On November 20, 1975, the day Franco died, there were approximately 5,000 unemployed people in the Balearic Islands who, since the 1973 international oil crisis, felt completely abandoned. Three weeks later, on January 13, 1976, about fifty of them decided to express their discontent with the government of Arias Navarro by locking themselves inside the church of Sant Miquel in Palma. They did so with the complicity of the Bishop of Mallorca, Teodor Úbeda. The following day, they were violently evicted by the police, who were acting on orders from the Civil Governor, Carlos de Meer.

He was the great-grandson of the prominent Mallorcan politician Antoni Maura, as well as Duke of Maura and Grandee of Spain—as are all dukes—a law graduate, and also a diplomat. In January 1976, 50 years ago, Ramiro Pérez-Maura took office as Civil Governor of the Balearic Islands, to lead a process whose direction was then unclear to most: the Transition. Later, he would be one of the founders in the Islands of the Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD), a senator, and a member of the pre-autonomy government.

GOB Mallorca presented the report this Friday in Parliament Impacts on the work of ecosocial transformation in the Balearic Islands. A degrowth proposalPrepared by the Garúa cooperative, the document argues that a well-planned eco-social transition could lead to a net increase in employment, with higher-quality jobs and more dignified working conditions, while simultaneously improving the quality of life for citizens. GOB spokesperson Margalida Ramis explained that the report puts forward "fundamental proposals" to move towards an economic model less dependent on tourism and more aligned with the archipelago's ecological limits. "The Balearic Islands are a limited, fragile territory, damaged by environmental and economic crises that must be at the center of the social and political debate," she emphasized. She added that the goal is for the document to serve as the basis for a public discussion throughout 2026 on the economic, social, and political viability of these proposals. A model based on over-tourism

UIB researcher Iván Murray, a member of the GRICCS research group, has presented a metabolic analysis of the Balearic economy, that is, an evaluation of the energy and material flows that sustain the current model. According to Murray, since the end of World War II, the Islands have become "a laboratory of touristification," a process that has fueled dependence on an abundant and cheap workforce to serve an ever-increasing transient population. This model, he explained, has been accompanied by strong demographic and territorial pressure, as well as a high level of energy and material dependence. Currently, each person generates a daily material footprint of 27.4 kilos, and 90% of the energy consumed in the Islands is used for electricity and transportation—air and land. "We are an economic system that requires many external resources and leaves an unsustainable environmental footprint," Murray warned.

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