The Cathedral of Mallorca was the setting this Sunday for a grand concert in tribute to Joan Alcover, coinciding with the centenary of the first performance in Mallorca of La Balanguera set to music by Amadeu Vives. The event, organized by the Obra Cultural Balear (OCB), was part of the commemorations of the Year Alcover, which marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the Majorcan poet.

100 years after the death of Joan Alcover, Mallorca has once again sung with one voice La Balanguera, the island's official anthem for three decades. Thousands of people gathered in the Plaça Major in Palma, while dozens of municipalities simultaneously replicated the same scene in a mobilization promoted by the Obra Cultural Balear (OCB), a historic entity in defense of the Catalan language and culture. It also played in educational centers and Eroski chain supermarkets.

Poet, author of the poem The BalangueraJoan Alcover, whose song would become the anthem of Mallorca, was the host and driving force behind the prestigious gatherings held every Sunday at his home, Can Alcover, in Palma, with the most prominent figures of Mallorcan culture at the time. An art theorist, a man who suffered the loss of his first wife and four of his five children... Joan Alcover is widely remembered on the centenary of his death on February 25, 1926. Perhaps less well known, however, is his political side, the one that led him to become a member of parliament in Madrid and a champion of Catalan nationalism, with language as the unifying element of what we now call the Catalan Countries.