The presentation a few days ago of the new section of Palma's second ring road recalled, as ARABalears explains, those times indelible in our memory of the “Majorcan-style roads” of Maria Antònia Munar. Works presented with good canapés, marquees and, above all, a lot of nerve. Because they intended to make citizens believe that laying more asphalt was solving mobility.

Tourist saturation is one of the star topics of the legislature, especially when four years will have passed without structural measures having been applied to mitigate its effects. “The transformation of the Balearic Islands' economic model is the first challenge facing this autonomous community.” These words are part of the speech that the President of the Government, Marga Prohens, gave at the General Policy Debate on October 1, 2024. It is lucky that it was the first challenge two years ago, because if it had been the third or fourth, the residents might have already had to exile ourselves to the 'emptied Spain' to be able to breathe. “While being clear that we are a hospitable land where tourists are welcome, we all agree that we can no longer continue to grow in volume, and that the transformation of our model is non-postponable.” I am sorry, but here we must contradict Prohens: time has shown that the transformation of the model is entirely postponable. Two years later and about to end the legislature, the facts remind us of that Julio Iglesias song that said “la vida sigue igual”.

The Consell de Menorca has postponed until Wednesday the extraordinary plenary session scheduled for this Monday to approve the modification of the Biosphere Reserve Law, a necessary step to promote the limitation of vehicle entry to the island.

The Consell de Mallorca anticipates that by the end of the year, approximately 200,000 ITV inspections will be carried out, a figure that would allow for around 534,000 vehicle inspections in 2026, in line with those performed last year. In fact, 350,898 technical vehicle inspections have already been conducted this year.

“The perception of the citizens of the Balearic Islands towards tourism is improving. Nine tenths in one year and it achieves a score of five out of ten”. This is the news that IB3, the public television of the Balearic Islands, broadcast on August 13, two weeks after 70,000 people demonstrated in Palma against tourist saturation, and only days after the protest in Sóller on August 8. The source that allowed this conclusion to be reached is a barometer from a consultancy called LLYC, specialized in “communication, reputation management, public affairs and digital marketing”, according to the company on its website.

Although public discourse advocates for distributing tourists during winter and reducing arrivals or, at least, preventing an increase in summer, reality is stubborn: in July 2026, and throughout the high season, Palma airport has broken records. With 19.6 million passengers achieved by July, Son Sant Joan confirms that the increase is not stopping and that, moreover, it is concentrated between May and July, awaiting what may happen during August.

The second week of August Menorca has welcomed a new large-format music festival, Ukalari Live. The managers of the theater of the same name in Ciutadella, Alberto Gómez and Miriam Torres, dare to program 10 days of concerts, from David Bustamante to The Tyets and the tribute This is Michael, in a venue set up at the Sporting Maonès football field which can hold 4,000 people. These days employ about thirty people and cause the indirect creation – they estimate – of 300 more jobs. A significant leap, but they say it is controlled, compared to what they are used to at the old Calós theater, now Ukalari, where in two years they have managed to regularly fill its 575 seats and have attracted nearly 25,000 spectators.

The tourist pressure on Mallorca continues relentlessly in the middle of high season. Tourist rental homes on the island have already reached a booking rate of 99% for this August, the highest of all coastal areas in the State, according to a study by Rentalia, Idealista's holiday platform.

Govern after govern, councilor after councilor, plan after plan, day after day, and presentation after presentation. Good words, intentions, and, for some time now, a certain self-criticism have succeeded one another. “We are at the limit.” Now, even the PP admits that the Islands are on the verge of collapse.

While Aena and the island and regional governments pass the buck over who is responsible for the saturation, the saturation does not stop increasing. In the first six months of 2026, Mallorca's main airport has once again pulverized all its records and is already close to 15 million passengers (14.9), which represents 14% more than just three years ago, compared to the first semester of 2023.

The territorial coordinator of GOB, Miquel Camps Taltavull (Maó, 1963), is warming up to launch from this Saturday, June 13 (7:30 PM), the new summer of mobilizations announced by Via Menorca. An army of ants "fed up with mass tourism" are already walking towards the Biosphere Square in Maó to demonstrate in defense of the right to housing and against those who "suck our water dry until the aquifers are left dry" and those who "condemn us to precarious jobs to barely live off tourism".

It is enough to spend a few minutes in Carrer de la Lluna in Sóller to realize how difficult it is to find any 'native' there. There isn't a tourist guide that doesn't recommend visiting this spot in town, and it shows. It's also hard to walk without bumping into someone, and finding a traditional shop is now almost impossible. “About four businesses close a year on this street. My mother has a haberdashery there, and when she retires, no one will take it over. They'll put in another souvenir shop. The photography shop closed, and the clothing shop geared towards the island's residents. In fact, I used to be able to buy a book in Sóller. And now there's no bookstore,” explains Bartomeu Miró, a resident of the town and spokesperson for SOS Sóller, a citizen movement that has not stopped denouncing that the situation is unsustainable.

While the Parliament began to process the reform of the Law of capital of Palma, a hundred people had already received the order to leave the old prison without knowing where they will live when the judicial process ends. This image summarizes the political moment that the Balearic Islands are going through. The capital that the mayor Jaime Martínez claims as the economic and institutional engine of the Islands is also the scene where many of the tensions that have marked the PP's return to the main institutions are concentrated: the housing crisis, tourist saturation, demographic pressure caused by the need for labor in the tourist economic model, the fragility of public services, and a discourse increasingly obsessed with poor migrants.

When a year before the pandemic, the friend Àlex Dioscórides directed the magnificent documentary ‘Overbooking’, which already highlighted some of the indicators that make us a collapsed island, I believe that neither he nor all the people who saw it were able to imagine that a day would come, just like this start of the season, where not only would politicians have done nothing to reverse the situation, but we would find ourselves with a situation of overbooking of overbooking.If the concept of overbooking refers to overbooking of overbooking I mean the conversion of this over-selling into a permanent strategy, thanks to which collapse is no longer the exception, but the norm, even beyond the high season, as these days. We are not only talking about airlines or hotels, where business overbooking used to occur, but also about tourist rental houses, car rentals and a long etcetera of tourist services and products – also cycle tourism, and how! –, which indirectly generate saturation in the services that we residents need – and pay for –: roads, public transport and, indirectly, health and education, pressured by the population growth that the overbooking of overbooking.That the overbooking of overbooking goes beyond the “sensations” or “caprice” of residents was recently confirmed by the Government itself, when the Forum of Civil Society forced it to make public the results of the resident opinion poll, which indicates that the satisfaction level with tourism had fallen from 71% in 2018 to only 42% in 2024. For the first time, the overbooking of overbooking is causing a more than significant critical mass that is beginning to question the idea of ‘tourism is untouchable, because it's what feeds us’… 77.2% of residents directly blame tourism for the increase in housing prices; 55.4% for the rise in the cost of basic goods and services; 65.5% perceive an excessive saturation of streets, shops, and public transport; 62.3% believe that tourism degrades natural resources and the landscape.A few days ago, on a trip to Sóller, I was able to experience firsthand an overbooking that has been exceeded for some time, where the recipes of politicians, both local and regional, are limited to wanting to "manage better" the flow of cars, but without anyone daring to say that what needs to be done is to reduce, limit, decrease... Sóller is the metaphor for the overbooking of overbooking: living in a postcard town and not being able to leave your home. I would like to see in a few years studies on the increase in respiratory illnesses due to the increase in vehicle traffic, as it is quite evident that this must already be affecting the inhabitants of the municipality in terms of public health, as well as other daily headaches.

Son Espases University Hospital has begun to reschedule non-urgent surgeries and reinforce the emergency service staff due to the peak in healthcare demand registered since Wednesday, a situation that has also forced a review of the planned activity for next week.

The Balearic Government and Palma City Council have reached a strategic agreement with the main cruise lines operating in Palma, whereby the maximum daily average of cruise passengers will be reduced from 8,500 to 7,500. This reduction, formalized through a new memorandum of understanding, will only affect the peak season months, from June to September, in 2027, 2028, and 2029. The agreement was signed this Friday morning by the President of the Balearic Government, Marga Prohens, the Mayor of Palma, and representatives from the cruise lines. The new agreement maintains the one signed by the government of Francina Armengol in 2022, which set a maximum of three cruise ships in the port of Palma, one of which may have a capacity exceeding 5,000 passengers.

"The first thing I must do is listen to the growing social unrest (...) which expresses a shared outcry that our model can no longer grow in volume, that our islands have already reached their limit, that going from almost 18 million visitors to potentially reaching 20 million is not sustainable. That is why we have to talk (...) about limits, we must talk about restraint." The President of the Government, Marga Prohens, made these remarks in Parliament on June 20, 2024, referring to the 17.8 million tourists expected in 2023. At the time, she was defending the Pact for Sustainability, an initiative that the Executive presented as historic in terms of changing the course of the Islands. However, many of the proposals remain unknown; the committee of experts that was supposed to evaluate them and select the most appropriate ones has never been established; the document outlining the framework for the transition has been shelved; and the Executive has already made it clear that it does not intend to implement any significant restraint measures. And yet we have over a million more visitors than when Prohens considered it essential to talk about limits: 19,053,592 tourists – 1.73% more than the 18.7 million in 2024.

The Ibiza Council has proposed setting a maximum daily limit of 18,918 vehicles on the roads for the upcoming summer season, which is 1,250 vehicles less than last year's limit. This figure will serve as the basis for the public consultation process the Council has opened for affected sectors before approving regulations for the 2026 and 2027 summer seasons.

The Civil Society Forum has warned that the transition to a more balanced, equitable, and sustainable model in Mallorca is "practically nonexistent." This is one of the main conclusions of the report "Key Indicators of Transitions by 2025," which also points to a "stagnation" in the elements that should enable social, environmental, and economic transitions. The study, presented this Thursday at the Estudi General Lul·lià as part of the Climate Academy's activities, identified a progressive increase in human pressure and an increasingly worrying housing crisis on the island, according to Europa Press. If this trend is not corrected, the Forum representatives were warned during the presentation, Mallorca is destined to become "a scenario of growing vulnerability" due to factors such as the climate crisis, political instability, and the monoculture of tourism. The overall conclusion of the study, which addresses each of these transitions separately, is that the transformation is "very slow and uneven." Without a "more robust and coordinated" intervention, an "unsustainable" model will become entrenched, increasing social vulnerability, degrading the land, and maintaining an economy "with little resilience to future crises." In light of this situation, as the Forum pointed out in a statement, the report's authors have proposed to the entire Mallorcan society, businesses, unions, and political parties the creation of a unified observatory to assess how to transition to an economic model capable of mitigating the effects of climate change. Human pressure and housing

One of the main points addressed by the study is the increased human pressure resulting from the combination of tourist arrivals and population growth. This increase, the authors emphasized, is characterized by a rise in social vulnerability, especially due to the financial burden of accessing housing, which has become "one of the main obstacles to advancing social transition." This pressure also translates into a greater strain on natural resources, services, infrastructure, and the sustainability of the territory. If this trend is not curbed, the report predicts that Mallorca could reach 56 million tourists annually and 1.5 million inhabitants by 2050. The study also highlights the use of private vehicles. In this regard, according to the study, Mallorca ranks second in the national classification for time lost in traffic congestion, with an average of 17 minutes per day for journeys of just ten kilometers. The report's authors also highlighted the worsening hydrological drought, linked to increased urban consumption, per capita waste generation well above the national average, and renewable energy, which, despite progress, is doing so "too slowly."

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Time is running out for Llorenç Galmés, the president of the Council of Mallorca. Only a year and a half remains in his term, and just one peak tourist season before the 2026 elections. It is at this point that his flagship proposal, limiting vehicle access to Mallorca, could gain greater visibility if implemented. However, this possibility is being complicated by the veto of Vox, with whom, despite the split in the Balearic Parliament, he continues to govern the island institution. Sources within the institution insist that they are still negotiating with the other groups to bring their proposal to the Parliament, but this process seems to be slowing down. Even so, the People's Party (PP) is not yet open to accepting the Socialist Party's (PSIB) offer to jointly approve the bill with the same objective that the Socialists have registered in the Parliament.

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