In 1990, the current bishop of Mallorca, Sebastià Taltavull, aged 78 and from Ciutadella, was vicar general of Menorca and a great activist in the environmental movement. "As a delegate for the diocese's youth," he asserts, "I helped organize many demonstrations in defense of the land. I also wrote articles of denunciation for the newspapers. It was clear to me that defending the territory was defending the people, their identity, and their language." At the end of 1973, Menorca led the green struggle in the Archipelago, demanding the protection of the Albufera del Grau, north of Maó, where a mega-urbanization with an exotic name, Shangri-La, had been planned. It was not until 1995, almost two decades later, that the site was declared a Natural Park.

On July 21, 1936, three days after the coup d'état, the Catalan Marina Ginestà Coloma, a 17-year-old communist girl, accidentally became the great icon of the anti-fascist militia woman. She was working as a translator at the Hotel Colón in Barcelona, which had been converted into the headquarters of the PSUC, the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. Her determined pose did not go unnoticed by Juan Guzmán, a Mexican photojournalist of German origin who was in the city to cover the People's Olympiad for the Efe agency, the alternative to the Olympic Games in Hitler's Berlin that, due to the military insurrection, did not take place. Guzmán asked the young woman if he could take a special photo session of her. He had her go up to the building's roof and lent her a rifle. The proposal caught her attention, as she had never touched one before. Due to the circumstances of the moment, however, she agreed to act as a model dressed in a militia uniform. In front of the camera, she exhibited a defiant attitude with the weapon hanging on her back.

The Romani people left India about a thousand years ago, besieged by other cultures. They did so with their own language, Romani. They arrived on the Iberian Peninsula in 1425 thanks to a safe-conduct granted by the monarch Alfonso V of Aragon. At that time, it was mistakenly thought that they came from Egypt, hence the demonym was created from the Latin aegyptanus and which in English would give gypsy. In the time of the Catholic Monarchs (1474-1504), the group was forbidden from practicing a trade, so they had to earn a living as best they could.

The 74-year-old priest from Palma, Jaume Alemany Pasqual, is the delegate of Prison Pastoral Care for Mallorca. He has just returned from spending a week walking the Camino de Santiago with a group of inmates. “It is a pioneering initiative throughout the country,” he says with pride. “I launched it thirty years ago when I took on the position, during the time of Bishop Teodor Úbeda. Back then, the Palma prison was located in the Cas Capiscol neighborhood, which closed in 1999 to move to a new complex on the Valldemossa road. The Ministry of the Interior looked favorably upon the Camino de Santiago project, and today it is already part of the reintegration program of many penitentiary centers. The dozen people who come with me have been selected for their good behavior.”

In 2015, having retired as a hotel manager, 75-year-old Guillem Garau Amorós from Artà felt the need to preserve the pre-touristic Mallorca of his childhood in the book A foravila antany (El Tall Editorial). “With a terrible heartache –he says– I interviewed shepherds, estate owners, sharecroppers, and other witnesses to a world that was disappearing”. One of these witnesses to lost words, tools, customs, and trades was his mother, Magdalena Amorós Ginard, who today, at 104 years old, still keeps a very clear head. “I –she recalls under her son's attentive gaze– was born in 1921 in Artà, in the countryside, at the Can Capblanc estate. I am the eldest daughter. My parents were farmers”.

During the Second Republic, the Communist International, known as the Comintern in Russian, sent a mysterious figure to Spain who played a prominent role in the Balearic Islands. His trajectory can be traced in the book by historian David Ginard titled Heriberto Quiñones y el movimiento comunista en España(1931-1942), published in 2000 by Documenta Balear. “Of him –he asserts–, Dolores Ibárruri, the leader of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), said that ‘everything, even the name, was false’”.

The death of Franco in November 1975 awakened many hopes. In the Balearic Islands, the PSI (Socialist Party of the Islands) was already founded in 1976. One of its founders was the sociologist from Palma, Antoni Tarabini, now 82 years old. “It was,” he says, “a very plural party. It was, however, more federalist than nationalist. A year later, ahead of the first general elections scheduled for June 1977, two other colleagues and I were summoned to Madrid. The PSOE leadership proposed that we form a federated party like the PSC of Catalonia, led by Joan Raventós. I agreed, even though I knew we would lose the elections.”

In 1892, the Menorcan Francesc F. Andreu promoted the first power plant in the Balearic Islands, Eléctrica Mahonesa. The first one in Mallorca was inaugurated in Alaró in 1901 through the initiative of the brothers Gaspar and Josep Perelló Pol, local soap and oil merchants. In 1902, electricity arrived in Manacor with the company Servera i Melis. And in 1903 it would be Palma's turn, thanks to the Compañía Mallorquina de Electricidad, which built a power plant near the Can Pere Antoni beach designed by the architect Gaspar Bennàssar. As pioneering infrastructures, there were also the hydroelectric power plants of Gorg Blau (1905) and La Costera (1908). In Ibiza, the first power plant dates back to 1907 and its architect was the businessman Abel Matutes Torres.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Balearic Islands had nearly 370,000 inhabitants. Of these, about 300,000 lived in Mallorca and about 100,000 were gathered in Palma. They were one of the communities with the highest illiteracy rate. 77% of the population could neither read nor write – in the case of women, the figure was higher. It was from 1926 onwards, with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, that a plan for the construction of educational infrastructure was devised to reverse the situation. The majority of those that existed at the time occupied old buildings reused as schools and had pitiful conditions of light and sanitation.

At 82 years old, Joan Pons Gost from sa Pobla looks at the calluses on his hands and reviews his five decades working as a stonemason. “I learned the trade in 1957, at 13 years old. I had lost my father when I was very young, and to help the family economy, I started as a laborer in different renovations that were being done within the same municipality of sa Pobla. With a cart, they sent me up and down to fetch material. Later they taught me how to make cement and lay blocks.”

For 60 years, the gigantic tower of a cement factory has presided over the heart of Raiguer, at the foot of the Tramuntana mountain range. The emblematic industrial complex of Lloseta recalls the smoky nuclear power plant of Springfield, where the character of Homer from the mythical animated series The Simpsons works. The inauguration of the infrastructure in August 1966 was celebrated as a great milestone of progress. The same had happened in 1958 with the commissioning of the Alcanada (Alcúdia) thermal power plant, with which Gesa brought electricity to a large part of Mallorca – in 1981 it would be taken over by the Murterar plant, located about 10 kilometers away, near l'Albufera.

The paradigm shift that the tourism boom caused in Spanish agrarian society is reflected in the film El turismo es un gran invento (1968). Its protagonist (Paco Martínez Soria) is the mayor of a small Aragonese village who wants to turn the municipality into a large modern tourist center. His role model is Marbella, where he travels with his secretary (José Luis López Vázquez) to take notes. Both are amazed not only by the bikini-clad Swedish women, but also by the monumental hotels on the Andalusian coast, the great icon of progress at the time.

In Mallorca, one of the great allies of the boom of tourism were the so-called tourist songs. The lyrics praised the island's scenic wonders. The seed was already sown in the 40s of the 20th century by the Majorcan musician Pere Bonet Mir (1917-2002), better known as Bonet de Sant Pere and professionally Bonet de San Pedro. In the midst of the post-war period, in the song Bajo el cielo de Palma, he proclaimed to the four winds “paisajes lindos tiene Mallorca”. He would deal with the same theme in Un viejo hogar en la isla, Juntito al mar, Cala d’Or, and Canto a Mallorca. These utterly naive compositions contrasted with the famous song Raska-yú, which in 1943 the island artist wrote as a parody of death in times of great misery (Franco's regime even censored it, suspecting it contained an implicit criticism of the dictatorship).

The beginnings of humanity were marked by the Sun. People worked 'from sunrise to sunset' to earn a living, a word that derives from the Latin adjective 'diurnus' ('daily'). As they became sedentary, various ancient cultures set out to follow the movements of the king of the stars in order to organize themselves better. They did this by measuring their shadows with a stick stuck in the ground. In Greek, this stick would be known as a gnomon, from which comes the term 'gnomonics', the art of building sundials. Thus began the process of domesticating time. For us, that astronomical invention would arrive with the name of clock also from another Greek word, 'horológion' ('hour indicator').

When you ask AI to create a drawing about Mallorca 50 years from now, the result is a polluted island full of buildings, much like Hong Kong. In 1978, when only natural intelligence existed, this same scenario was already described by the Palma-based cartoonist Pere Joan Riera, better known as Pere Joan. “I–he recalls today in his seventies–was 22 years old and still studying in Barcelona. One day Basilio Baltasar came to see me. He was one of the leaders of the anarcho-ecological formation Terra i Llibertat, which the previous summer, in July 1977, had occupied the small island of Dragonera near Andratx to prevent its development. He asked me for a poster that would reflect the direction Mallorca would take if the construction fever, initiated with the boom of tourism, was not stopped”.

Tomeu Penya, 77, speaks candidly to ARA Balears: “I want my current state of mind to be very clear. I am very sad. As a young man, I would never have imagined that Mallorca's future would be like it is now, an island full of cement and tourists, with saturated roads and residents who cannot afford housing. For this summer's concerts, I'm considering singing ‘Trenc’ again, which I dedicated four decades ago to the emblematic beach of Campos that now, unfortunately, is once again under threat”. ‘Trenc’ was the debut of the country singer from Vilafranca as an environmental activist at 35 years old. It is one of the most outstanding songs from his third album Coverbos (1984).

In the Balearic Islands, the Civil War is full of small great stories that would deserve a good film. One is the odyssey starring the Mahón musician Deseado Mercadal Bagur. The Alicante journalist Tomás Andújar, delegate of the Efe agency in the Archipelago, has just rescued him from oblivion in the book "Water is running out. The exile of Deseado Mercadal, edited by Dolmen. He has done it based on the testimony of Celeste, the granddaughter of the Minorcan, and on the two books she wrote years after returning to her island: I was in Kenadza: nine years of exile (1983) and The Civil War in Menorca 1936-1939: historical account of a witness (1994).

At the beginning of 2011, the 26-year-old graphic designer from Palma, Jaume Vich, was in charge of coordinating the successful lipdub campaign ‘Mallorca m’agrada’ by Obra Cultural Balear (OCB). Back in 2008, the entity had launched the ‘Cafè per la Llengua’ campaign with well-known faces such as that of tennis player Rafel Nadal. According to the official statement, the new initiative aimed to “promote the moral rearmament of people who love Mallorca”. Many towns became involved in the creation of collective videos that claimed their own identity elements. In June, that boost of self-esteem would turn into frustration. The popular José Ramón Bauzá won the regional elections. His four-year term would be characterized by a clearly hostile attitude towards the Catalan language and culture.

In the Mallorca of late Francoism, the revolution began in La Calatrava, a small neighborhood of Palma located between the cathedral and the Baluard del Príncep. Antoni Rotger Martínez was its alma mater. “I no longer recognize – he laments at 80 years old – the streets where I grew up and played with other children. There are tourists everywhere and, because of gentrification, many of my former comrades in struggle have had to leave. This was a rundown, working-class neighborhood, and now it is prey to the real estate speculation that the entire island suffers from”. In 1975, this man from Calatrava, of the 'pedra picada' style, was 32 years old and, with Franco agonizing, he already led the neighborhood mobilization against the construction of a large parking lot for tourist coaches in front of the Cathedral. The cry of protest was ‘Park YES, parking NO’. Due to that pressure, in May 1976 the City Council rectified and gave way to a competition of ideas for the design of the current Parc de la Mar, which was inaugurated in 1984.

It has been a long time since the Balearic Islands became a consumer postcard. At Palma airport, you can find a 'clever' advertisement from a car rental company that says: 'It’s pronounced ‘MA-YOUR-CAR’’. Three weeks ago, on the facade of the complex, there was also a giant advertising banner from the German financial group Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. It promoted Wero, an instant payment application similar to Bizum. The slogan used had a double meaning: 'Was auf Malle passiert, wird auf Malle beglichen’ (‘what happens in Mallorca, is settled in Mallorca’). The phrase refers to the famous slogan of the US 'sin city': 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas'. 'Malle’, the substitute for Vegas, is a very common colloquial term in Germany to refer to Mallorca as an emblem of excess tourism.