on 1 May 2001. Alomar told Diario de Mallorca, looking back, that the decision had been studied for a long time and had been driven by two facts: this was the first left-wing government of the country, and education and health had urgent needs. He thought it a lack of solidarity for the tourism ministry to spend general money promoting the richest sector. In time, he said, events proved them right.

The fight was personal as well as doctrinal. Diario de Mallorca recalled the line that entered the island's political folklore, spoken by a hotelier who had built a Caribbean empire from Mallorca: "Hay que matar al conseller." Ultima Hora later quoted a fuller version from the same climate, "hay que quitar al president o matar al conseller." Alomar answered with humour. He told the paper that Pablo Piñero's line had amused him, that he had known the man from earlier visa work when Alomar was a director general in Madrid, and that he had called the interior conseller to report a threat. A few days later the police replied that the man no longer had a firearms permit. The founder of Meliá, Gabriel Escarrer Juliá, would not even see him. Alomar said the Constitutional Court and the judges found for the tax. He said he did not know how many lawsuits there had been. No count is added here.

The Partido Popular abolished the tax after Jaume Matas returned to the Consolat de Mar in 2003. Alomar did not stand again in 2007. He worked as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Tourism Organization, and he advised governments in Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Guatemala and Zacatecas. In 2007 he was named head of the Balearic coastal demarcation, a post that required a civil servant. He kept writing. He was a columnist for Ultima Hora until illness made him set that aside, and he wrote for ARA Balears and for El País, including a piece whose title called the removal of the ecotax an irreparable error. When a later left government under Francina Armengol restored a version of the charge in 2016, as the Impost de Turisme Sostenible, Alomar welcomed the return and complained that the years without it had been lost. Raising the rate later, he said, came very late. On the 25th anniversary he told Ultima Hora that arguments about the tax cutting visitor numbers were a false debate, because the studies had already shown it did not.

In 2017 he left the PSOE, together with Bernat Ramis, over Pedro Sánchez's support for article 155 in Catalonia and what he called the authoritarian drift of the government of Mariano Rajoy. Bernat Ramis was a political companion, not kin. Alomar said that if he were only a member of the island party, not of the Spanish PSOE, he would not have resigned, and that Armengol and the Balearic government still had his full support. Another line, reported by Ultima Hora, set the generation that had built the democracy against the jailers and with the political prisoners. He did not go quiet. He joined the Fòrum de la Societat Civil and Col·lectiu Alternatives, remained a member of Obra Cultural Balear and sat on its advisory council, and kept arguing that independence on the left flank was more useful than party membership. In 2022 Antich was still able to gather that first Pacte government, Alomar among them. Antich died in 2025. Pere Sampol died the same year. Alomar died the next August.

His family said he was married and that he had two daughters and two sons. The published obituaries do not name his wife or his children. Parents, siblings and grandchildren were not named in the sources used here, and none are invented. Colleagues remembered him as reserved in office and a great talker off the record. He said accusations made against him during the tax war were false and hard on his family. The vigil was set for Wednesday 2 September 2026, from 17:00 to 20:00, at the cemetery of Llubí, the town he had never really left. A burial place beyond that vigil was not stated in the obituaries used here. Armengol, by then president of Congress, spoke of his generosity and loyalty. The argument he started is still collected at hotel desks across the islands, under another name, a quarter of a century after the first night it was charged. No major prize list appears in the obituaries consulted. His public honours are the offices themselves, and the nicknames father of the ecotax and referent of progressivism used in farewell coverage.