I spent my Erasmus year in London denying I was Italian and answering the same questions at the pub where I worked: no, I didn't understand what my Prime Minister was doing in the Azores photo; the euro had made everything more expensive for us (they nodded proudly); Aserejé was just the phonetic adaptation into English of a disco-rap song and – to their disappointment – it meant nothing; and no, I didn't frequent Magaluf. For the customers to whom I served pints and shots, pronouncing Magaluf lit up their faces. For me, it was just a place that was very far from all the nightlife areas of Palma and whose appeal was eating ecstasy pills on a Saturday night at BCM. I'd say I hadn't even set foot there. Therefore, I limited myself to nodding with a smile while returning their change in pounds from their Foster's or Carling. I didn't want to add another disappointment to that of the Ketchup, famous at the time at Tony Blair's level.

The Detailed Urban Plan (POD) of Palma still has no timetable two years after municipal technicians took over its drafting. It is a fundamental instrument for interpreting and applying Palma's General Plan, approved by the Pact shortly before losing the elections. Cort assures that the document handed over by Territorios y Ciudad “did not meet the necessary conditions for its approval,” but does not specify what deficiencies it had, what work has been done since April 2024, or what remains to be completed.

At the time when the Moon had already begun to eclipse the Sun, a pair of German posers were clashing shopping bags from the golden mile stores and four Jehovah's Witnesses were waiting in vain to proselytize. As if an exceptional astronomical phenomenon were not about to occur. On the way to the terraces of Es Baluard, a street vendor was placing, bored, his straw hats. "Do you have glasses?". He shook his head because he knew they were asking him for the eclipse ones. Already at the top of the museum, a foreign couple had decided to cut in half the only pair they had and their children were looking at the Sun with one eye and covering the other with a hand.

Maria Joaquina Ferrer is no longer the Director General of Costs and Littoral, but a good part of the team that worked with her does not seem willing to let her dismissal be read only in terms of a management crisis. Twenty-one officials from the agency have signed a letter addressed to the Minister of the Sea and the Water Cycle, Juan Manuel Lafuente, in which they express disagreement with the Government's decision and claim the way Ferrer has led the agency in recent months.

Two years after the Palma City Council rescinded the contract with Territorios y Ciudad to draft the Detailed Planning Plan (POD), the conflict remains open in the courts. The company claims 348,794.91 euros from Cort, VAT included, for work it claims to have carried out and not been paid for. The company calculates that the ruling on the contractual resolution could arrive during the first quarter of 2027.

The facade of the Llucmajor City Hall began this Tuesday with a mountain of garbage bags in front of the door. Household waste, cardboard, and other debris were piled up at the entrance of the Town Hall early in the day in an image that encapsulates the main problem that has marked this legislature: a collection crisis that has been dragging on for years, worsened in recent months and which remains unresolved.

The immense shade of a mulberry tree protects Jan Gómez from a late June sun that tastes like August. He gets up from his chair, takes off his straw hat with a green and white ribbon –“the first thing I found at the flea market,” he says–, straightens the t-shirt that says Carpe Diem and picks up a stick that belonged to his grandfather. To the left of the mulberry tree, the onions in the garden have bent stems, so they can finish fattening up, the small tomatoes peek out between the canes and the sunflowers already bow their heads, heavy with seeds. To the right, the pen. About twenty goats emerge from it in a flurry and cross the sown field as soon as Jan opens the latch. They sniff with their snouts the grain that has been scattered on the dry earth after the harvest.

For years, Antonio Turiel (León, 1970), a physicist, mathematician, and CSIC researcher, has been warning that the global economic model is approaching the planet's energy limits. The war between Israel and Iran and the tension in the Strait of Hormuz, he assures, have only accelerated a crisis he considers inevitable. Invited to Mallorca by the No Normal movement, he argues that the Balearic Islands must prepare for a future with less oil, less tourism, and greater social vulnerability. "The worst thing would be to continue thinking that everything will go back to how it was," he warns.

Juan Carlos I has returned to Mallorca and the Marivent Palace seven years later. The emeritus king took advantage of a lightning visit to the island to enter on Sunday the residence that concentrated the family, political, and social life of the Spanish monarchy for decades. Before that, he celebrated at the Flanigan restaurant the 80th birthday of its owner, Miguel Arias, an old friend from the times when the establishment was known as 'the King's restaurant', as reported by La Vanguardia.The monarch had arrived on Sunday morning in Mallorca on a private plane from Geneva. The trip coincided with the departure of Felipe VI, who had left the island to visit, along with Queen Letizia, the neighbors displaced by the fires and housed in a sports center in Villamanta, Madrid. That same evening, the monarch traveled to Lima to attend the inauguration of the new president of Peru, Keiko Fujimori.

The Balearic left must be a prodigious political force. It has been in opposition for more than three years and still manages to collapse roads, increase housing costs, saturate beaches, and fill the airport. There are governments that barely leave a legacy. The Pact, on the other hand, seems to have discovered the secret of political immortality.

The Mallorcan Business Circle (CMN) and the Mare Mar Foundation have requested the Consell de Mallorca for the dismissal of the managing director of the Maritime Museum of Mallorca, Albert Forés. The two entities, promoters of the original Museum project, denounce a management marked by "paralysis", "inefficiency" and "alleged irregularities", while the institution defends that it complies with the Consortium's objectives and claims the work done in recent years.

The Less Tourism, More Life action manual is a mistake. It shifts the focus. It has managed to get people talking about violence instead of housing; about hammers, instead of impossible rents, and about activists, instead of a government incapable of offering solutions. Furthermore, it is childish: if you intend to surprise someone, don't hand them the instruction manual beforehand.

The most enthusiastic of the group sends us advertising for throwback parties to the WhatsApp group in the hope of exciting us and forcing us to see each other. I rejected one because the ad used songs by El Canto del Loco and La Oreja de Van Gogh. I have no masochistic inclinations. There are those who refuse to attend "remember" sessions. The commodification of nostalgia is exhausting, and it's as if our parents were getting together to dance to songs by Karina or Los Diablos, like on that joint tour of old glories they called Mágicos 60. With the adolescent insolence of back then, it seemed like something for old people. Now, a faction of friends is making a plan that invites us to live on the edge: an afternoon snack on a Sunday at ten in the morning.

The ship that will transport waste from Ibiza to Mallorca is already sailing from the Canary Islands to the Balearic Islands. The Al Andalus, the vessel that Baleària has assigned to transport the waste to the Son Reus incinerator, will arrive in Ibiza in the coming days, according to maritime tracking data consulted by ARA Balears.

The first time Marco Magazzu (Rome, 1990) swam in Thailand next to giant manta rays, he almost drowned. “Seriously, I started crying. I would do the same if I had the luck to find sharks in their natural habitat, in the open sea. I would do it out of emotion, not fear!”, he confesses. A marine biologist with a master's degree in Aquatic Ecology, he is part of the technical team of the Palma Aquarium Foundation, responsible for the Balearic Islands' cetacean stranding network. He also takes care of and rehabilitates turtles, but today he is here to debunk Spielberg and correct the bad reputation of sharks.

I'm arriving mid-afternoon and the first thing that crossed my mind was that it was the anniversary of my first communion, an absolutely inconsequential date in my biography. Another day, while I'm looking for a headline for a news story, I remember the anniversary of a schoolmate who was never my friend. I suppose it stuck with me when he was handing out Sugus to celebrate it, long before playgrounds existed. As irrelevant as my Eucharist.