The real estate developers of the Balearic Islands are not satisfied with the regulatory reforms of Marga Prohens' Government and, despite the possibility of increasing the number of apartments on the same plot by 45%, they have sent new proposals to Parliament. The Proinba Association aspires to amend the Balearic Islands' Urban Planning Law to facilitate the processing of real estate projects even if the water supply has not been approved. The document arrives after the developers have encountered difficulties in moving forward with the projects that aim to address the housing emergency.The regulatory reform that they have sent to Parliament would allow apartments to be approved first and then resolve whether they have the water necessary for future inhabitants legally guaranteed. This is the type of approach that courts have struck down in other territories, reminding that the order is the other way around: first it is necessary to prove that there is water, and then begin with licenses and permits.

Between 2023 and August 2026, the Directorate General of Water Resources has authorized 2,865 wells with associated water consumption, according to data provided by the Government. These are not simple "applications submitted or cases being processed, but rather extractions that have obtained administrative authorization" to extract water, according to Executive sources. The count does not include wells intended for geothermal energy. In this way, the aquifers of the Balearic Islands continue to incorporate new extraction points at a time when pressure on underground reserves is one of the main concerns in water management on the Islands.

There are 73,180 swimming pools in Mallorca, and 10,680 have been built between 2015 and 2024. That is, in the last ten years, three swimming pools have been built every day, according to the latest study by Terraferida. Panoramic views of Mallorca show more and more urban developments in coastal areas and also chalets on rustic land that have this infrastructure, surrounded by lawn. According to experts, this type of landscaping is even worse because it consumes more water. All this, while this summer there were 47 municipalities on pre-alert for drought.

We complain, and rightly so, about how the so-called European investors – who are speculators or aspire to be so – arrive in the Islands to acquire plots of land or finished villas and transform them into real estate assets. They buy for one million and want to get three out of it. Or they rent to acquaintances and engage in tourist activity without any authorization. Of course, the transaction takes place in their home countries, and the Islands only provide the territory, their body, in short, so that others can get rich.

The technical services of the Directorate General of Coasts and the Coastline concluded in November 2025 that there were sufficient grounds to initiate the expiry procedure for the concession of seasonal services on the beaches of Formentera. The report, to which ARA Balears has had access, expressly proposes that the competent body issue the agreement to initiate the procedure, considering that "several essential conditions" of the concession title have been breached. In other words, the criterion set by the head of the Coasts and Coastline service was to end a concession of bars and restaurants that had breached the law. Given this forcefulness, the already ousted Director General of Coasts, Maria Joaquina Ferrer – who is also a civil servant – considered that there was no other path than to follow the technical and legal criterion.

The keyboard chords of a version of Whitney Houston coming from the Hotel Mariant Park are mixed with the notes, at full volume, of Barbie Girl, a hit from the 90s coming from the surroundings of the Hotel Playamar. The August night is heavy and the hotel terraces are full of tourists looking for the promised entertainment. Right in the middle, immutable and eternal, oblivious to anachronism, remain the millenary stones of the Talayotic settlement of l’Illot.

The violent outburst at the end of the last and successful demonstration called with the aim of achieving less tourism, more life, is another indicator of a whole series of contradictory policies implemented simultaneously in our Autonomous Community. When the CAIB was constituted (1983), it assumed, among other things, competences in urbanism and territorial planning, but the State reserved the cards that could condition, directly or indirectly, urban and territorial plans: economic policy, taxation, justice, police, and large inter-community infrastructures, including the energy distribution network and ports and airports of general interest. Since then, the objectives of the policies implemented by both administrations have not always been consistent.

The Less Tourism, More Life movement carried out a protest action this Tuesday at Cova de la Grava, in Illetes (Calvià), to denounce what it considers the "privatization" of this small cove by the Gran Meliá Hotel de Mar. The activists have symbolically occupied the space, both by land and by sea, with banners and kayaks to assert that "the beaches will always be ours" and to demand the recovery of public coastal areas.

In the year 2000, 10 million tourists arrived in the Balearic Islands. In the year 2026, 20 million will arrive. For years, some political leaders tried to make us believe that tourist saturation was just a perception. Today, however, hardly anyone doubts that the Balearic Islands are suffering from a serious problem of overmassification.

The environmental organization Terraferida considers that the debate on water in the Balearic Islands cannot be limited to the construction of new desalination plants, as the Government proposes. Its spokesperson, Jaume Adrover, maintains that the problem is older: the territorial model has allowed for decades for dispersed urban growth and housing on rural land to increase pressure on aquifers, which are a public good. "I don't know of any place on the planet where such an abusive consumption of water is made as here due to chalets on rural land," states Adrover, who links this situation with the expansion of single-family housing outside urban centers.

New song against tourist overcrowding, land exploitation, the Balearic economic model, and real estate speculation. Pepet i Marieta have released Ses platges seran sempre nostres, a Mediterranean roots jota that reflects on some of the consequences of tourist overcrowding in Mallorca and the gentrification affecting neighborhoods and municipalities in the Balearic Islands. The song arrives at a time when the debate on the tourism model occupies a central space in Balearic current affairs, coinciding with the call for the 'Mallorca al límit!' demonstration, scheduled for this Sunday in Palma to denounce the effects of tourist saturation on the island.

Although state statistics speak of a global decrease in sales by foreigners in recent months, in the Balearic Islands the reality is quite different: according to the latest data from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda, in 2025 these citizens acquired four out of every ten properties over €500,000 sold. A proportion that doubles any figure from other autonomous communities.

The Omnibus Law was intended to be an instrument for regulating strategic business projects and will go down in history as one of the most deregulatory norms regarding territorial and environmental matters. Among its provisions, there is one that eliminates the restrictions that the Government (former PP councilor Gabriel Company) had promoted to limit the establishment of catering establishments in the maritime-terrestrial public domain.

He was manager for a brief period of the Palau de Congressos de Palma and, therefore, also knows public management. However, Josep Sintes has dedicated a good part of recent years to studying the phenomenon of the excessive increase in real estate prices, in which he currently works. Doctor in Economics, he has sent a proposal to all parliamentary groups in the Balearic Islands to find concrete solutions to the housing emergency, which he has named the Insular Framework for Territorial Equilibrium (MIET).

The future expansion of the Palma metro to Son Espases hospital, which has already been released for public consultation and represents one of the Govern's most ambitious short-term mobility projects, crosses areas with a high risk of flooding. The project incorporates an environmental impact study that confirms this structural constraint, as it affects all proposed alternatives and could determine both the final route and the environmental viability of the project.

This weekend, while this column is published and read, the second germination of Earth Revolts will take place. Last year, the first one, was in Mont-roig del Camp (Tarragona) against a project that exemplifies the trap that green capitalism proposes to us to reinvent the ways it subjugates and conditions territories. Always under the blackmail of jobs and economic dynamization of the territory, it ends up colonizing them and turning them into sacrifice zones at the mercy of profit generation for large international financial capitals. In the case of Mont-roig it was Lotte, a Korean company that plans to implement an industry for the manufacture of a component for the lithium batteries that power the misguided energy transition of the global north.This year it is in Bages, where the company Israel Chemical Limited (ICL) has been exploiting salt mines for years that contaminate waters and lands with salt dumps and, at the same time, sponsors the genocide in Palestine. A company in whose activity ecocide and genocide go hand in hand.Both one and the other, accompanied in development by the competent institutions in turn and, in the second case, with the complicity and indulgence of the institutions in the face of non-compliance with judgments in which the company has already been convicted for environmental damage.From Mallorca, we have approached the Earth Uprising movements from the beginning. First, in meetings that periodically and for three years have been held on struggles in defense of the territory from all Catalan-speaking regions. These meetings have been the seed for the collective construction of a proposal that does not define itself as a coordinator of collectives, nor as a platform, but as a new dynamic of struggle. A dynamic that aims to spread like a mycelium underground, to nourish it with a common sense and feeling, and to emerge at any point where there is a territory that wishes to be defended against projects that threaten life (human and non-human). It is at these points that the germinations will materialize, where a massive confluence of organizations, collectives, and people are convened to confront the disaster, sharpen the challenges, and reorganize life. All, under other logics for inhabiting the earth without compromising the sustainability of life, and that this, precisely, be the political horizon of the desirable transformation of the way life and societies are organized in the territories that sustain it.This is why we learn together, mobilize together, organize together, to invent and reinvent, without ever losing hope, with other forms of relationship, other forms of resistance, other forms of collective construction and other forms of inhabiting the present and future together. Forms that draw on and recognize the learnings and paths that have preceded us, with a critical gaze that allows them to be transcended rather than fossilized, and that, at the same time, seek to become possibility and dispute the imaginaries of what is to be done, breaking the mental, action and interaction frameworks recognized until now. Forms that recognize the great and small struggles in defense of the territory, the ecological struggles, the conservationist struggles, the workers' struggles, those of popular and communalist organization, those of base communities and infrastructures, the anti-racist and decolonial struggles, the feminist struggles, those from other territories that we find inspiring. The latter range from those of organizations from the global south against global extractivism to the struggles coming from France or Germany, which deal with the occupation of territories, the reappropriation and resignification of what it means to inhabit land, bodies and territories, and which are characterized by massive direct actions that allow for very broad confluences of organized people to claim and defend life, the life of all, in a time of death.It will be an intense weekend to meet each other, recognize each other, organize ourselves, inhabit ourselves and inhabit the territory that welcomes us and that, in its welcome, recognizes us as part and with which we become a whole. A territory defending itself. Before it was Mont-roig, today it is Bages, tomorrow perhaps –and certainly, I would say– it will be Mallorca.Therefore, this year, we return and, in the following, we tell you about it.

The GOB Mallorca, Arrels Marines, and the affected property owners' association ANACA warned this Wednesday that the project for a second electricity cable between Mallorca and Menorca is not a viable solution in its current terms and have called for a thorough review of the environmental impact study. They stated this at a press conference in Alcúdia, where they also presented the objections they have registered within the framework of the project's processing.

Contrary to what the courts had stated in the first instance, the Consell de Mallorca will have to compensate the developer who had a license to build a housing development in El Guix (Escorca). The Superior Court of Justice of the Balearic Islands (TSJIB) has partially upheld the appeal of the developer Urnova regarding the long urban planning dispute of El Guix, which triggered the controversy over the impact of a set of chalets adjacent to the Lluc monastery. The court recognizes the company's right to be compensated for five plots of land affected by the urban planning declassification that was carried out to prevent construction in such an emblematic location. The court, however, rejects the bulk of the compensation requested, corresponding to the main housing construction project that was never executed.