One day, at school, she told off a nun who had hit her little sister. She was, and still is, “very protective, defiant and justice-seeking”. She was a girl “who made herself noticed”, according to the one protected, the little one, Catalina. We are talking about Maria Antònia Oliver, president of the Memòria de Mallorca organization, who is the second of three siblings. The older brother is Francisco.

After more than two months and more than a dozen concerts, the La Lluna en Vers festival of the Fundació Mallorca Literària comes to an end this Friday with a theatrical show that invokes one of the great names of Catalan poetry: Jacint Verdaguer. Playwright and theatre director Ferran Dordal Lalueza and actor Albert Prat have co-created this piece practically "by accident", they say; it can be seen on Friday, September 4, at 9 pm, at the Garden of the Casa Llorenç Villalonga in Binissalem.

Among his references were Subcomandante Marcos and Malcolm X, one of his idols when he was young. He played basketball, but he has also been practicing less conventional sports for years, such as boxing. He is a fan of Ismael Serrano. He studied Catalan Philology at the UIB and then Anthropology at the UB. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, students at the Ramon Llull building at the UIB filled the walls with graffiti against the war. Near the main stairs, one can still be seen. It was made by David Pujol, now a Catalan teacher and candidate for MÉS per Palma for the mayoralty of Ciutat. "Like the others, they wanted to cover it up, but it can still be distinguished." Says Antoni Trobat, David's friend since their university years.

Karmento is the artistic name of Carmen Toledo Sánchez, a neofolklore singer-songwriter originally from Bogarra, a village in the Albacete part of Sierra de Segura. She began making music when she was over thirty, in an "amateur" way, as she explains. That was more than a decade ago: in 2015 she released the album Mudanzas}; in 2020, Este devenir, considered one of the best Root Music albums of that year. In 2024 she releases the album La Serrana, which wins the Music Academy award for Best Folk Album. It is an album, La Serrana, born from research and, subsequently, a dialogue with the place of belonging, memory, and relationships with the community. Karmento's La Mancha folklore will be heard in Montuïri this Saturday, August 29th, within the framework of the La Lluna en Vers festival of the Fundació Mallorca Literària. 

In Sant Lluís (Menorca) lived Mrs. Van Oppen, daughter of a British military officer stationed in India when it was still under the direct control of the British Crown. She gave private English lessons which, beyond grammatical and phonetic foundations, "were filled with landscapes, experiences, and lifestyles" that far surpassed the daily experience and canons of Western culture known until then by two Menorcan children born in the late 60s. "She encouraged exploring the unknown, opening up to new frontiers, accepting diversity. This experience, undoubtedly, would fuel our interest in opening up to new horizons. Alicia often comments that these English sessions were the seed of her later scientific vocation". Alicia is Alicia Sintes (1969), professor and doctor in Physics from the UIB; and her brother, Tomàs Sintes (1966), also a professor and doctor in Physics from the UIB, tells us about it.

In 2024, twenty years after launching the musical project Mazoni, the captain behind it, Jaume Pla (la Bisbal d’Empordà, 1977), decided he had to stop. The alarms were clear: “Before some concerts, I thought that if it rained and I got paid, it was fine. That thought scared me. A musician can't not want to go out and play,” he says in a conversation with ARA Balears. This week he has two concerts in the Islands to present the album he released last September, Banderes per daltònics, a return to the most pop sounds in the project's history: on Thursday, August 20, he will be at Jazzbah in Ciutadella; on Friday, August 21, he will present the album in Santanyí (in the courtyard of Col·legi Bisbe Verger), in a concert that is part of the summer festival program of the Fundació Mallorca Literària, La Lluna en Vers. They will be concerts with the whole band: “The last few times I've come to Mallorca, I've been solo. I'm very excited to come with the whole group to do these two concerts, for them to be energetic and to find that feeling that you seem to be floating when you make music. I think it's an album that is enjoyed more as a group”.

“He is a person who illuminates your thoughts. For me, he is my spiritual father, fundamental in my life. He is one of those great men of whom one is born every century. A universal man who vibrates and makes others vibrate, and who throughout his life has done everything with love, generosity, and tolerance.” This is how the village poet Antoni Gost Curro (1953) speaks. He says it about another Antoni, known, admired, and loved, difficult to classify: a pharmacist, a cultural activist, a social agitator, and a revolutionary. We are talking about Antoni Torrens Gost (1937), the driving force behind sa Pobla in Gràcia, the meeting of bagpipers and luthiers, the Llar de la Memòria, the Albopàs group of devils... among so many other things.

Venus and Adonis arrives for the first time in Mallorca, on August 13 and 14, eleven years after its premiere, with Jordi Bosch, Emma Vilarasau and the cellist Lluís Claret, hand in hand with the Fundació Mallorca Literària

He has lived in Andorra for years, a usual location among professional cyclists for altitude training camps. Likewise, he maintains lifelong friends with whom he started cycling. The group of friends assures that in short distances he is practically the same as when he was a child: “Approachable, fun, and very natural”. However, he has always been “very private about his intimacy”: “He doesn't like interviews and cameras at all, and if he can avoid them, he does”, tells us Joan Danús, one of the childhood friends of professional cyclist Enric Mas (Artà, 1995).

Music has always been present in his life. He has classical training, sang in different choirs when he was young and also played in an orchestra. Over the years he has gone through several bands and before Paco Pecado he had started a project in English “much less identity-related”, he says, and that belonged to another artistic stage. Javier Morales (Barcelona, 1993), the man behind the project, considers Paco Pecado to be his “first fully personal and solo project”. Thus, in March 2025 he published "Between wineries and fairs, an eleven-song album that he will present in Mallorca on August 7th in Consolació, Sant Joan, as part of the La Lluna en Vers festival of the Fundació Mallorca Literària. It will be an evening of a double concert, because Gregotechno will also perform, a project that mixes Gregorian chant with contemporary electronic music. A night titled "To sin.

The initial intention of this project was to “make accessible” a repertoire that had profoundly struck Marc Vilajuana. Approximately ten years ago, he discovered Gregorian chant and was fascinated by this sonic universe. “Beyond the spiritual aspect, it is the foundation of Western music. It is with Gregorian chant that musical writing begins in the West, as until then music had been transmitted orally,” he points out.

A family snapshot: the six members squeezed into a three-door orange Renault 5. They are four siblings born in Llucmajor. At home, Spanish was always spoken: the father had arrived from the Peninsula and married a Mallorcan woman, the mother. The family's linguistic idiosyncrasy changed when the third brother was about 17 years old. We will tell it later. The third brother was born in 1968 and today he is a poet, narrator, and professor: Miquel Bezares. A fire at his home, when he was about four years old, impacted him so much that even today, when he starts to smell burning, he feels a certain dread, as if that smell had stayed stuck in his nose forever. The youngest brother, Jesús – although everyone knows him by the nickname Tuti – says that Miquel "was an extraordinarily bright child": "At eight years old, he already had the head of a fifteen-year-old boy; and at fifteen, he looked like an old man," he laughs.

Another Mobo chronicler commented on Friday at certain early morning hours about the fear of falling into mass clichés to explain this farewell. Frankly, I would never write (and the other chronicler wouldn't either, I'd say) that "you don't know what you have until you lose it." It is ungrateful and unconscious. And we are not like that: we knew what we were losing in 2013 when Antònia Font announced a retirement; we know that, after Mobo, there will be a void for alternative music, that a space for closeness and recognition (identification?) will be missing; we know what we will lose if we continue living on mass tourism, wild and bare with everyday life, and since we know it, this Sunday afternoon we will be in Palma at the demonstration against tourist overcrowding, in favor of a dignified life.

Saturday evening. The end of 10 years of Mobofest is approaching. Around 11:30 PM, practically everyone was heading towards the main stage to accompany the "group of our lives," they said, the group "that changed everything for music in Mallorca and in Catalan," it was commented. Yesterday more than ever, the public could not miss it.

After Thursday, Friday a hopeful atmosphere welcomed the Mobofest audience as they headed towards Consolació, in Sant Joan. Atop the first flight of stairs, some letters: "Goodbye". "See you soon". "Good luck".

After exploring the traditional repertoire from a contemporary perspective in their early works, Tarta Relena delved into tragic thought, oracles, and humanity's relationship with the uncertainty of the future to write and perform És pregunta (2024), an album produced entirely by the duo formed by Helena Ros and Marta Torrella. With the maxim 'less is more' as their banner, Tarta Relena offers a set of songs that narrate impermanence and turn their live performance into a ritual. Voices are the main instrument, and the different languages they sing in bring different "worldviews" to the album. They will present it on July 31st in the garden of Casa Llorenç Villalonga in Binissalem as part of the La Lluna en Vers festival. We spoke with one of them, Marta Torrella.

They knew each other by sight until an event caused their life threads to become entangled forever. Linguist and professor Nicolau Dols tells us about the writer Biel Mesquida: “In 2001, Biel published T’estim a tu, a collection of articles about Mallorca at the time. I wrote a review of it in El Mirall. A few days later, when we were still using answering machines, I arrived at the office and there was a message from him. He didn’t say anything to me. He simply recited, impeccably, Joan Alcover’s poem Desolació. I understood that gesture as an elegant and very typical way of thanking me for the review. It must be said that he has one of the best voices in the Catalan Countries for reciting.” The friendship was consolidated a little later, when they coincided working at the UIB. Nicolau did not know Biel as a child, but their relationship is such a long after-dinner conversation that the professor says he can give some details about it.

“When you bit me, God left saliva / inside the wound and the coolness of his great lip. / And the saliva flooded my blood. / And a voice full of nests was born in me”. The set of verses is from the poem ‘Soledat oberta’ (Open Solitude), included in the book Entre el coral i l’espiga (Between the Coral and the Ear of Corn) published in 1952. The author is Blai Bonet, of whom this year marks the centenary of his birth – and a voice, indeed full of nests, which still spreads everywhere. The last verse of this stanza gives its name to what will be the central spectacle of the Blai Bonet Year, a production by the Fundació Mallorca Literària that aims to vindicate the relevance of one of the most unique voices in Catalan literature and invite the public to rediscover it through a journey along the paths of his great themes.

As a baby he slept a lot, so much so that his grandfather would often say to him: “You need to get a move on, be sharp. It’s not good to sleep so much”. He was so content in his baby role that he had little interest in walking. One fine day, without having gone through the crawling stage, he got up, put on his shoes – on the wrong feet – and started walking. “I think his steps just came to him because he’s very stubborn!”. This is told to us by Aunt Marieta – Maria Bauzà – the wife of the brother of Miquel Àngel Raió’s mother, who started dating the old man when the current director of the Principal Theatre of Inca was only two months old – she was 17 years old. She saw him born. And she still remembers the laughter that the family produced seeing him walk in that way, so confident, the day the child decided it was time to get up.

As a child, she was creative, bright, and very independent. She is the third of four siblings who were born and raised in Palma, behind the Born: “She had a very rich inner world. She spent many hours playing in the courtyard that is now Casal Solleric, imagining stories and building her own universes”. She is slightly scattered, but with a lot of “visionary capacity”. In fact, 25 years ago she decided to make a change in the family restaurant, create her own vegetable garden there and bet on local, zero-kilometer produce: “It seemed like an extravagance at the time, but when she had an idea in her head, she would go ahead with it without paying much attention to what others said”. This is how she launched Ca na Toneta, the iconic family restaurant in Caimari. Maria Solivellas (1970) is the chef who revolutionized it, but before putting on an apron, she did many other things, driven by an infinite curiosity. This is told to us by the actress Catalina Solivellas, her second sister – the eldest is Teresa, and the youngest, Pep.