Located at the foot of the Tramuntana mountain range, 14 kilometers from Palma, at the beginning of the 20th century Esporles was known as the 'little Russia' of Mallorca. Its six textile factories had managed to forge a strong proletarian consciousness. The inauguration in 1930 of the Casa del Pueblo would be a reflection of that class pride. Already in the municipal elections of April 12, 1931, the municipality would be one of the few on the island where the left triumphed. Two days later, King Alfonso XIII departed into exile and the Second Republic was proclaimed.

Women have played a key role in the history of antimilitarism. When men were obliged to go to war, mothers, wives, and sisters did not hesitate to mobilize to save their loved ones from certain death. It was during the Modern Age (15th-18th centuries) that the armies of European states became permanent and increasingly large. At that time, the Hispanic monarchy, following what was done in the rest of the continent, had three ways of supplying its troops: with mercenaries (professionals who fought in exchange for pay), with forced levies (generally from marginalized people, prisoners, and vagrants), and with the quintas.

The Havana cemetery is full of tombs with very local surnames: Pujol, Roca, Moner, Ensenyat... They are the testimony of the Majorcans who in the 19th century left to 'make the Americas'. According to chronicles, in 1889 there were about 10,000 (4% of the population). Many from Andratx went to Cuba. Among them were the paternal and maternal grandparents of Rosa Calafat Vila, professor of Catalan Philology at the UIB. “In the eighties, during my youth – she says –, I dug into the oral memory of the municipality and I was pleasantly surprised. I discovered a large number of 'gloses' related to the Caribbean island”.

The Palmesan Gonçal López Nadal, 73, is Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB). He feels indebted to the mastery of the Felanitx native Antoni Binimelis Sagrera. “The first time –he assures– I heard of him was in 1964, when I was 11 years old. It was through my uncle, Guillem Nadal Blanes, who was stationed as a diplomat in India. In a letter he told the family that he had met a Majorcan, a specialist in classical languages and a Spanish teacher in New Delhi. He said he was a rather peculiar person, a man of universal culture, and that he hadn't lost a hair, but, from his condition as a peasant”.

In Mallorca, during the Civil War, one of the main targets of the insurgents was the wealthy class that had supported the Second Republic. The symbol of that repression was the mayor of Palma, Emili Darder, a doctor by training, who in 1934 had helped found the Balearic Republican Left (ERB) to counterbalance the local political bosses. On February 24, 1937, after a sham court-martial, Darder was executed by firing squad. He shared that fate with two party members: the businessman Antoni Maria Ques from Alcúdia and the former mayor of Inca, Antoni Mateu, and the Palma socialist Alexandre Jaume. Eight more ERB mayors were also murdered: Joan Mas Verd I harvest (Montuïri), Clemente Garau Juan (Porreres), Pere Llull Fullana (Algaida), Pere Josep Cànaves Sales (Pollença), Pau Crespí Villalonga (Mancor del Valle), Pedro Vallespir Amengual (Costitx), Joan Alemán Villalonga (Búger) and Joan Guasch.

In 2021, Francesc Vicens Vidal, a musicologist from Palma, discovered a remarkable story within his wife Maria de Salut's family. "I received," he recalls, "a phone call from filmmaker Álex Dioscórides, who was preparing the documentary." Stone and oilfocused on the olive grove culture of the Tramuntana mountain range. He asked me if I knew any olive harvesters he could interview, given that many sang while they worked. I told him no. But one day my mother-in-law told me that her mother, when she was single, had been hired out to work on an estate in Sóller. They called this 'going to the mountains'."

During the Franco regime, women had their own form of military service through the Women's Social Service (SSF). This was a request made in 1937 by the Women's Section of the Falange to Franco to obtain more volunteers for the service.Social AssistanceIt was a public assistance organization created by the insurgent side during the Civil War. In 1939, with the fascist victory, the Women's Social Service (SSF) was decreed a 'national duty' presented as the perfect complement to the Home Economics Schools. Under the auspices of National Catholicism, these schools were dedicated to instructing young women in the tasks considered proper to a 'good woman and mother' (cooking, childcare, sewing, nursing, etc.). Curiously, the head of the Women's Section, Pilar Primo de Rivera, sister of José Antonio, founder of the Falange, never married nor had children.

Andreu Matamalas Fons, a 51-year-old from Manacor, had kept silent for three decades. A few months ago, he received an unexpected call from a television program. Saved"They suggested," he says, "that I meet up with four old comrades from my military service in Palma. They got us talking about the biggest military desertion in the entire country, which a group of 18 soldiers staged in 1994 to protest the mistreatment we suffered. My brain had completely erased that trauma."

Francesca Palou Fernández, a 63-year-old from Pollença, perfectly remembers the general elections of March 3, 1996, which gave victory to José María Aznar of the People's Party, after 14 years of socialist government under Felipe González. "It was with my family." grandmother My mother was watching TV. When Aznar came on, she said to me in Spanish, "They're coming back, Francisqueta, they're coming back," referring to the right wing. It was the first time I'd ever heard her make a political comment. At that time, there were still many people alive who had suffered under Franco and who were still afraid. On May 5th, Aznar was sworn in as president, and curiously, she died the next day of a heart attack, at 84 years old. Perhaps she couldn't bear the shock that made her relive all her ghosts from the past.

Like an ancient sibyl, 93-year-old Maria Capó Navarro concentrates and begins to sing one of the tunes from her youth, when she worked on the family farm in Sóller. It's her way of evoking a world of connection to the land and precise words that vanished with the boom A tourist attraction in the 1960s. The first person to hear that same tune live 74 years ago was the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. "In 1952," he says, "he saw me perform at an international folklore competition held in the Palma bullring. I sang with my village group, Los Danzadores del Baile de Oro (The Dancers of the Golden Dance). We were one of the prize winners. Apparently, my family liked it a lot and asked to come. I was the only doll." Capó remembers that visit perfectly. "The sun was blazing, and Lomax arrived hunched over and sweltering. He took out his tape recorder and recorded the moment when my father, my grandfather, and I were singing while we threshed grain on the threshing floor with a sledgehammer. He must not have understood a thing. He only knew a little Spanish."

In 1968, the world would be governed. It was the year in which the mobilizations against the Vietnam War, begun 13 years earlier, intensified. In May, in Paris, hundreds of students took to the streets with slogans as resounding as 'Be realistic, demand the impossible'. In Czechoslovakia, Soviet forces repressed an attempt at reform called the 'Prague Spring', which advocated 'socialism with a human face'. The United States, while witnessing the rise of the hippie movement, was dismayed by the assassinations of two defenders of the rights of the Black population, the Reverend Martin Luther King and the Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy – the same tragic end had befallen his brother five years earlier, who had arrived in Mexico. He had machine-gunned university students who were demanding more democracy on the eve of the Olympic Games. At that sporting event, the anti-racist 'Black Power' movement was made visible by two African American athletes who accepted their medals raising a black glove and bowing their heads.

I still don't know what the future holds after the death of Margalida Capellà Soler. An entire generation of Latin and Greek teachers owes her a great debt for her work in popularizing these subjects. Born in Campanet in 1965, as a teenager Margalida was fascinated by what her Greek teacher, Coloma Blanes y Blanes, taught her at the Berenguer de Anoia high school in Inca. Even then, she knew that after finishing her pre-university studies, she would go to Barcelona to study Classical Philology. She didn't succumb to the siren call of her science teachers who, upon recognizing her intellectual versatility, insisted she pursue a degree "with better job prospects."

Today, giants are the protagonists of many civic celebrations. Their origin, however, was religious, within the context of Corpus Christi. The most important ancient feast of Christendom was instituted in Europe in the 13th century. It was set on the calendar 60 days after Easter Sunday to venerate 'the body of Christ,' personified in the consecrated host. Initially, it took place inside churches, but from the 14th century onward, it moved into the streets in the form of a procession. Attention then turned to men in costumes and on stilts who recreated episodes from sacred history with the aim of making it known to the illiterate population. Very soon, those actors became giants. The first one in the West dates from 1424 and was built in Barcelona. It was a replica of Goliath, the Philistine giant whom David, the future king of Israel, captured with a powerful slingshot. It already had the characteristic rigid shell that encases the man wearing it. In the Balearic Islands, the appearance of enormous anthropomorphic figures occurred two centuries later. The first is documented in Sóller in 1630 and the second in Sineu in 1653, the latter already integrated into a local festival, that of Sant Roc. The first Mallorcan giant whose name we know, Puput, dates from 1762 and is from Sant Llorenç. And in Menorca, the oldest giants are those of Maó. They arrived rented in 1934 from Barcelona to liven up the festivities of the Virgen de Gracia – the City Council would eventually buy the figures, which would not be given names (Tomeu and Guida) until 1992. In the Pitiusas Islands, however, the giant tradition was entirely nonexistent.

On November 20, 1975, the day Franco died, there were approximately 5,000 unemployed people in the Balearic Islands who, since the 1973 international oil crisis, felt completely abandoned. Three weeks later, on January 13, 1976, about fifty of them decided to express their discontent with the government of Arias Navarro by locking themselves inside the church of Sant Miquel in Palma. They did so with the complicity of the Bishop of Mallorca, Teodor Úbeda. The following day, they were violently evicted by the police, who were acting on orders from the Civil Governor, Carlos de Meer.

Saint Anthony is the patron saint of animals and, by extension, of farmers. Muro is the town that most proudly celebrates this status of the bearded saint on his feast day (January 17). They do so with elaborate and well-attended blessings, which are the culmination of the great winter festival of the Part Forana region, celebrated with traditional songs, tambourines, and bonfires. Now, the Consell de Mallorca (Island Council of Mallorca) has declared these celebrations an Intangible Cultural Heritage Asset (BIC). Their history can be followed in the book recently published by researcher Damià Payeras Capó, entitled Saint Anthony, popular devotion and festival in Muro. "There is documentary evidence," he says, "that these celebrations have been held in the municipality since the 18th century, although they are surely older. It was the time when all the farmers adorned their altars and took them to be blessed to ensure that they would be protected throughout the year."

In Mallorca, tourists don't just come to soak up the sun on the beaches; they also come to see the native goats. This is known as hunting tourism, a word derived from Greek. kyōn ('ca') alluding to the animal that goes in search of the downed prey. Animal rights groups have always been against it. Guillem Amengual, president of the Progress in Green party, explains the reasons: "It should be prohibited. It's not a hunt to control the goat population, but for simple fun. And the most degrading thing is that it's done for profit and the trophies are displayed on the internet."

In the Taíno language of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), cacique means 'little Indian king'. In our country, it gave its name to the style of governance characteristic of the Bourbon Restoration (1874-1931), which buried the short-lived First Spanish Republic (1873-1874). Under the reigns of Alfonso XII and later his son Alfonso XIII, power was in the hands of a conservative oligarchy that manipulated election results to its advantage (they even went so far as to have the dead vote). In the Balearic Islands, in most towns, the local political bosses from Madrid had their own delegates, who were mainly industrialists and landowners. These delegates, often with the mediation of the Church, forced workers to vote for a specific candidate. Those who refused risked significant reprisals. This is documented by the historian Isabel Peñarrubia, author of the book Political parties facing caciquismo and the national question (1917-1923)Published in 1991. From Mallorca, however, there was one person who dared to break the political hierarchy imposed from the Peninsula to create his own. He was Joan March (1880-1962), a banker from Santa Margalida, in Verga. In 1918, to gain the support of the working classes, he ordered the construction of the Casa del Pueblo (People's House) in Palma, which would be inaugurated in 1924. He also made peasants landowners by selling them plots of land on credit, which he had bought from landowners. By 1919, the Mallorcan magnate had already taken control of the Liberal Party. The party would become the battering ram against the conservatism of Antoni Maura, from Palma, who, between 1903 and 1922, was president of the Spanish government five times. To gain even more power, in 1921 March launched the newspaper The DayIn the parliamentary elections of April 1923, he won a seat. However, four months later, General Miguel Primo de Rivera staged a coup, imposing a dictatorship that lasted nearly seven years.

The origins of nationalism in the Balearic Islands are rooted in the 19th century with the Renaixença, a cultural revival movement born under the influence of English and German Romanticism. One of its leading intellectuals was the bell-maker Miquel dels Sants Oliver. In *La cuestión regional* (1899), he proposed a federalism based on historical regions, in which Mallorca would fit within the Catalan nationality. This hope was dashed by the military uprising of 1936. Throughout almost 40 years of dictatorship, linguistic advocacy became an important tool in the anti-Franco struggle. In 1962, some thirty dissidents, led by the philologist Francesc de Borja Moll, founded the Obra Cultural Balear (OCB), which revived the spirit of the Association for the Culture of Mallorca (1923-1936). In 1967, the politician from Artà, Josep Melià Pericàs, published the influential book The MallorcansIn it, he urged the people to "remedy the defeat we are experiencing today as a nation," alluding to the defeat of the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (1521-1523). That was the largest popular uprising ever seen on the island known as the island of calm. Thousands of islanders died for rebelling against the corrupt and privileged caste of Charles I's administration. In 1715, the defeat would worsen with the Castilianization imposed by the Nueva Planta decrees.

For centuries, women were considered 'factories of God's children.' Not having children was frowned upon. For most, the only possible contraceptive method was choosing the days of their menstrual cycle when they didn't ovulate. And this wasn't always calculated accurately. Then they had to think about the moment of childbirth, which took place at home in less than ideal conditions. Catalina Noguera Garí, 85, remembers that experience very well. She greets us sitting near the brazier in her house in Vilafranca de Bonany, intrigued to know what interest her life might hold. Two of her four children, Maria and Miquel, are with her.

The first victims of the July 1936 coup were not civilians, but military personnel who refused to support their fellow rebels. Among them were two men from Mallorca, Pau Ferrer Madariaga and Josep Rotger Canals. Information is only available about the former. Born in Inca in 1896, Ferrer entered the Salamanca Military Academy at the age of 16 and in 1916 was assigned to Melilla, which had been part of the Spanish protectorate of Morocco since 1912. In 1936, the man from Inca was commander of the Ceuta Light Infantry Battalion. He closely followed the new course that the Second Republic took in February with the victory of the Popular Front. In Madrid, tensions began to rise on July 13 with the assassination of the monarchist deputy José Calvo Sotelo. Former Minister of Finance during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923-1930), Calvo Sotelo was one of the most combative right-wing leaders against the new government of Manuel Azaña. He was assassinated in revenge for the death the day before of Lieutenant José del Castillo, a well-known socialist, at the hands of far-right gunmen. Four days later, everything exploded.