Mallorca needs limits
In the year 2000, 10 million tourists arrived in the Balearic Islands. In the year 2026, 20 million will arrive. For years, some political leaders tried to make us believe that tourist saturation was just a perception. Today, however, hardly anyone doubts that the Balearic Islands are suffering from a serious problem of overmassification.
When GOB and Terraferida state that Mallorca is at its limit, we are not making a rhetorical exaggeration. We are describing a reality visible in many areas. Rustic land is disappearing under new constructions. Water consumption exceeds the capacity of aquifers and forces the planning of new desalination plants. We need more energy, more infrastructure, and more resources from outside. Roads are congested, public transport remains insufficient, and natural spaces are suffering increasing pressure.
We are also losing food autonomy. There are fewer and fewer farmers, fewer livestock breeders, and fewer fishermen. We produce less food and depend more and more on imports to feed the resident population, which makes us more vulnerable and distances Mallorca from its capacity to supply itself with its own resources. The reform of the Agrarian Law will not solve this problem either.
At the same time, tourist rentals, real estate speculation, and rising prices make access to housing difficult. Many young people have to leave because they can no longer live here. While airports and ports continue to grow, hospitals, schools, institutes, and treatment plants are overwhelmed.
In short, families are at their limit. Housing is at its limit. The territory is at its limit. Mallorca is at its limit.
How much can Mallorca support?
Faced with this reality, an inevitable question arises: how many people can Mallorca support?
Traditionally, this question has been approached through the concept of carrying capacity, that is, the maximum number of people or activities that a territory can sustain without degrading its resources or worsening the quality of life.The problem is that this capacity is not fixed. If there is a lack of water, we build a desalination plant. If there is a lack of energy, we lay an underwater cable or cover the territory with solar panels. If waste increases, we expand incineration. If the roads collapse, we build new infrastructure or expand existing ones. If economic activity requires more land, we modify urban planning laws to allow for more construction. Every time we approach a limiting factor, we invest resources and technology to push it a little further. This can give the false impression that limits do not exist.
That is why the relevant question is not how many people fit, but what are the limits we should not exceed. This is precisely the reflection that Johan Rockström and his collaborators put forward almost 20 years ago with the theory of planetary boundaries. Their contribution was not to calculate how many people fit on the planet, but to identify the essential ecological processes that maintain its stability and to warn of the risks of exceeding certain thresholds. The central question was to determine which limits we should not cross to stay within a safe operating space.
This approach helps us understand Mallorca. Water, land, natural spaces, mobility, housing, and social cohesion are part of the same system. That is why the problems we denounce from GOB and Terraferida are not independent, but alarm signals indicating that we are moving away from a safe operating space.
Problems do not disappear by ignoring them. We can postpone their consequences with more infrastructure, more consumption of water and energy, and more land occupation, but each time we need more resources to maintain a model based on continuous unlimited growth.
At this point, the question is whether we are willing to set the limits that Mallorca needs. Governments are the ones who decide whether to approve new developments, new tourist places, new measures of territorial desprotection, or administrative simplification. But governments rarely act in these cases to defend the common good if the citizenry does not demand it.
That is why Sunday's demonstration is not just a protest against mass tourism. It is a demand for a habitable future. It is about deciding whether we want to continue moving away from the safe operating space that sustains our quality of life or whether we want to start recovering it.Mallorca is at its limit. We still have time to prevent it from definitively exceeding it. But the time to act is now.