The group of companies on which the Mallorca Live brand is based, which includes, in addition to the festival, the Mallorca Live Nights and Es Jardí series, has received more than three and a half million euros from public entities in the last five years. Of these, more than two-thirds since 2023. Among the different contributions, which include sponsorships and grants, one of the most notable is that of AETIB, the Balearic Islands Tourism Strategy Agency, which since 2023 has allocated around half a million public euros to the Mallorca Live festival within the framework of a call for sponsorships for major cultural and sporting events.

At Mallorca Live, in reality, the music is secondary. This sensation, which is increasingly repeated when talking about festivals, becomes a certainty in the island case if one analyzes the financial architecture that sustains the events linked to the Mallorca Live brand. Above all, a festival that in two weeks will celebrate its ninth edition, rebranded as Mallorca Live Occident. The entry of new sponsors and partners into the new promoter La Isla & Co is the latest step in a path full of countless commercial movements that are difficult to follow and, above all, to decipher: the tip of the iceberg of a network of dozens of companies that move millions of public euros to turn culture into a financial asset.

While the Teatre i l’Auditori of Manacor face an important change of era with the change of manager, after almost 40 years with Tomeu Amengual at the helm, the Teatre Principal of Inca consolidates an audience that, since its inauguration in 2021, has not stopped growing. If the 2022-2023 season closed with 28,000 attendees, the 2024-2025 season ended with more than 34,000. Many of them, moreover, from Inca. “More and more people from Inca are coming to the theater, trusting the proposals we offer, but since the audience from the rest of the island is also growing, the percentages mean that the increase in local audience, which was one of the main objectives to achieve, is blurred”, explains Miquel Àngel Raió, director of the center since September 2022. “Of course, we would like to achieve a model like Manacor’s, with more than 50% local audience, but now we are operating with different percentages. We have 30% of people from Inca and 70% of people from the rest of Mallorca”, he specifies.

I will go to the Plaza Mayor in Palma to experience a unique, historic, and who knows if unrepeatable moment: the simultaneous singing of La Balanguera throughout Mallorca, organized by the Obra Cultural Balear as part of the centenary of Joan Alcover's death. The event will also be doubly extraordinary, as it will take place exactly one hundred years after the premiere of the musical version of the poem, which was first performed on May 29, 1926, at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona. Friday, May 29, at 8 p.m.

Of the vast majority of writers, only the published works are known. This means not only those that found a publishing house to launch them onto the market, but, above all, those that the authors themselves considered finished, as good. But in most careers, many are left by the wayside for very diverse reasons: authors who lose interest in the topic they are working on, the emergence of new projects that turn out to be more seductive, urgent, or timely, and the daily complications that surround the writing process, which can have as much to do with inspiration as with the conditions of the jobs with which the writing profession is normally combined. Eight island authors share with ARA Balears the texts they are currently working on, when many of them do not even have a publication date secured. These are the books we may not know if we will read, but that they are all writing now.

Among the thousands of new releases that will arrive in bookstores in the coming months – more than 85,000 books are published each year in Spain, the vast majority in print, according to data from the Federation of Publishers' Guilds – there are numerous by Balearic authors. And a very important part of those that will be published before the end of the year will be found in the non-fiction section. This is the case of the new book by writer Lucia Pietrelli, with the provisional title Vestiges. Labyrinth with a father with flames. It will be after the summer that Adia Edicions will publish this literary essay where, from the personal experience of her father's death, Pietrelli explores, investigates, and fabricates on the theme of death through mythology.

One more summer, the cultural agendas of the Balearic Islands multiply their capacity between June and September with the arrival of dozens of cycles and festivals that lead to hundreds of concerts that, with so much competition, do not always achieve the expected diffusion and often end up buried by the avalanche of parallel proposals. We have asked performers, critics, and music managers to help us make a selection of essential live performances. The selection that has emerged goes through Mallorca, Menorca, and Formentera – in Ibiza, electronics monopolizes the summer musical programming – and includes proposals of all styles and for all tastes, from Celtas Cortos to La Zowi, passing through Antònia Font and the Symphony.

Four years have passed since the General Directorate of Culture of the Government, headed at that time by Catalina Solivellas, and the Ministry of Culture announced an ambitious plan to renovate the main state-owned cultural facilities in the Balearic Islands. The State had committed to investing up to eight million euros in four different venues –the Museum of Mallorca, the Can Sales library in Palma, the Ethnographic Museum of Muro, and the Dalt Vila headquarters of the Archaeological Museum of Ibiza and Formentera (MAEF)– within a period of precisely four years. The forecast, therefore, was that at the beginning of 2026 all these interventions would have been completed.

Guillem Llorens (Ciutadella, 1993) says that when he started thinking about shaping his own musical project, he wanted the name to reflect his intentions: it was a humble and simple project, connected to his origins and to the rural life of Menorca, but it also had to connect with the musical movements that influenced him aesthetically, especially reggae. “That’s why I chose the adjective 'rudimentari', which I found defined it perfectly, and I changed the first 'i' to a 'y', which connects me with the rude boys of Jamaica, a social movement that also has an important musical component,” he explains. The last thing he expected at that time, however, was that the first song he would release as Rudymentari would suddenly become an anthem for thousands of people. The song, 'Som', has accumulated more than 750,000 streams on Spotify and reflects, like the project's name, the author's intentions. “We are non-existent, lost by the current, / pirates on the high seas, adrift and against the wind. [...] We are sailors, we are peasants, incandescent poetry. / We are a song without end, / an unfinished gloss / that speaks of a past, a future, and a present”.

After more than two years of work, and more than a decade since the disappearance of Palma Photo, Mallorca PhotoFest has been born, a festival promoted by the association Art Palma Contemporani that will fill, until next August, about thirty exhibition venues throughout the island with contemporary photography proposals. “The long-term objective is to turn it into a benchmark where we can reflect on images, where we can foster critical thinking through photography. 100 years ago it was an unquestionable source of authority and trust, and now it is used to distort reality. We think it is necessary to reflect on this, that images should also serve us to draw conclusions about the world we live in”. This is how Xavier Fiol, director of the festival, defines it, who, together with the general coordinator, Montserrat Torras, and with the advice of Xisco Bonnín and Horacio Fernández, has shaped a program that includes exhibitions, talks, guided tours, a reading club dedicated to photobooks, and a film series that will take place during May at the Teatre Sa Societat in Calvià.

It is just another almond tree. One of the thousands scattered across the Mallorcan geography that have defined its landscape and, therefore, its culture and identity for centuries. Specifically, since the end of the 18th century. Filtered through Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955), however, it is many other things, without ceasing to be, precisely, an almond tree. It is a sculptural figure, which alludes to a human presence, perhaps the naked body of a woman, and at the same time it is a kind of zombie, an anonymous and forgotten vestige: a part of the remains left by the Xylella fastidiosa catastrophe in the Mallorcan countryside. It is a relic, and also a prophecy, which is difficult to distinguish whether it comes from the dream world or the real one.

The rose that the artist Pep Llambias (Alaró, 1954) has made for ARA Balears and that will be at all the Sant Jordi stalls in Palma is not, by any means, the first one he has made. The thorn of a rose, in fact, was one of the main protagonists of the exhibition with which he filled the Llotja de Palma 20 years ago. “I am very attracted to the duality it symbolizes”, he acknowledges, and states that he has some planted in the yard of his house.

That Saint George has taken flight in recent years is a fact that is noted every April 23 in Palma. If last year two caparrots were premiered there, confirming its character as a traditional festival, this year the festival has begun almost a week earlier with a prior fair in the neighborhoods of the City. Nevertheless, the momentum of Book Day has also been felt outside Palma: throughout the Balearic Islands, numerous bookstores are preparing since February for one of the most important days of the year.

Gemma Camps (Palma, 1994) will fulfill a dream on April 24 and 25. Or close a circle. Or both at the same time. It will be then when she returns to the Teatre Principal in Palma, where she says she fell in love with opera. Now, with the commission to direct one. “I perfectly remember the first one I saw there, sitting in the stalls at 15 years old. It was La Bohème, and I knew immediately that I wanted to dedicate myself to this,” she admits. Sixteen years later, she will be in charge of the musical direction of La veu humana, a production that is part of the 40th edition of the Principal's Opera Season. With stage direction by Roberto G. Alonso and Marga Cloquell as soprano, it is expected to be one of the premieres of the season. It certainly will be for Camps, who at 31 years old has become one of the prominent figures in musical direction, a field where even now women, and much more so young women, are an exception. According to the most comprehensive study to date on this issue, by the SGAE Foundation, women directors did not reach 8% in 2019.

“I write to you / because I seek you. / And because I want to kill you”. “They are mistaken: / darkness hides nothing. / It makes everything shine”. “I will tear out my eyes / so as not to see / that you are looking”. These are just three of the fragments with which the journalist and collaborator of l’ARA Balears Clàudia Darder (sa Pobla, 1994) debuts as a poet with Com una cussa (Adia Edicions), a poetry book with which she was a finalist for the Salvador Iborra award. In one of the epilogues, the poet Joan Tomàs Martínez Grimalt defines it as “a piece of hot meat that still beats”.

It has been one of the questions the sector has asked itself since the Palma City Council announced its intention to bid for the title of European Capital of Culture: how will a title designed to attract more visitors to such a tourist city as Palma benefit the cultural fabric? And now the international experts who have evaluated the project have answered it: “It is clear that Palma is not looking to increase the volume of cultural programming or attract more visitors, as in both cases they have enough [...] and even understanding the local circumstances and needs, the jury wonders if the title of European Capital of Culture is the best platform to advance the city's aspirations.” This is how the report, made public this Monday, concludes, with which the committee, chaired by Tanja Mlaker, argues the decision to discard Palma from the candidates to obtain the title for the year 2031.

It was February 18, 2022, when the then Ministry of European Funds, University and Culture, headed by Miquel Company, announced an investment of more than 8 million euros by the Ministry of Culture and Sport in the reforms of different state-owned museums and cultural institutions in the Balearic Islands. Among them was the “integral architectural and museographic rehabilitation” of the Ethnological Museum of Muro, which for years had suffered from significant deficiencies that hindered its operation. “At this time, the drafting of the architectural project has already been put out to tender, with works scheduled to begin in 2023”, it was stated in the press release published on the Govern's website on that same day in 2022, that is, more than four years ago.

This March, singer Júlia Colom published a tune on social media that is not part of any of the albums she has released to date. It is a song written by her and her brother Martí, in which she speaks of a Mallorca that cries, of historic records, and of what, Colom says, we all know we have to do when the day gets longer: “stay inside at home so as not to bother them too much”. In a video that begins with a close-up of her and ends with an image of a hotel on the Majorcan coast, the singer from Valldemossa states: “Mallorca, you have been punished, / for getting the maximum profit: / a seasonal product / that now lasts all year round”. It is just the latest example of a whole series of songs with which island musicians and singers have demonstrated against mass tourism in recent years.

Between an essay and some memoirs and halfway between an allegation and a question, with as much rigor as personal perspective. This is the ground where Llucia Ramis's (Palma, 1977) latest book, Un metro cuadrado, written and published thanks to the No Ficció award from Libros del Asteroide, is situated. In it, the return to all the houses where she has lived serves the writer and journalist as a common thread to delve into all the ingredients with which the current housing crisis has been cooked. The Catalan version, published by Anagrama, will go on sale on May 13.

Among the Spanish cities still vying to be European Capital of Culture 2031 – Cáceres, Las Palmas, Oviedo and Granada – is the project promoted by the Palma City Council, under the slogan Mediterranean in motionAlthough Palma 2031 has been eliminated, there are numerous differences. The Councilor for Culture of Corte, Javier Bonet, pointed to two of them at the press conference he gave on March 18, five days after learning that Palma 2031 would not advance to the next phase. The first difference concerned experience and time. "All four had applied for the title on previous occasions," explained the deputy mayor, "and that means they have been working for 10 to 15 years." The other major difference, according to Bonet, is the budget allocated to the competition so far.