Nearly 100,000 residents of the Balearic Islands lived in 2025 in areas where drinking water was declared unfit at least at some point during the year. Specifically, this concerns 98,452 inhabitants, a figure that rises to 145,027 if people residing in the 22 areas considered "at risk" are added, meaning those with recurrent non-compliance that could eventually lead to a declaration of unfitness.

Homes located in the highest part of the Rotgetes and Jardín de Flores developments turned on the tap and, in some cases, not a single drop of water came out. Meanwhile, other homes in the area were consuming up to 8,000 liters of water in a single day. This is the situation that forced the Esporles City Council to adopt unprecedented restrictions to ensure the distribution of an increasingly scarce resource.

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 Sencelles Town Hall will take the municipality's water situation to the Environmental Prosecutor's Office. The Consistory has announced this drastic measure so that both the origin of the chemical contamination detected in the Son Saletes network – which has forced the water to be declared unfit for human consumption – and the possible administrative omissions accumulated over more than two decades can be investigated. In parallel, the government team has demanded the immediate and precautionary suspension of discharges from the industrial laundry Elis Mallorca (formerly Lavanderías Diana) until it is clarified whether it is related to this episode.

Emaya's water tariff, applied for years to hotel establishments, uses a specific calculation technique that modifies how progressivity is applied in the case of the tourism sector. The analysis of current tariffs, published in 2016, by a former company technician assures that the methodology, "designed for the hotels of Platja de Palma" establishes a consumption recalculation system "two rooms at a time", and generates a false division of expenses that significantly reduces the amount it would have to pay if progressivity were applied.

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.

Water reserves have never been so low in Menorca, only at 34% of capacity, and the pre-alert situation is beginning to alarm everyone. The Administration has arrived late to act and has not listened in time to specialists like engineer José Antonio Fayas, who had long warned that in the last decade practically nothing has been done to stop overexploiting aquifers, limit swimming pools, increase the cost of water, and reuse the regenerated water that comes out of treatment plants.

The Balearic Islands face a complicated summer in terms of water supply and, more worryingly, a race against time to guarantee this resource in the coming years. The problem is no longer just whether it will rain more or less in the coming months, but whether the current system, at its limit during the summer months, will be able to withstand while the infrastructure to reduce dependence on aquifers arrives. The Islands are preparing an offensive of investments in desalination, reuse, supply networks, and sanitation, but a good part of these actions are still in the project, tender, or execution phase.

When water is not enough, room for manoeuvre runs out. It is the most basic limit any society has. And the Balearic Islands have started this summer closer to that limit than in recent years. Water reserves have dropped again. Menorca registers the worst levels. Almost fifty municipalities – 47 out of the 67 that exist – entered the summer in a state of alert or pre-alert for drought. The Government itself admits that climate change will make droughts longer, rainfall more irregular, and aquifer recharge more difficult. These are not catastrophic forecasts, they are official data.

Water reserves have hit rock bottom as never before in Menorca. The island ended the month of June with water reserves at only 34% of its capacity, the same situation it already had in August of last year. In the records of the Ministry of the Sea, such a low level has not been remembered for at least the last 10 years.

The Balearic Islands have started the summer with a very complicated situation in terms of water reserves. The data from the month of June worry the Executive, and rightly so. Underground reserves, the main source of supply today, have dropped again on the eve of summer, and the lack of rain in recent weeks has worsened a situation already marked by pressure on aquifers. Although there is no talk of a widespread emergency, official data paints an increasingly tight scenario.

The water crisis in Pla de Mallorca is entering a new phase in terms of savings due to the lack of water resources in the region. The Algaida City Council yesterday approved a motion by the PSIB governing team, through which the plenary session calls on the Consell de Mallorca to urgently stop using water from the municipality's aquifers for cleaning and maintenance tasks on the Manacor road (Ma-15). The motion was unanimously approved by all parties present in the plenary session: PSIB, PP, and MÉS per Algaida.

The situation of water resources in Pla de Mallorca has become particularly delicate after the Mancomunitat detected in recent weeks "episodes of extraordinary consumption" that have exceeded the usual production capacity of the region's wells and have caused increasing pressure on underground aquifers.

The Government introduced a last-minute legal modification to water regulations to exempt some urban development operations from the need to obtain authorization from the Directorate General of Water Resources. An additional provision of the Omnibus Law approved by the PP and Vox allows for the avoidance of new water sufficiency reports (water availability) in certain cases, provided that a specific plan or project is not considered to increase demand or that the circumstances justifying previous reports have not changed.

Palma wants to continue growing in population and Jaime Martínez's team does not intend to give up on this despite the lack of water that the Water Resources technicians already detected and confirmed in the year 2023. This is one of the conclusions of the Sustainable Water Management Plan promoted by Emaya, which has just completed the public exhibition period. The document advocates for increasing desalination and extracting more water from underground: up to 10 million more liters per day than are currently obtained, despite the delicate situation of the aquifers.

The Montuïri City Council has begun work to connect a new water supply well to the municipal network, an urgent measure whose main objective is to minimize the severe water crisis that the municipality is suffering.

The Manacor City Council has approved changes to the water rates for water supplied by SAM, the municipal company responsible for its management. The new, more socially oriented system will offer discounts on bills for, for example, large families, single-parent families, families with a dependent person, or families with a victim of gender-based violence. Thus, the City Council is establishing a system of consumption blocks from now on, in order to implement progressive tariffs and "so that those who consume more pay more," explained the Councilor for the Environment and President of the Board of Directors of SAM, Sebastià Llodrà, who recalled that water prices have not been touched since the population changed.

The water war continues in Palma. For the moment, Jaime Martínez's City Council has managed to avoid the preliminary reports from the Directorate General of Water Resources that prevent it from issuing building permits. The official argument is that there is a monumental backlog, which municipal sources have estimated at 500 files. Thus, the City Council emphasizes that projects to address the housing shortage have not been approved due to what it describes as a bottleneck in the Water Resources department. However, according to data consulted by ARABalears, the majority – up to 80% – of the projects that must be approved by the Directorate General are for detached houses. According to official figures, Palma does not have 500 pending applications, but rather 118. As already mentioned, the majority of these are for single-family homes, according to data from the Balearic Government. Thus, it could be concluded that the Palma City Council's Urban Planning Department is requesting permission from the regional government, regarding water resources, to build detached houses. In all cases, the procedure is carried out because the proposed construction site is a flood zone, and regulations require a ruling from the water authority.