He is a man who deeply loves this land. He has some “wonderful tools to help the country”. “He puts his knowledge, talent and means at the service of everyone”. Sometimes “he gets discouraged thinking about the future, when he sees that the struggles we have fought for may end up in nothing, with the language, the land, the country. I tell him that we must take care of our surroundings”. The speaker apologizes: “I am sorry, I cannot criticize him at all”. It is Biel Majoral, teacher of teachers, musician and activist, who introduces us to the pianist and musical and audiovisual producer Miquel Brunet (Bunyola, 1961).

Like so many other young people born in the eighties, she grew up with series such as Sesame Street, David the Gnome, Full House and Around the World in 80 Days; and with the films Back to the Future, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, which she watched over and over again. A particularity of her home, however, is that both her father and her mother were great film buffs (and readers), so they also habitually watched films by Chaplin, the Marx brothers, Woody Allen, Bergman, and Italian and American classics. All these stimuli made that “shy girl” spend part of her early years curious about the great questions of humanity: who we are and where we come from, how big the universe is, death. Marga Melià Rigo (Palma, 1982), “restless and curious,” is still looking for answers. Her lifelong friend Deborah Florit tells us about it.

Determination, courage, and firmness are traits that her presence exudes; her voice and her words are her calling card to the world. Maria Magdalena Amengual Caldés (Pollença, 1985) grew up between Port de Pollença and sa Pobla, surrounded by the love of her grandparents from both sides, who “were her gods.” For a period of time, she couldn't stand honey or mushrooms. Today she is a glosadora (improvisational poet), a discovery that “changed her life,” as she herself admits. However, as a special education teacher, she is the one who contributes to changing the lives of many children.

Every morning, while he religiously drank his daily Cola-Cao, he would watch Club Súper 3, of which he was a member. At home, they still keep his membership card. Since he has two older siblings, until the seventh month of pregnancy, his mother thought he would be a girl –a wish that was not fulfilled because a few years later another boy arrived. The first years were not easy: “Until he was two years old, he was often sick, with problems with mucus, his chest, and his ears. At two years old, they had to operate on his adenoids and everything started to get better.” So says Ana Sitges, the mother of the politician Ferran Montero, candidate for mayor of Manacor for MÉS per Manacor.

He was a difficult child to raise, because he didn't like to eat at all. He only wanted to run through the fields, explore nature and, mind you, feed little animals. “As a child, I already knew that a rabbit, a goat, and a pig must eat differently, and I would scold whoever gave them food without taking that into account.” He, however, was a picky eater. Who would have said, twenty-odd years later, that he would have a shop of food made by himself. We are talking about Nicolau Pons (Pollença, 1994), founder of Sa Cabreta, an organic farm and artisanal cheese factory located in the Serra de Tramuntana, in Pollença. One of his aunts, Cati Pons, tells us about him – his mother is one of four sisters and two brothers!

In Santa Margalida there is a street called Sa Placeta because it is a three-cornered area that forms a small square. In the eighties, quite a few kids lived among the houses in that neighborhood, about seventeen or eighteen. They were not the same age, but there was only a five-year age gap between them. Time passed, everyone went their own way, but every summer they close the street and have a dinner to meet up again. Including partners and children, about 60 people get together. One of the guests is the glosador Mateu Matas OrdinasXurí (Santa Margalida, 1982). His older brother, Joan, who is five years his senior, tells us about it.

One day, at school, she told off a nun who had hit her little sister. She was, and still is, “very protective, defiant and justice-seeking”. She was a girl “who made herself noticed”, according to the one protected, the little one, Catalina. We are talking about Maria Antònia Oliver, president of the Memòria de Mallorca organization, who is the second of three siblings. The older brother is Francisco.

Among his references were Subcomandante Marcos and Malcolm X, one of his idols when he was young. He played basketball, but he has also been practicing less conventional sports for years, such as boxing. He is a fan of Ismael Serrano. He studied Catalan Philology at the UIB and then Anthropology at the UB. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, students at the Ramon Llull building at the UIB filled the walls with graffiti against the war. Near the main stairs, one can still be seen. It was made by David Pujol, now a Catalan teacher and candidate for MÉS per Palma for the mayoralty of Ciutat. "Like the others, they wanted to cover it up, but it can still be distinguished." Says Antoni Trobat, David's friend since their university years.

In Sant Lluís (Menorca) lived Mrs. Van Oppen, daughter of a British military officer stationed in India when it was still under the direct control of the British Crown. She gave private English lessons which, beyond grammatical and phonetic foundations, "were filled with landscapes, experiences, and lifestyles" that far surpassed the daily experience and canons of Western culture known until then by two Menorcan children born in the late 60s. "She encouraged exploring the unknown, opening up to new frontiers, accepting diversity. This experience, undoubtedly, would fuel our interest in opening up to new horizons. Alicia often comments that these English sessions were the seed of her later scientific vocation". Alicia is Alicia Sintes (1969), professor and doctor in Physics from the UIB; and her brother, Tomàs Sintes (1966), also a professor and doctor in Physics from the UIB, tells us about it.

“He is a person who illuminates your thoughts. For me, he is my spiritual father, fundamental in my life. He is one of those great men of whom one is born every century. A universal man who vibrates and makes others vibrate, and who throughout his life has done everything with love, generosity, and tolerance.” This is how the village poet Antoni Gost Curro (1953) speaks. He says it about another Antoni, known, admired, and loved, difficult to classify: a pharmacist, a cultural activist, a social agitator, and a revolutionary. We are talking about Antoni Torrens Gost (1937), the driving force behind sa Pobla in Gràcia, the meeting of bagpipers and luthiers, the Llar de la Memòria, the Albopàs group of devils... among so many other things.

He has lived in Andorra for years, a usual location among professional cyclists for altitude training camps. Likewise, he maintains lifelong friends with whom he started cycling. The group of friends assures that in short distances he is practically the same as when he was a child: “Approachable, fun, and very natural”. However, he has always been “very private about his intimacy”: “He doesn't like interviews and cameras at all, and if he can avoid them, he does”, tells us Joan Danús, one of the childhood friends of professional cyclist Enric Mas (Artà, 1995).

A family snapshot: the six members squeezed into a three-door orange Renault 5. They are four siblings born in Llucmajor. At home, Spanish was always spoken: the father had arrived from the Peninsula and married a Mallorcan woman, the mother. The family's linguistic idiosyncrasy changed when the third brother was about 17 years old. We will tell it later. The third brother was born in 1968 and today he is a poet, narrator, and professor: Miquel Bezares. A fire at his home, when he was about four years old, impacted him so much that even today, when he starts to smell burning, he feels a certain dread, as if that smell had stayed stuck in his nose forever. The youngest brother, Jesús – although everyone knows him by the nickname Tuti – says that Miquel "was an extraordinarily bright child": "At eight years old, he already had the head of a fifteen-year-old boy; and at fifteen, he looked like an old man," he laughs.

They knew each other by sight until an event caused their life threads to become entangled forever. Linguist and professor Nicolau Dols tells us about the writer Biel Mesquida: “In 2001, Biel published T’estim a tu, a collection of articles about Mallorca at the time. I wrote a review of it in El Mirall. A few days later, when we were still using answering machines, I arrived at the office and there was a message from him. He didn’t say anything to me. He simply recited, impeccably, Joan Alcover’s poem Desolació. I understood that gesture as an elegant and very typical way of thanking me for the review. It must be said that he has one of the best voices in the Catalan Countries for reciting.” The friendship was consolidated a little later, when they coincided working at the UIB. Nicolau did not know Biel as a child, but their relationship is such a long after-dinner conversation that the professor says he can give some details about it.

As a baby he slept a lot, so much so that his grandfather would often say to him: “You need to get a move on, be sharp. It’s not good to sleep so much”. He was so content in his baby role that he had little interest in walking. One fine day, without having gone through the crawling stage, he got up, put on his shoes – on the wrong feet – and started walking. “I think his steps just came to him because he’s very stubborn!”. This is told to us by Aunt Marieta – Maria Bauzà – the wife of the brother of Miquel Àngel Raió’s mother, who started dating the old man when the current director of the Principal Theatre of Inca was only two months old – she was 17 years old. She saw him born. And she still remembers the laughter that the family produced seeing him walk in that way, so confident, the day the child decided it was time to get up.

As a child, she was creative, bright, and very independent. She is the third of four siblings who were born and raised in Palma, behind the Born: “She had a very rich inner world. She spent many hours playing in the courtyard that is now Casal Solleric, imagining stories and building her own universes”. She is slightly scattered, but with a lot of “visionary capacity”. In fact, 25 years ago she decided to make a change in the family restaurant, create her own vegetable garden there and bet on local, zero-kilometer produce: “It seemed like an extravagance at the time, but when she had an idea in her head, she would go ahead with it without paying much attention to what others said”. This is how she launched Ca na Toneta, the iconic family restaurant in Caimari. Maria Solivellas (1970) is the chef who revolutionized it, but before putting on an apron, she did many other things, driven by an infinite curiosity. This is told to us by the actress Catalina Solivellas, her second sister – the eldest is Teresa, and the youngest, Pep.

It is known that he was a friend of the writers Blai Bonet, Bernat Vidal i Tomàs and Jaume Pomar; also of the couple formed by Maria Antònia Oliver and Jaume Fuster – the latter, incidentally, taught him the first notions of computing. He was born in 1945 in Santanyí, a land of writers. And the protagonist of these lines is no exception: Antoni Vidal Ferrando, poet, narrator and historian. His story is told by the writer's eldest daughter, Antònia. He has another son, Andreu.

He has an extraordinary natural talent for rhythm and a very fine sense of harmony. In fact, he even played bass with people from the Deià scene, linked to English punk, in groups like Sex Beatles. Who knows if it's because from a very young age he listened to music that didn't sound anywhere else on Mallorca: his older brother, Jaume, brought him the latest music records directly from London in the early 70s. The middle brother is Joan and the protagonist of these lines is the gallerist Xavier Fiol (Palma, 1962). He is brought to us by who would be, given the years they have known each other and the affection they have, the fourth brother: Ivan Albons.

When he was young, between 8 and 10 years old, he greatly enjoyed the horror book series Goosebumps, by R. L. Stine. As an adolescent, he listened on repeat to the album Californication, by Red Hot Chili Peppers. During the 2003 Copa del Rei final, which Mallorca won, cameras captured a boy running towards the players, dressed in white, with a microphone in his hand, trying to get the first statements amidst all the joy: “That boy was my brother,” says Manel Barjacoba, the younger brother of IB3 Radio director, Daniel Barjacoba (born in Binissalem), who is called Dani. Before all that, however, Sílvia arrived, the older sister, with whom Dani is practically one year apart: she is from 1985 and he is from 1986. Indeed: this year is Dani's 40th year. And Manel, the youngest of the three, who is seven years younger than the journalist, tells us about it.

From a very young age, she had her ideas very clear. “When she set her mind on something, she had to have her way,” they say about her. She soon developed a special ability to achieve what she wanted: “She knew perfectly how to ask for things from each person. She did it with innocence, but she almost always succeeded. She had great intuition for reading people.” Children and stories have been two constants throughout her life. When she was a girl, she would sit the little ones down and tell them stories. Later she studied teaching and worked for a few years as a Primary school teacher before dedicating herself fully to philology. We are talking about Caterina Valriu (Inca, 1960), na Catalina Contacontes, and her older sister, Paula, who is seven years her junior, introduces us to her.

He heard the first jotes and boleros in Valldemossa, where his father was from, a village that was beginning, in the mid-50s, to be touristy. She was born in 1948 and grew up in Palma, where her mother was from. At her home there was a pickup that was always on. The first records she listened to were Picolíssima Serenata, by Renato Carosone, and Una Casita en Canadá. She was particularly marked by French chanson and Italian singer-songwriters, but she also developed a taste for classical music: “She deeply adores Bach”. She is the second of three siblings: the eldest is Biel, a lawyer; the youngest, Rafel, a set designer. She is a composer, one of the most recognized voices in Mallorca: we are talking about Miquela Lladó. Pere Estelrich, a mathematician, musicologist, and collaborator of various media, introduces us to her.