One evening, while dining together in Madrid, we looked at each other with a certain perplexity. Celestí Alomar was Director General of Tourism and I was Vice-Rector of the University. I don't know if we said it exactly like that, but we both must have thought more or less the same thing: what are we doing here? We had met many years before, when we were two lads from the Pla de Mallorca, he from Llubí and I from Sant Joan. And another scene came to our minds, also distant: Franco's bust emerging from the balcony of the Rectorate of the University of Barcelona towards the street. We had gone from all that to Madrid, with ties, positions, and responsibilities. "Two suited up youngsters," he said.

Mata de Jonc, a school promoted by idealistic and brave families and teachers, was the first to conduct all teaching in Catalan in the Balearic Islands. It began to be formed in April and May 1976, 50 years ago. It was born with the will to become a new school, breaking with the traditional model, with active teaching, rooted in its environment and, above all, in Catalan. It took its name from the "Crònica" by Ramon Muntaner (1325-1328) from a paragraph that exemplifies how unity makes strength: "If the whole bunch of reeds tied together with a strong rope and you all want to pull it up together, I tell you that ten men, no matter how much they pull, will not pull it up, nor even if more were to join. And if you remove the rope, a young man of eight years will break it from reed to reed, so that not a single reed will remain".

Promoted by Celestí Alomar, Minister of Tourism of the first Pacte de Progrés (1999-2003), a tax on tourist stays, immediately known as the ‘ecotax’, was approved on April 10, 2001, twenty-five years ago. It levied, approximately one euro per night, the stay of tourists. With the revenue, some negative externalities of mass tourism in the Balearic Islands were to be corrected. It did not come into effect until May 2002 due to an appeal to the Constitutional Court, filed by the Aznar government. When the People's Party won the following elections in 2003, it repealed the tax, considering it a brake on tourist competitiveness. Those who defended the repeal of the tax said that it could not be classified as ecological or environmental, and that it was not even a tax, arguing: “It was nothing more than a symbol of a policy of negative messages towards what tourism represented”. And they related the application of the ecotax to the decrease in tourist arrivals and the problems the hotel sector had experienced. The Government of Jaume Matas wanted to replace it with so-called green cards or ‘sustainable’ foundations that only collected a pittance.

I read that the far-right party Vox says it will condition its support for the approval of the 88 amendments to the strategic projects law –a true shake-up of the current system that will modify almost thirty laws– on a change in the toponymy of the Balearic Islands: “That they return to bilingual toponymy, Palma-Palma de Mallorca, Maó-Mahón and others like Santanyí-Santañí”. The Government has already replied that it does not agree with this, as it contravenes the Law of Linguistic Normalization.