What are gardens that seem so much taken from Granada in the very heart of Palma, at the foot of the Almudaina and a few steps from the Born and the sea? And even more so when the elderly people of Ciutat still remember that right here, in Hort del Rei, there were the Líric theatre, the Alhambra hotel, the mythical Riskal café... The truth, however, is that with the demolition of those buildings, what had already been a green area in the Middle Ages was recovered, only this time it was not done for the enjoyment of a monarch, but for the entire citizenry – and tourists, of course. We recall the history of Hort del Rei as sixty years have passed since the project that the architect Gabriel Alomar Esteve made in 1966 and which envisaged the recovery of that space.

Located at the foot of the Tramuntana mountain range, 14 kilometers from Palma, at the beginning of the 20th century Esporles was known as the 'little Russia' of Mallorca. Its six textile factories had managed to forge a strong proletarian consciousness. The inauguration in 1930 of the Casa del Pueblo would be a reflection of that class pride. Already in the municipal elections of April 12, 1931, the municipality would be one of the few on the island where the left triumphed. Two days later, King Alfonso XIII departed into exile and the Second Republic was proclaimed.

“This book will be part of the memory for some and a discovery of the unlived reality for others”, affirms the priest and researcher Santiago Cortès in the book’s prologue. In Inca desapareguda (Efadós, 2026), the author, Carme Colom, recovers, from an extensive photographic collection and collective memory, the landscapes, trades, and transformations that have marked the passage of time in the capital of Raiguer.

In 1976, Porreres took a key step in education. That academic year, the doors opened to a center that was born with the name Colegio Nacional Mixto. It was a school that responded to demographic growth and the need for new facilities in the municipality. This year, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, the currently named CEIP Climent Serra i Servera blows out the candles, consolidated as a benchmark for public, inclusive, and diverse education in Porreres and in the Pla de Mallorca.

Women have played a key role in the history of antimilitarism. When men were obliged to go to war, mothers, wives, and sisters did not hesitate to mobilize to save their loved ones from certain death. It was during the Modern Age (15th-18th centuries) that the armies of European states became permanent and increasingly large. At that time, the Hispanic monarchy, following what was done in the rest of the continent, had three ways of supplying its troops: with mercenaries (professionals who fought in exchange for pay), with forced levies (generally from marginalized people, prisoners, and vagrants), and with the quintas.

95 years ago, between April 13 and 14, 1931, Spain changed its regime with the proclamation of the Second Republic, a sudden process that was also experienced in Palma, one of the first cities to assume the new power. “Spain went to bed monarchical and woke up republican,” in the words of Admiral Aznar, the last prime minister of Alfonso XIII, although the change had been brewing for months.

For Joves de Mallorca per la Llengua, 2026 is a historic year. For the first time in the same year, the entity's two major events will be celebrated: l’Acampallengua and Correllengua. Correllengua will be in a new format, which adds the 'Agermanat' lineage and will travel from north to south through the Catalan Countries between April 19 and May 5.

The Havana cemetery is full of tombs with very local surnames: Pujol, Roca, Moner, Ensenyat... They are the testimony of the Majorcans who in the 19th century left to 'make the Americas'. According to chronicles, in 1889 there were about 10,000 (4% of the population). Many from Andratx went to Cuba. Among them were the paternal and maternal grandparents of Rosa Calafat Vila, professor of Catalan Philology at the UIB. “In the eighties, during my youth – she says –, I dug into the oral memory of the municipality and I was pleasantly surprised. I discovered a large number of 'gloses' related to the Caribbean island”.

“The olive trees that your Pilar paints are real, / They are pagan, Christian, and modern olive trees / that guard the secret desires of the dead / with gestures, wills, and poses of the living”. This is what the poet Rubén Darío wrote addressing Joan Sureda, the husband of the painter Pilar Montaner. We remember the life and work of this exceptional artist, ahead of her time, as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of her birth, on April 13, 1876.

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.

The Palmesan Gonçal López Nadal, 73, is Professor Emeritus of Economic History at the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB). He feels indebted to the mastery of the Felanitx native Antoni Binimelis Sagrera. “The first time –he assures– I heard of him was in 1964, when I was 11 years old. It was through my uncle, Guillem Nadal Blanes, who was stationed as a diplomat in India. In a letter he told the family that he had met a Majorcan, a specialist in classical languages and a Spanish teacher in New Delhi. He said he was a rather peculiar person, a man of universal culture, and that he hadn't lost a hair, but, from his condition as a peasant”.

Almost all monarchs have had a distinctive nickname –like ‘the Emeritus’, in our times– and Alfonso, sovereign of the Crown of Aragon and, therefore, of the Balearic Islands, between 1416 and 1458, has gone down in history as ‘the Magnanimous’. Was he, really? It is now 575 years since the eternal fine that, with the king’s full powers, the governor of Mallorca imposed on the Part Forana, on April 9, 1451, for revolting against the injustices they suffered. Not much magnanimity there.

It was formerly called the House of Comedies, and the current building was constructed in the 19th century. But Palma's Principal Theatre stands on the same site where performances were already taking place in the 17th century. For 359 years, comedies have been staged in the same location, next to the former stream that gives its name to the street where it is located. As we approach World Theatre Day, as we do every March 27th, we explore the history of this stage.

In 2021, Francesc Vicens Vidal, a musicologist from Palma, discovered a remarkable story within his wife Maria de Salut's family. "I received," he recalls, "a phone call from filmmaker Álex Dioscórides, who was preparing the documentary." Stone and oilfocused on the olive grove culture of the Tramuntana mountain range. He asked me if I knew any olive harvesters he could interview, given that many sang while they worked. I told him no. But one day my mother-in-law told me that her mother, when she was single, had been hired out to work on an estate in Sóller. They called this 'going to the mountains'."

Little by little, without much noise, traditional cuisine of the Balearic Islands It's fading away. It's not happening for a single reason or overnight, but as a consequence of a profound change in how we live, eat, and relate to time. Globalization, the culture of immediacy, and a fast-paced diet have been displacing a cuisine that requires slow cooking, patience, and oral tradition. This has led to the disappearance of part of the culinary vocabulary and linguistic heritage that has defined the cultural identity of the Balearic Islands for centuries. Words that once circulated naturally in the islands' kitchens are increasingly unfamiliar to younger generations, reflecting how the disappearance of traditional dishes is accompanied by the loss of language and cultural knowledge.

Shall we meet at Bosch? It's impossible to keep count of how many times these two 'junquillos' have said it, which is how the inhabitants of Ciutat are known – proudly, they say now. Ninety years ago, in February 1936, this establishment opened its doors, a regular meeting point for residents and visitors; and of which the salchichón, in its sense of a small bread with a groove along its length, has been and is its reference, although in this case with the popular name of langosta (lobster).

Island Social Promotions. This was the name displayed half a century ago on a premises on the central Can Verí street in Palma. Near where the newsroom of this media outlet you now hold in your hands, or on your screen, is located. Perhaps some might wonder what these promotions were. The answer is as simple as this: it was the front for a political party, then illegal, like all the others: the Socialist Party of the Islands (PSI), whose initials coincided with those of this entity. And that was its headquarters. Fifty years ago, on January 18, 1976, that PSI, which would later become the Socialist Party of Mallorca (PSM), made its presentation to the press.

Like an ancient sibyl, 93-year-old Maria Capó Navarro concentrates and begins to sing one of the tunes from her youth, when she worked on the family farm in Sóller. It's her way of evoking a world of connection to the land and precise words that vanished with the boom A tourist attraction in the 1960s. The first person to hear that same tune live 74 years ago was the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. "In 1952," he says, "he saw me perform at an international folklore competition held in the Palma bullring. I sang with my village group, Los Danzadores del Baile de Oro (The Dancers of the Golden Dance). We were one of the prize winners. Apparently, my family liked it a lot and asked to come. I was the only doll." Capó remembers that visit perfectly. "The sun was blazing, and Lomax arrived hunched over and sweltering. He took out his tape recorder and recorded the moment when my father, my grandfather, and I were singing while we threshed grain on the threshing floor with a sledgehammer. He must not have understood a thing. He only knew a little Spanish."

Does God speak Catalan? Undoubtedly, for believers, since He is omnipotent. However, for centuries, the Catholic Church expressed itself in its ceremonies in Latin—the language of the Roman Empire, which threw the first Christians to the beasts of the circus: such are the paradoxes of life. It wasn't until the 1960s that the Second Vatican Council established that Masses would be celebrated in the vernacular: six decades ago, the Church in the Balearic Islands was embroiled in a heated debate about which language that should be. That the vernacular was Catalan had been perfectly clear to the Catholic Church in the Balearic Islands practically since the medieval conquest. Not even the growing centralism of the State made them change their position. The very liberal Bishop of Mallorca, Bernat Nadal, had the catechism published in Catalan in 1801. Bishop Pere Joan Campins created a chair of Mallorcan Language and Literature at the seminary. Bishop Josep Miralles, despite his support for the 1936 coup, had already stood firm against Primo de Rivera's Castilianizing ambitions and, during the early Franco regime, defended preaching in Catalan and published a final edition of the catechism in that language in 1937. Twenty-five years of Franco's dictatorship—a period of peace, as the regime proclaimed; yes, the peace of the cemeteries—and a segment of the Church in the Balearic Islands, as well as a segment of society, understood Castilian as the language of prestige and culture. Not all, of course: in Lluc, as if it were Asterix's village, the priest Pere Riutort promoted textbooks in standard Catalan and distributed copies of the magazine Strong Horse From Barcelona, ​​and upon moving to the Valencian Country, he would continue his work in favor of the presence of Catalan in the ecclesiastical sphere.

In 1968, the world would be governed. It was the year in which the mobilizations against the Vietnam War, begun 13 years earlier, intensified. In May, in Paris, hundreds of students took to the streets with slogans as resounding as 'Be realistic, demand the impossible'. In Czechoslovakia, Soviet forces repressed an attempt at reform called the 'Prague Spring', which advocated 'socialism with a human face'. The United States, while witnessing the rise of the hippie movement, was dismayed by the assassinations of two defenders of the rights of the Black population, the Reverend Martin Luther King and the Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy – the same tragic end had befallen his brother five years earlier, who had arrived in Mexico. He had machine-gunned university students who were demanding more democracy on the eve of the Olympic Games. At that sporting event, the anti-racist 'Black Power' movement was made visible by two African American athletes who accepted their medals raising a black glove and bowing their heads.