And all the beaches

I grew up with the beach in front of me. Before I knew almost anything about the world, I already knew how to hold a crab net from my grandfather, how the wet sand clung to my feet (also the varnish) and how the castles we built with my mother and my brother, with a bucket or just with our hands, had minutes counted before the sea took them away. Later came the long summers of adolescence: hours and hours with friends sitting on the sand doing nothing more than chatting, laughing and jumping again from that rock we saw from our house. Mornings, afternoons and evenings. The beach was our natural place. We didn't go there, we lived there.

Perhaps that is why it is difficult to accept that now, when the time comes to make the most of it, we do not go, we cannot go, we do not like to go.

First it was l'Arenal, we stopped going there. Then came el Trenc – we don't want them to touch it, but we also don't go there, because it is no longer the same in any way, with so many people and so many boats, one on top of the other – Formentor, el Caló del Moro, Cala s’Almunia, Cala Varques, Cala Deià... In Menorca, Cala en Turqueta, Macarella, Son Saura... Les Salines and Cala Saona in Formentera, practically all around Ibiza. There are already many more beaches and coves that we have given up than those we still consider as an option.

What a profound contradiction, to live surrounded by the sea, on islands that the world envies precisely for its coasts, and those of us who live here have become accustomed to looking at them from afar during the hottest months. And not because we don't like them, but because we like them too much and we know what awaits us there: traffic jams, saturated parking lots, sand occupied inch by inch, noise and boats anchored one after another.

It is true that the population of the Islands has grown much more than can be assumed. But the overcrowding of the beaches is, above all, tourist-related. Residents often work while the beaches fill up. And because today tourists no longer discover coves by chance; they know them all before arriving. Social networks have turned every photo into a massive invitation.

This has even changed the way we talk about the coast. If we still have a discreet cove, a rocky outcrop, an inlet where we can spread out our towel without feeling like we are part of a crowd, we do not share it. We keep it as a family secret. As if it were a treasure, which it is.

When a society begins to hide its shelters for fear of losing them, it means it has already lost many others. And it is not just a matter of leisure time. It is a way of ceasing to belong to the place where you were born. Those beaches were not just landscape; they were memory, identity, a way of growing up. The day that the inhabitants of islands accept as normal that summer is the time not to go to the sea, we have made a much deeper and more significant renunciation than that of simple beach days.