The leadership of Ara Més is putting different names on the table to head the candidacy for the general elections on November 29th. The result will be submitted to a vote in the assemblies of the different formations that make it up over the coming weeks.

The Council of Mallorca is now prepared for the rainy days approaching this autumn: the island institution has spent 4,999.72 euros on corporate umbrellas. The Presidency department explains that these gifts are mostly distributed to the elderly during the activities in which they participate, although the contract documentation does not specify the number of units acquired nor at which events they have been distributed.

The Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival takes place on a contradiction that is difficult to avoid. For four days, books occupy one of the great epicenters of mass tourism and binge drinking in Mallorca. They do so hand in hand with the hotel chain Melià, a company that is an exponent of 'balearization,' the export of the intensive tourism model first implemented in the Archipelago and transferred all over the world.

When someone thinks about going to a literary festival, they don't imagine they could leave with a tattooed arm or shoulder. The unknown in the equation is isolated when you add FLEM to Magaluf: the Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival, a festival that long ago stopped considering literature as an isolated discipline and has exposed it to coexistence with electronics, urban art, tattoos, podcasts, games, and even karaoke.

On the night of July 17, 1936, Conxita Badia was rehearsing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the Palau de la Música Catalana under the direction of Pau Casals. The work was to inaugurate the People's Olympiad in Barcelona, conceived as a response to the Olympic Games that Nazi Germany was holding that summer in Berlin. During the rehearsal, news of the military uprising arrived. The concert would not take place. Before parting ways, Casals proposed that the musicians perform the final movement one more time, the song of fraternity built by Beethoven upon Schiller's Ode to Joy. They did not know when they would meet again.

Reading a book on a toy surfboard in a wave pool at a hotel on one of the most overexploited beaches in Mallorca. This is how the sixth edition of the Magaluf Expanded Literature Festival, the FLEM, is being promoted, which will take place from October 1st to 4th in one of the world's epicenters of excess tourism. The hook is clear: literature can also be fun, and the FLEM has come to provoke and break the schemes of classic festivals, against academicism and against solemnity.

Living in an apartment without an elevator when you are 80 years old can be a problem, but it is even more so if you live in a city where the water that comes out of the taps is not good for drinking or cooking, and you depend on bottled water if you do not want to get sick. This is the case for Antònia, who does not have an osmosis system in her home and relies on her family network to be able to have drinking water. "At my age, I don't have the strength to carry jugs of water up the stairs and I'm afraid of falling," she explains. "I always have to keep after my family to see if they can go buy it for me and bring it up to our home. I feel bad about bothering them because I know they are very busy, but I have no other choice, because with this water I can't even boil potatoes," she adds.

"For decades, nitrates have acted like the dog in the manger, which neither eats the hay nor lets the ox eat it: their presence prevented drinking the water, but the problem was not perceived as urgent enough to mobilize the investments necessary to resolve it." This is asserted by Francesc Grimalt, the manager of the municipal company Serveis de l'Ajuntament de Manacor (SAM), which manages the water supply network. Manacor, with nearly 30,000 inhabitants in its urban center, is considered the most populous city in Spain that still does not have potable water in most of its residential network. Since 2015, work has been underway to modernize the water cycle network to control consumption and reduce leaks, in order to prepare the city for the postponed arrival of potable water to all the taps in the capital of the Llevant region.

At the Manacor agri-food estate, the bustle around the drinking water fountain installed by the City Council in 2021 does not stop. People go there to fill jugs because the water that flows from the taps has not been fit for consumption for more than forty years. With a population of about 30,000 inhabitants, Manacor is the most populous city in Spain that still does not have drinking water in the entire domestic network. In the Balearic Islands, nearly 145,000 people live in areas with water considered unfit for consumption or at risk.

Supporting Paradise is a literary and cinematographic work that has already accumulated several lives. The publisher Lunwerg published the first edition of this book of conversations with twenty Majorcan artists in 2011 and now Lleonard Muntaner has reissued it. The documentary, premiered this 2026 at the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, recovers interviews filmed in 2012 to portray the loss of identity, the destruction of the territory and the contradictions of tourist Mallorca. The film confronts those warnings with the gaze of a new generation of creators. We talk about it with the director about the creative process, about cinema as a space for dialogue and about the defeat, the indignation and the hope that cross the social context in which it has been premiered.

Llorenç Galmés admits that Mallorca "has reached the limit and cannot grow anymore", but he will not modify the main territorial and tourist planning instruments that the Council has to curb this growth. This is the contradiction that GOB and Terraferida have pointed out after meeting this Thursday with the island president at the Royal Palace. The entities left with a clear conclusion: "The feeling is the same as we had with Marga Prohens".

The debate over tourist containment in Mallorca no longer revolves solely around how many places there may be in the future, but also about what is happening with those that already exist and can return to the market. Since the entry into force of Decree Law 4/2025, the Council of Mallorca has sold 1,020 tourist places and reserved 876 more through the exchange, while it has renewed the authorizations of 1,649 multi-family dwellings that total 6,730 places, according to data provided by the institution in response to a battery of 32 questions from MÉS per Mallorca.

For three hours, the President of the Government, Margalida Prohens, and the representatives of GOB and Terraferida have addressed the outcry that has been heard on the streets this summer to demand limits on the model of land consumption and tourist saturation in the Balearic Islands. Prohens received the two environmental organizations this Tuesday afternoon at the Consolat de Mar, after months marked by massive social mobilizations.

The proposal for a law by the Council of Mallorca on the regulation of vehicle influx on the island of Mallorca has already encountered its first obstacle: the vehicle employers' association rent a car, Baleval. The Balearic Association of Vehicles with and without a driver brings together large, medium and small operators that carry out their activity on the Islands. In a forceful document registered in Parliament on September 17, Baleval has presented 22 amendments to the initiative that promises to limit the entry of rental vehicles to Mallorca with the aim of slowing down the circulatory collapse and saturation.Baleval considers that the bill promoted by the executive of Llorenç Galmés restricts access to an economic activity without demonstrating that rental vehicles are the specific and main cause of the problem: "The law is based on an attribution of singular responsibility to the vehicle rental sector that does not appear sufficiently accredited in the legislative file". Therefore, if this responsibility is not accredited, they consider that the law may result in being arbitrary or discriminatory. They believe that the bill does not incorporate a sufficient analysis of less restrictive regulatory alternatives nor does it accredit why the specific limitation of rental vehicles is the most appropriate measure. The employers' association maintains that limiting fleets and distributing vehicle quotas is an "intense intervention" in the market that requires solid data, a detailed justification, and the study of less restrictive alternatives.

Plaça del Fossar in Sineu, November 2003. Thousands of people watch the satirical performance of the wedding between Maria Antònia Munar and Jaume Matas, a symbol of the political alliance that drives an unprecedented transformation of Mallorca's road network. Munar's Council road plan projects an island turned into a giant Scalextric and ignites one of the most intense periods of social mobilization in recent history. Sineu becomes the epicenter of the opposition to the Inca-Manacor motorway, an infrastructure that threatens to mutilate the Pla region. At the same time, another slogan begins to be heard: 'No to the second beltway'.

A new road –the first section of the second ring road– is the Mallorca Council's recipe to alleviate the traffic collapse suffered by the access routes to Palma. It is an action “of great social consensus”, according to the island institution, with a projected cost of 350 million euros that must continue the dual carriageway of the Ma-30 between the Manacor road and the Llucmajor motorway. The project has gained in ambition, budget, and execution time compared to what Galmés himself presented in the year 2024. The works will be divided into two phases, valued respectively at 90 and 260 million euros, and the Council plans to execute them partially simultaneously to reduce their total duration, which between the two phases adds up to six years and two months of work. The president of the Council, Llorenç Galmés, announced this Wednesday that the first phase will begin to be executed before the end of the year, while the technical managers have set the start of the works in 2027, once the processing and the public information period have been completed.

The Council of Mallorca will refer files on illegal tourist offerings to the Public Prosecutor's Office that, in the face of an order to cease activity, have disobeyed in a repeat manner. The Department of Tourism directed by Guillem Ginard is finalizing the complaints and expects to present them to the Public Prosecutor's Office "during this autumn". "We will take the multi-recidivism and the repeated failure to comply with the cessation of activity to the Public Prosecutor's Office," explained the island councilor.

After a summer marked by social mobilizations against the tourism model, GOB and Terraferida already have a date to personally convey their demands to the President of the Government, Margalida Prohens. The head of the Executive will receive the representatives of the environmental organizations on Tuesday, September 24, at 6 p.m.

The Official Association of Architects of the Balearic Islands (COAIB) warns that the coastal law promoted by the Marga Prohens Government could open the door to perpetuating urban illegalities on the coast. The professional entity warns that the conservation of existing uses, responsible declarations, and the new coastal heritage registry could protect illegally established constructions and activities.

Carles Buxadé was two years old when his aunts, Daria and Mercè Buxadé, embarked at 22 and 18 years of age at the port of Barcelona with Captain Alberto Bayo's expedition. He keeps a vague memory of it, but enough to have dedicated decades of his life to searching for the truth about the cruel fate of those two women whom he never saw again. “Obviously, he was very small, but he remembers seeing them get onto an open truck with many other women, approximately ten of them,” relates his daughter, Ann.