Is Menorca's star going out?

The late Guillem Frontera, in the interview I conducted for the tribute collection coordinated by Damià Pons and published by Ensiola, insisted on convincing me that, despite the feeling we Menorcans sometimes have, because each one fears what belongs to him, Menorca has withstood different sides of the same onslaught. In comparison with what has happened in Mallorca and Ibiza, Guillem praised the prudence of the Menorcans, the slow and measured steps toward tourism without abandoning other economic activities, from farming to industry, the continuity of associations, the preservation of a humanized and vibrant landscape. A whole series of virtues, Guillem said, that generate in the foreign visitor the sensation of stepping on a civilized land, and that make Menorca a luminous, profoundly Mediterranean landmark that persists amidst a disfigured environment.

To everything he said, I replied that it was, however. That perhaps we've believed it too much, and that this complacency has made us believe we were vaccinated against excesses, when everything is fragile and provisional. That often the comparison with Mallorca or Ibiza no longer has the effect of alerting us to what might happen to us, but rather anesthetizes us to threats because things aren't as bad here. Guillermo told me that he understood when I warned him against flattery, because, indeed, the way things are today is no guarantee of anything, since what has taken generations to build can be quickly destroyed.

We had this conversation in November 2021 (we were still wearing masks). It's only been four years, but sometimes it seems like decades. When referring to Mallorca, Guillem emphasized that he wasn't speaking nostalgically about the Mallorca that had been, but about the one that could have been; that contrasted the path Menorca had taken. Agreed. But I increasingly have the feeling that the dismantling has already begun. That not all is lost, but that if we don't rectify this soon, we'll end up talking, even in Menorca, about what we could have been.

David Marquès's recent reports on the ARA Baleares, excellent, show a few of the things—too many things—that we do, between bad and very bad, and that are causing us to lose momentum as leaders in sustainability. If we don't remedy this, if we don't reverse the current dynamic, the famous and pretentious Biosphere Reserve label will become an oxymoron.

The common denominator is the overturning of the model and the inversion of priorities. If the problem is overcrowding, and experts tell us that the island's saturation has already exceeded its capacity, now it turns out that instead of scaling supply to its capacity and respecting the island's limits—both natural and those of services and infrastructure—we must adapt to demand by artificially expanding our capacity.

We were the first to talk about limiting car entry in the summer, but we will be the last block to implement this measure, behind Formentera, Ibiza, and Mallorca. We boast of being the only island without highways, but now we're planning more lanes on the roads and more parking everywhere to accommodate all the cars we sell. We were the island that led the debate on limiting tourist rentals, but now we will even allow it in rural areas to convert farmhouses into chalets. We said we had to curb overcrowding because there isn't enough water for everyone, but now we have to plan desalination plants to challenge any limits. We chose not to incinerate manure and prioritized waste reduction, a challenge associated with limiting tourism, but now the blame falls on the local councils because there aren't enough containers to collect all the manure left by overcrowding in the summer. We had an award-winning, benchmark territorial plan, but now we'll turn it into the tool to plan and accelerate urban development and grant amnesty to those who broke the law.

All this is Menorca, right now. The process is reversible, but the time to rectify it is shortening. That glow Guillem Frontera spoke of is fading. If we don't go, the only star we'll have left will be that of the beer that crushes us every year with its pamphlet. pijoflauta, a seller of a Menorca so authentic that it doesn't exist, although some natives laugh at the joke and find it fantastic to live in this theme park.