Maria Lluïsa Suau dies, pioneer of television in Catalan in the Balearic Islands

PalmaThe journalist Maria Lluïsa Suau passed away this Monday at the age of 87. On November 15, 1979, she presented with Joan Santamaria the first broadcast of the Informatiu Balear on TVE. It was one of the first audiovisual news spaces in Catalan in the Balearic Islands and Suau was one of its most well-known faces.

She had started working at Ràdio Popular, from where she followed the democratic transition in the Balearic Islands. Later she moved to TVE. In those first months, the program was prepared in the Islands, but the territorial center did not yet exist: the tapes traveled every day by plane to Madrid to be broadcast the next day. Suau presented the news and also followed the activity of the Balearic deputies and senators in the Spanish capital.

Her voice left the screen on February 27, 1981. Four days after the attempted coup d'état, she read the manifesto at the rally in defense of democracy held in Palma, in which some 15,000 people participated.

Years later she returned to read a manifesto in front of a full square. It was in March 2007, at the end of the demonstration "Enough destruction. Let's save Mallorca", called by the GOB and Salvem Mallorca against the degradation of the territory and the urban planning policies of those years. Suau and the painter and theatre director Joan Lacomba had to repeat the reading because the last demonstrators were still arriving at the Plaça Major. The protest had brought together tens of thousands of people in the streets of Palma.

Born in Palma on September 17, 1939, Suau is part of the first generation of journalists who made television in Catalan in the Balearic Islands. In 2008 she received the Ramon Llull Award. The Government then recognized her contribution to linguistic normalization through the Informatiu Balear and her professional career.