This summer I noticed that young people go to the sea with a chair. And I'm not referring to young people who have ceased to be young, but to very young people. Some carry a deck chair, but most, a folding chair. You see them with the chair, but also with the umbrella, a large cooler, a basket with the picnic, lunch boxes and with clothes hanging from the umbrella. They set up on the rocks or on the beach as if they were at home. I like the attitude.

There are many ways to explain how we have grown in the Balearic Islands. Mercè Pinya's report on archaeological heritage besieged, swallowed, or boxed in by construction shows one of the most explicit: we have come to disregard what we simultaneously declared an Asset of Cultural Interest. That is to say, heritage that, by definition, has a mandate for protection, including its surroundings.

There are events that last only a few minutes, but are lived for months. The wait is also part of the experience. Sometimes, even more than the moment itself. That's why great celebrations don't start on the day they arrive but much earlier. They are prepared, shared, fed by expectations. Institutions know this very well, and that's why every New Year's Eve, on Saint John's Day, during patron saint festivals, or on so many other significant dates, they organize activities so that the celebration becomes a collective experience.

What happens when a protest is so justified and so broad, cross-cutting, and peaceful that it cannot be discredited by its own actions? Perhaps what we are seeing with the police actions against the movement crying out in Mallorca against tourist overcrowding and for the right to housing happens.

We already know what these people want, as we know from Maria del Mar Bonet's great song denouncing fascism, which in these times resonates in our heads too often. Now they want the photograph of a young woman with a hijab to weigh more than an academic record, for prejudice to prevail over merit, and to turn a university graduation into an identity battleground, because that is where they feel most comfortable, stirring up fears even if they are the most unfounded.

I grew up with the beach in front of me. Before I knew almost anything about the world, I already knew how to hold a crab net from my grandfather, how the wet sand clung to my feet (also the varnish) and how the castles we built with my mother and my brother, with a bucket or just with our hands, had minutes counted before the sea took them away. Later came the long summers of adolescence: hours and hours with friends sitting on the sand doing nothing more than chatting, laughing and jumping again from that rock we saw from our house. Mornings, afternoons and evenings. The beach was our natural place. We didn't go there, we lived there.

The Mariantònia Oliver Company has just received the Toni Catany ARA Balears Culture award, but the person it is named after has been paving the way through dance for over three decades, in the Balearics and abroad. Mariantònia Oliver, an essential choreographer and dancer, has turned the body into a language and dance into a tool for thought and social transformation.

I like Joan Cortés because he is an artist who doesn't need to speak loudly to be heard. At a time when art often seems to compete for attention at any cost, he continues to work with discretion, with an honesty that is not a strategy or a pose, but a way of being. Those who know him know that the man and the artist share attributes such as serenity, coherence, neatness, and fidelity to what he believes in.

The linguist Joan Veny i Clar (Campos, 1932) has received the highest academic and civil distinctions. Among other recognitions, he is Doctor Honoris Causa by the universities of Valencia and the Balearic Islands; he has received the Medal of Honor from the Xarxa Vives d’Universitats, the Creu de Sant Jordi, the prize of Honor of Catalan Letters, the Pompeu Fabra prize, the Gold Medal of the Balearic Islands. He is also an Illustrious Son of Campos (where the Infant and Primary school also bears his name). Now that the great work for the Catalan language, the Linguistic Atlas of the Catalan Domain, has been completed, the dialectologist has received the Special ARA Balears prize.

If they don't explain to me what it means, what advantages it has, and what it can mean to live in a large metropolitan area of Palma, right off the bat, I don't want to live there. I don't want to be part of it.

ARCA has publicly clarified that it is not responsible for the ultras having turned the fascist monument of La Feixina into their sentimental altar. And the truth is that it is difficult to decide whether it is more extraordinary that a heritage entity considers it necessary to justify itself or that it states –as it has done in ARA Balears– that “preserving La Feixina has not contributed to it becoming the ‘ultra’ meeting point”. Perhaps the extreme part of the extreme right would continue for centuries and centuries celebrating in front of nothing. I don't see it.

Marga Prohens' Government will create a Baccalaureate of Excellence –a name chosen by themselves, with all the ideological baggage it implies– and will establish a specific institute to gather the “excellent” students there. It is hard to find a more anti-pedagogical initiative. Or worse still, a more profoundly reactionary one.

The history of the art trade in Mallorca cannot be understood without the emergence, at the end of the 19th century, of a society that turned painting into an object of desire and a business capable of moving significant capital. We are talking about the Foment de la Pintura i Escultura, a social entity active in the city between 1876 and 1904, but about which little has been said until now. The restorer of works of art José María Pardo Falcón now reconstructs that collective adventure in the essay-book "La sociedad del Fomento de la Pintura y Escultura. Palma 1876-1904", edited by Ensiola and with a prologue by professor Catalina Cantarellas. The volume will be presented on May 7 at the Quars bookstore, in a conversation between the author and Cantarellas herself.