Empty Mallorca
PalmEvery week, between 2021 and 2024, five new villas were built on rural land in Mallorca. This isn't a metaphor or a subjective perception; these are facts. These facts come from Terraferida, a collective that has returned to the public sphere with rigorous, patient, and sometimes uncomfortable work—as numbers always are when they dismantle official narratives. In times of often confusing noise, it's worth celebrating that someone is back to put figures on the table and do so to reinforce sensible demands.
Five villas per week—no joke. That's more than 200 constructions annually in a territory that, in theory, should be excluded from urban development and used for the necessary promotion of agriculture and environmental protection.
In any case, given these figures, the first question we should ask ourselves is how many of these large houses are actually inhabited. The answer, although not systematically compiled, is well-known: most are empty for much of the year. We destroy land for nothing, because this constant trickle of villas doesn't solve the housing problem in any way. These houses aren't built to address a social need. They're bought and built as investments, as a haven for capital, or as occasional recreational spaces for people who usually have a choice of homes: today in Mallorca or Ibiza, tomorrow in the Hamptons. They're also used to rent out under the table, to "host friends"—as they say—or simply to store them and multiply their value shortly afterward in speculative operations that, until now, have yielded much higher returns than any other conventional investment.
We should have accepted long ago that housing can no longer be a commodity destined for speculation. The Spanish government has just requested, for the Canary Islands, the possibility of limiting home purchases by foreigners. It hasn't done so for the Balearic Islands. Furthermore, the PP government here doesn't want to, and the left-wing parties only demanded it when they were no longer in power. With the Balearic Islands, everyone starts counting their chickens before they hatch.
And yet the Islands have such a clear uniqueness that, if we don't deserve to be able to establish limitations here, there's no other place that does. We are a finite territory, strained to the point that people can't access housing despite having an average salary, but we are also a territory where global demand is infinite. That's why it's a trap to say time and again that if we don't build more, there won't be any housing. It's a self-serving argument. The world is very big, and there will always be hundreds or thousands of people with more money willing to buy. Building more, in that context, only accelerates the loss of territory and exacerbates the problem. The housing problem, the landscape problem, the economic problem, the food problem, the education problem, and the healthcare problem, among so many others. In short, it worsens most of the problems of the people who live—and want to continue living—in the Islands.
