Some time ago I went to a party full of people from Manacor with a friend from out of town. A guy who wanted to meet her asked her to repeat “What color is Saint James’ white horse?” This apparently harmless phrase is a shibboleth, a formula that characterizes members of a linguistic group because it repeats a sound unknown to speakers of another language or dialect. Curiously, the word ‘xibòlet’ comes from the Bible, from the book of Judges, in which it is explained how forty-two thousand Ephraimites died for not being able to pronounce like our ‘x’ the initial consonant of the word, which they emitted as an ‘s’, which differentiated them from the rest of the Hebrews.

Walking in Palma, and in many other towns in the Balearic Islands, has become an obstacle course. Cars are encroaching on sidewalks, blocking pedestrian access. Peatones Mallorca (Pedestrians Mallorca) recently posted a video on Instagram showing the difficulties a mother with a stroller faces trying to walk her child in her neighborhood, located around Isidre Llaurador Street. With this footage, the organization denounces this "shameful" problem, which is repeated in other neighborhoods and towns, and argues that "there are too many cars and not enough planning."

'Porto Solea', 'Bar de Mosa', 'Campanei', 'Cala Miloa', 'Cala Mi Lord', 'Cala Santani'. These are some of the responses posted on social media by the marketing agency Ximbomba in collaboration with the Instagram account Mallorca Viral. The agency asked tourists which towns they've visited and posed the following question to users: can you pronounce the names of these towns? In the humorous video, the interviewees' answers to the towns and villages they've visited are particularly interesting.

García is the predominant lineage in nine municipalities in Mallorca. After centuries where towns had distinctive and distinct lineages, and you could almost tell from a person's lineage what municipality they were from, globalization seems to have also reached the lineages of Mallorcans, with a clear example: García.