“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” This is the famous line from the final monologue of the replicant in Blade Runner (1982), Ridley Scott’s great science fiction film. In 1973, nine years earlier, Llorenç Villalonga, arriving from the future, described an equally apocalyptic panorama for Mallorca in 2050 in Andrea Víctrix. In the 1960s, during the tourist boom, there were already authors who sensed a far from promising future for the island. They did so with books that X-rayed the social trauma generated by the then-known ‘golden goose’. Researcher Pilar Arnau discusses this in Narrativa i turisme a Mallorca (1968-1980), published in 1999 by Edicions Documenta Balear. In 1967, at the age of 70, Villalonga had already lamented the crisis of agricultural society in Les Fures due to the ‘tourist big bang’. That same year, Antònia Vicens from Santanyí also delved into the same theme in her first novel, 39º a l’ombra (Sant Jordi prize). Written at the age of 25, the work is based on the author’s experiences as a hotel secretary in Cala d’Or. It addresses, among other issues, the miseries of labor exploitation, both in hospitality and construction, the oppressive Catholicism of the time, and the cultural contrast caused by the arrival of foreign tourists and mainland workers.In 1968, Guillem Frontera from Ariany (1945-2024) published Els Carnissers (Ciutat de Palma prize) – he wrote it in a month and a half, at just 23 years old, while doing his military service. Its protagonists are Miquel and Coloma, two former farmers who, in just ten years, become rich thanks to the souvenir business. Their success is materialized with the purchase of the estate where they had worked as servants for Don Fulgenci and Doña Leonor in their youth. Miquelet, one of the new rich couple’s sons, believes that the workers “are better off every day. They all have cars, televisions, and refrigerators.” At the same time, however, he doesn’t hesitate to criticize his family: “Mumpare and mumare have only lived their lives to make money, and they’ve sacrificed Magdalena by turning her into a mummy who makes a fool of herself all day long in front of a few simple-minded foreigners, saying typical spanish, typical Majorca, very very, mucho very… ¡Very shit! And all for money.”In 1970, at the age of 24, Maria Antònia Oliver from Manacor (1946-2022) wrote Cròniques d’un mig estiu. It tells the experience of a boy who leaves the rural world to work as a bellboy in a hotel. That same year, Gabriel Tomàs Alemany from Andratx (1940-2026) also captured his experience in hospitality in the novel Corbs afamegats (Ciutat de Palma prize). The work makes the following denunciation of the situation of mainland immigrants: “Many of them arrived without a penny in their pockets, with faces gaunt from hunger and misery; the children, thin and dirty, wore patched and thick clothes.” The same denunciation is contained in Camí de coix (Ciutat de Palma prize 1979), by the worker-priest Jaume Santandreu, a native of Manacor.
The dystopias of Mallorca made reality
In 1978, in the midst of the environmental struggle, the illustrator Pere Joan was a pioneer in drawing the island as a future sun and beach theme park. Five years earlier, in the science fiction novel 'Andrea Víctrix', Llorenç Villalonga had already predicted that Palma would be a tourist colony. Today the reality imposed by turbo-capitalism is worse
PalmaWhen you ask AI to create a drawing about Mallorca 50 years from now, the result is a polluted island full of buildings, much like Hong Kong. In 1978, when only natural intelligence existed, this same scenario was already described by the Palma-based cartoonist Pere Joan Riera, better known as Pere Joan. “I–he recalls today in his seventies–was 22 years old and still studying in Barcelona. One day Basilio Baltasar came to see me. He was one of the leaders of the anarcho-ecological formation Terra i Llibertat, which the previous summer, in July 1977, had occupied the small island of Dragonera near Andratx to prevent its development. He asked me for a poster that would reflect the direction Mallorca would take if the construction fever, initiated with the boom of tourism, was not stopped”.
Pere Joan found it easy to pour all the science fiction literature he loved to read then onto paper. “I drew a Mallorca turned into a theme park for tourists, with three airports (one at sea) and a huge highway crossing it. I also painted the Puig Major as a bunker in allusion to the growing American presence at the military base inaugurated at the top of the Serra de Tramuntana in 1959, in the midst of the Cold War. I underestimated my predictions. Now we have an island much worse than the one I imagined 48 years ago”. In 1978, the year the poster was published, the Balearic Islands received 3 million tourists, a negligible figure compared to the 19 million in 2025.
'What does this people want?'
Pere Joan's illustration was presided over by the question ‘What do these people want?’. It alluded to the title of the famous song with which, in 1968, Maria del Mar Bonet denounced the death of Rafael Guijarro. He was a 23-year-old student from Madrid, a member of FAR, who had died after the Police, during a search, threw him out of a window of his home. On the poster, the question was directed at hoteliers and speculators. During the occupation of La Dragonera, Terra i Llibertat had already pointed them out in a manifesto they distributed. “We are part –the leaflet said– of a people submissive and forcibly disunited, who see with impotence the slow but implacable destruction of a Free Land and its transformation into a business for state and foreign capital. Upon our Mallorca, good land for a beautiful future, an economic empire has been erected which only fattens the State and the ruling classes established on the island. Exploitation and theft have been carried out with impunity in all aspects of our lives: social, urban, ecological, economic. In this way, the violent aggression against our land has been consummated; our freedom [...]. It is preferable and urgent to put a stop to current growth and development before seeing an island turned into a giant dunghill”.
Terra i Llibertat proudly exhibited Pere Joan's poster, which was the first in a futuristic style to be made in the Balearic Islands. "It moved – he says – through small circuits. Today, however, with social networks, it would have had much more impact." The drawing exuded indignation. "I remember walking with my parents through the dunes of l'Arenal, which would later be razed by the famous process of "balearization". Now the whole island has become a metropolitan area. The city has also invaded the countryside".
In 2009, no less than 39 years after the famous illustration, Pere Joan recovered his spirit of protest with the book Memòria selectiva. Postals dibuixades de Mallorca al límit (Disset Edició). Its pages reflect a deep disappointment with a political class that has been incapable of managing the runaway growth of the tourism industry, seen for too long as a source of wealth and today, of poverty. "When I was young, I read many science fiction novels. Now I'm not interested in them at all because the dystopias have already become a reality. I would never have imagined seeing queues of people waiting two hours to take a selfie at Caló del Moro. I would never have imagined that residents would end up expelled from the island because of the high housing prices." In 2023, the cartoonist would once again portray his pessimistic view of the world in Neocaos (Disset Edicions).
‘Andrea Víctrix’
In 1973, five years before Pere Joan drew the dystopian future of Mallorca, the Palma-born writer Llorenç Villalonga (1897-1980) had already dedicated his novel Andrea Víctrix, winner of the Josep Pla Prize. Inspired by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), it is one of the great foundational works of science fiction in Catalan – the other being Manuel de Pedrolo's Mecanoscrit del segon origen, published in 1974. It complemented Villalonga's two previous successful novels, written at the age of 76, about the island's past, in decline since the 19th century: Mort de dama (1931) and Bearn (1961).
The protagonist of Andrea Víctrix is a man in his sixties who, trusting in the advances of medicine, undergoes a freezing treatment. He wakes up 85 years later in a Mallorca of the year 2050, totally devoted to tourism. His house has been demolished to make way for a skyscraper with a casino intended for waiters, a guild that Villalonga sarcastically turns into the new dominant class of Mallorcan society. Palma has even changed its name to become Turclub, the abbreviation for Mediterranean Tourist Club. Its inhabitants are androgynous beings tasked with making happy some visitors who are welcomed with bright signs that read 'Progress cannot be stopped'. Those who question the tourist regime are confined to psychiatric re-education clinics, where they are directed towards consumption and the constant pursuit of pleasure.
In 2026, 53 years after its publication, the dystopian landscape described by Villalonga is more relevant than ever. This is assured by Sílvia Ventayol Bosch, author of the book El malson de Llorenç Villalonga. Estudi d’Andrea Víctrix (2015). “All of Mallorca is now Turclub, a gigantic theme park where it seems tourists have more rights than residents. At the airport, flashy signs abound welcoming them, and many luxury real estate agencies occupy former traditional shops. Furthermore, these days we have seen how two young activists who dared to question the tourist model have been led before the judge in handcuffs”.
‘The island's hell’
In 2002, writer Pere Rosselló, in a humorous vein, would explore the dystopia begun with Andrea Víctrix. In the short novel L’infern de l’illa (The Hell of the Island), a deceased Santiago Rusiñol returns by plane to his beloved 'island of calm'. Upon landing in Palma, he finds himself in a labyrinthine airport, shaped like an immense ensaïmada, from which he cannot escape. Accompanying him is Llorenç Villalonga himself. The work has been studied by Mercè Picornell, a professor in the Catalan department at the UIB, author of the book, in Spanish, Paraísos insoportables. “The most terrifying room in this ensaïmada-airport – she points out – leads to an immense city of hotels, apartments, golf courses, discotheques, etc., completely empty and threatened by a storm that prevents tourists from coming. It is the hell of the hoteliers who have destroyed the island, condemned to live in their universe devoid of visitors”.
From 2001 comes another dystopia, Territori amortitzat 114, by Antoni Roca and Maria I. Deyà. It portrays a Mallorca that, due to its tourist monoculture, is listed on the stock exchange under the name 'Mallorquische, societat territorial anònima'. However, the rise in sea level caused by climate change means the island is no longer attractive to tourists. It thus becomes a depreciated territory, that is, unrecoverable and incapable of generating wealth. In 2014, the image of a saturated island, immortalized in 1978 by Pere Joan in his famous poster, would be recreated by Xisco Fuster and Toni Planissi in the comic Un infern a Mallorca (La decadència de l’Imperi Mallorquí), the sequel to Els darrers dies de l’Imperi Mallorquí (Edicions del Despropòsit).
In 2018, Joan Miquel Oliver, a member of the group Antònia Font, published Alexandra Schneider und ihr Casiotone. It is a wild science fiction novel that presents a Mallorca in the mid-21st century annexed to Germany because "the Majorcans of that time no longer mattered in Mallorca". More apocalyptic is the latest imagined dystopia, Contra el món (2023), by Pere Antoni Pons from Campaneta. It speaks of the disappearance of the Serra de Tramuntana due to a strange cataclysm. Immediately, a corporation with German and Spanish capital plans to rebuild the island under the toponym 'Mallorca nova', with which it intends to continue attracting tourists. “Mallorca –laments one of its environmentalist protagonists– was not paradise, no, but it could have been, and it is from this possible paradise that we Majorcans have been banished”.