The warnings have been of no use, nor the fear of losing the World Heritage recognition that UNESCO granted in 2023 to the valuable archaeological legacy of Menorca. The Popular Party government at the Island Council has disobeyed UNESCO and the Ministry of Culture and has gone straight ahead with the construction of the viaduct over the prehistoric navetas of Rafal Rubí, one of the sites included in the universal candidacy. Instead of demolishing the structure, as was demanded of it, it has maintained it and has traced over the viaduct the new section of the main road between Maó and Alaior. A policy of *fait accompli*.

The National Police have reported four militants from Arran Menorca for an alleged hate crime for wearing t-shirts with the slogan 'K*ll a tourist, free a house'. All four were summoned to testify at the courts of Mahón last August. The complaint was made public by Arran this Thursday on social media, after the Public Prosecutor's Office rejected the appeal filed by the organization against the decision to initiate judicial proceedings.

The entity Pla de Mallorca XXI presented the conference The Pla facing its transformation which will be held on October 30 and 31 in Lloret with the aim of addressing a profound debate on the territorial changes that are taking place in the interior of Mallorca as a consequence of the intense touristification of the island and the chalet-style development that threaten and are already a reality in the center of the island.

The 401 bus line of Transports de les Illes Balears enters Manacor with people already standing. They come from Cala Millor, passing through Porto Cristo. In the capital of the Llevant region, it makes three stops where people do not stop boarding the vehicle and, inevitably, many passengers end up standing for more than 50 kilometers.

The plenary session of the Ibiza Council approved this Friday the declaration of three tourist areas in the municipality of Vila as "saturated tourist areas and areas for redevelopment," which means that plans, projects, and redevelopment actions must be considered of insular strategic interest.

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.