Terraferida returns: "A greener and more fertile Mallorca is still possible"

PalmThe environmental group Terraferida announced on Monday the resumption of its public activity almost three years after suspending it. This coincides with the tenth anniversary of its founding and the imminent publication of a study that, they say, reveals an "unprecedented destruction" of the Mallorcan landscape over the last decade.

The research, entitled Inventory of the devastation of Mallorca 2015-2024The study focuses particularly on the period 2021-2024, for which aerial images are already available, allowing for a precise analysis of recent changes in rural land use. According to Terraferida, the study quantifies and documents the proliferation of hundreds of new villas, swimming pools, quarries, and photovoltaic plants outside the town, a process that—they warn—is advancing at a "dizzying" pace.

The group maintains that this trend is irreversibly transforming Mallorca and warns that, if not stopped soon, the island risks becoming "one big city, one vast suburb." According to the organization, the loss of forests, woodlands, and fertile land has a direct impact on natural resources, the quality of life, and the health of the population and ecosystems. Terraferida criticizes the fact that, except in the case of Menorca, no government or institution has implemented effective changes to halt this process, which they consider a "collective failure" with serious consequences for the future of the territory. Despite this stark diagnosis, the group argues that it is still possible to reverse the situation and recover degraded areas if there is political and social will. With this new phase, Terraferida announces that it will focus its efforts on research and analysis of funds that can be useful for public debate and will reduce its constant presence on social media. "The future is not written, it is yet to be made," they affirm, convinced that a "greener, more beautiful, and more fertile" Mallorca is still possible.

History

When the name Terraferida began circulating in the mid-2010s, Mallorca had already accumulated decades of urban and tourist growth, but had not yet fully grasped the extent to which this model had entered a phase of structural saturation. The environmental collective—founded around 2013—emerged precisely at a moment of change: when the debate was no longer about whether or not to grow, but how and with what irreversible consequences. Terraferida did not burst onto the scene as a classic entity of the environmental movement. It did not focus its action on large mobilizations or symbolic campaigns, but rather on the systematic analysis, counting, and denunciation of the transformations of the territory. Its main contribution has been to transform shared intuitions—that Mallorca was becoming overcrowded, that rural land was ceasing to be rural, that resource consumption was increasing—into measurable and comparable data. From the specific case to the structural phenomenon

One of the keys to Terraferida's work has been to avoid isolated cases. Where public debate had traditionally focused on a specific housing development, a controversial project, or a particular piece of infrastructure, the group chose to look at the whole picture. Using aerial photographs, cadastral databases, and official statistics, they began to quantify phenomena that had previously been addressed in a fragmented way. Thus, Terraferida put numbers to the proliferation of single-family homes on rural land, the sustained increase in private swimming pools, the expansion of existing buildings, and the still-latent building potential in current planning regulations. The message was clear: these were not isolated excesses, but rather a permissive land-use model that, accumulated year after year, generated an enormous cumulative impact. In this sense, the organization played a key role as an early warning system. It showed that many of the most significant transformations didn't occur through large, visible developments, but rather through thousands of small, often legal, but environmentally unsustainable administrative decisions.