Changing tourism patterns, capital accumulation, and urban water consumption in Mallorca, Spain: a sustainability fix? Angela Hof a * and Maci a Bl azquez-Salom b a Geography Department, Ruhr University Bochum, Universitaetsstrasse 150, Na 5/128, Bochum 44780, Germany; b Earth Sciences Department, Balearic Islands University, Ctra. Valldemossa, km. 7,5, Campus UIB, Edifici Beatriu de Pin  os, Palma (Mallorca), Illes Balears 07122, Spain (Received 23 October 2012; accepted 14 November 2014) This paper presents interdisciplinary research based on in-depth, comparative analysis of water consumption and land use patterns over a range of urban-tourist forms in Mallorca. The changing tourism patterns towards residential and quality tourism are studied, on the basis that capital investment for capital accumulation and increasing gains are its main drivers. Social awareness about overcrowding and resource limitations has moved the regulatory planning framework toward allowing further urban sprawl, based on the alibi of quality tourism. The rhetoric of this framework represents a first sustainability fix, a fix that hides the higher water demand and climate change issues. The socio-metabolic dimension of this process is analyzed in relation to how it has resulted in an uneven socio-spatial urban landscape of water consumption. This urban-tourist landscape is vulnerable to changes in climate, because it is sustained by an excessive use of water. Water supply is a serious constraint which has been resolved through its commodification and supply privatization, which are considered as a second sustainability fix. This tourism development process worsens rather than solves the metabolic rift, resulting in the second contradiction of capital accumulation between the imperative of continual growth and finite natural resources. Keywords: urban and tourist water use; residential tourism; social power; spatial fix; Mediterranean coast 1. Introduction The Balearic Islands, and among them particularly Mallorca, are a paradigmatic example of tourism evolution and transformation with time. This paper illustrates the changing tourism patterns in Mallorca, and instead of adopting an economic and managerial per- spective on the island’s tourism development, growth and sustainability, this paper takes a critical stand by addressing the challenges exacerbated by tourist specialization. It understands this specialization as a strategic move towards a higher quality model with possible negative effects in terms of water resource sustainability. The paper examines the complex environmental, economic, and political relations, and their spatiality, from a Marxian-informed perspective, analyzing the interrelatedness of changing tourism pat- terns with crises in capitalism and changes in the regulatory planning framework. Resi- dential tourism is a major component of this tourist specialization and of these complex relations. The concept of “residential tourism” has been used since the late 1970s to describe a development model based on the production of urban land for the construction *Corresponding author. Email: angela.hof@rub.de Ó 2015 Taylor & Francis Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2014.991397