Sant Jordi gains momentum beyond Palma

That Saint George has taken flight in recent years is a fact that is noted every April 23 in Palma. If last year two caparrots were premiered there, confirming its character as a traditional festival, this year the festival has begun almost a week earlier with a prior fair in the neighborhoods of the City. Nevertheless, the momentum of Book Day has also been felt outside Palma: throughout the Balearic Islands, numerous bookstores are preparing since February for one of the most important days of the year.

At the Mediterrània bookstore in Ibiza, for example, they already have 80 boxes with dozens of books to fill the stall they will set up on Passeig de Vara de Rey, the epicenter of the festival on the island. However, it will not be the only stall that Vicent Marí, who has worked there since 2009 and has been its owner since 2015, will set up these days: the next day they will be in Sant Antoni and on the 25th, in Santa Eulària. "And May 1st in Sant Llorenç de Balàfia," he adds, and immediately clarifies that "there is only one Saint George, but it is on the 23rd, and it has reivindicative connotations that we do not want to overlook."

In fact, reivindication is also part of the selection that the bookseller makes for Saint George: ever since, the Mediterrània bookstore has prioritized books that have a connection with Ibiza, either by author, theme, or publisher. "It is impossible to cover all the new releases we receive these months," he shares, "besides, in a month or two no one will talk about most of them. On the other hand, the potential of local books lasts over time, and we want to promote readings linked to the territory. This has been done since the bookstore was founded, in the mid-90s."

Low density of bookstores

The Mediterrània bookstore is one of the four located in the city of Ibiza. According to the latest edition of the CEGAL (Spanish Confederation of Booksellers' Guilds and Associations) bookstore map, in 2025 there were 2,754 throughout the State – a figure that includes neither large bookstore chains nor second-hand shops. Of the total, 53 are in the Balearic Islands, a community that has a rate of 4.34 bookstores per 100,000 inhabitants. It is one of the lowest figures in the State, only above that of Castilla-La Mancha, and far below those of communities such as Galicia and Castilla y León, which exceed 9 bookstores per 100,000 inhabitants. Of the 53 available in the Balearic Islands, in any case, almost half are in Palma, while the rest are distributed, especially, among the main cities of the Archipelago. The celebration of Sant Jordi depends on them to also spread to the other municipalities of the Islands.

In Inca, for example, there are three bookstores that have been going out into the street for years to celebrate Sant Jordi. They will do so in Inca on April 23rd, but they will also be present at literary fairs organized in other Mallorcan towns in the days before and after Book Day, such as Lloseta, Port de Pollença, and Alaró. However, on the big day, Thursday the 23rd, they will have to change location in the capital of Raiguer, because the festival coincides with the market day in Inca, Thursday. Thus, this April 23rd, plants will be the protagonists of the place where Book Day was traditionally celebrated, Plaça de l’Ajuntament, while in front of the covered market, stalls with books will be set up. Among the stalls will be that of Espirafocs, where, for the second consecutive year, the musician Miquel Serra will attend to the inquers, who summarizes his first experience as a bookseller on Sant Jordi's Day with a concise “much stress!”. “It’s madness. I remember last year full of faces I haven’t seen all year. It’s very strange, this Sant Jordi thing, but it’s very good that it has taken root so much.

Children, protagonists of the festival

For this year's edition, Serra has about 500 extra books prepared, and confesses that he has refined the selection a bit. “Last year we brought Gogol's Dead Soulsbecause we really liked it, but we already know it doesn't move masses. We've seen the trends of titles and authors that have already headed towards Sant Jordi,” he acknowledges. For his part, Miquel Prats, a bookseller from another Inca bookstore, Univers Literari, does not hesitate to point out who the main protagonists of the day are, beyond the books: children. “In Inca, Sant Jordi wouldn't exist without them,” he points out, “because they spend the morning with school and then, in the afternoon, you see them dragging their parents to buy. From five o'clock onwards there is a trickle of families, which is what makes the festival so beautiful. Seeing them so happy when they have the book they wanted is the best part of Sant Jordi, every year.”

For Dolors Boatella, bookseller at vaDllibres, in Ciutadella, it is not easy to choose the best part of Sant Jordi, nor is it easy to pick out the best moment from the eight editions she has lived through at the helm of the emblematic bookstore. “Perhaps I would say the worst of all, the one from the pandemic,” she finally decides, “because we had to set up a base camp at the bookstore to attend to all the requests we received. And my colleague, Cris [Juanico], went to deliver them by car, to places where they hadn't had stories to tell for a long time and to doctors who needed something to disconnect,” she explains emotionally.

This year she will once again set up a stall at the fair organized in Plaça del Born between April 23rd and 25th, where the show that Boatella herself has written based on the poetic work of Joan López Casasnovas will premiere. “We are very excited about it, because he was a much-loved person, very linked to the cultural world from various sides,” she shares. For Boatella, Sant Jordi is also a good day to vindicate the role of bookstores. “Only booksellers can guess which reading will fit specific tastes, a state of mind, or a person's interest in a particular topic. You can't find that on any platform, and it's worth remembering. That we are here and that local bookstores play a very important role.”