The devil in the Nou Levante neighborhood

PalmAs expected, the Nou Llevant neighborhood has become the flagship of the new Palma, which is the one that could emerge from urban planning regulations that disregard rural land and promote development without much, if any, consideration. New, in any case, there will be little: if anything, it will be a larger, more expensive, more crowded, more unlivable city, with increasingly blatant and difficult-to-bridge social class divides. As is often said about Palma these days: a city with all the drawbacks of large cities, and none, or very few, of their advantages. A city that over the last half-century has grown haphazardly, ignoring planning (when it has existed), at the mercy of speculative pressures, always under the tutelage and demands of the tourism sector.

Nuevo Levante reflects the model of society envisioned by its proponents and developers. Large white blocks of expensive apartments, averaging around €400,000, which some might imagine could be considered affordable on an island where the luxury real estate market is booming, and where super-millionaires are flocking to pay two, three, and five million euros for a villa. But €400,000 apartments are not affordable. At least, they are not for the majority of a population that earns around €16,000 gross per year and, moreover, works half a year on and half off. For these people, who we must insist are the majority, a €400,000 apartment is not just beyond their means: it is not even within their reach. They cannot afford it, not even dream of it.

The Nou Llevant blogs (ugly, let me say) are vertical filing cabinets, with a communal pool and mini-commercial areas inside or around the property, for independent professionals, retirees, ex-pats, and, where appropriate, high-net-worth tourists. They are not designed or built, despite our authorities' claims to the contrary, to solve the housing crisis affecting the Balearic Islands in general, and Palma in particular. On the contrary, they are likely to contribute to worsening it. Similarly, Palma's second ring road will not ease traffic or access to the city; on the contrary, it will obviously saturate them even further. However, it will be the excuse they need to build more and more apartment blocks around the new roads.

In the middle of all this are the cats, of course. The cat is a universal animal: its domestication began a caramull of years ago, between seven and ten thousand years ago (the domestication of the dog is even older, and goes back a fork of between twenty and forty thousand years). During this time, the cat has become accustomed to living with humans, although it also still exists in the wild. Be that as it may, wherever we go where there are humans, we can be almost certain that there will also be cats (except in extremely extreme climates: I don't know if cats can withstand the polar cold, as dogs can). Therefore, it's not surprising that in the Nou Llevant neighborhood there are cats running riot, as this photo by Isaac Buj shows. They walk around and, above all, look for places to lie down, which is what cats like to do most. But not to lie down just any old way, but in the best possible conditions: a good temperature, but in the shade and without excessive heat. We could say that cats are gourmets of the site, although this one we see in the photo has settled for a roasted and rusty surface, like so many things in Mallorca that we are doing.

Dark Matter

The cat is also an animal that some associate with dark matter. With witches, with the devil. We readers ofThe Master and Margarita, the legendary novel by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov (of which, incidentally, an excellent theatrical adaptation directed by Àlex Rigola premiered this week at Barcelona's Teatre Lliure). In this prodigious story, the devil shows up in Moscow in the 1930s to sow panic, and he does so in person, but also in the guise of a cat. I mean, one of the appearances the devil takes on to make his presence felt is that of a black bird that bodes ill. Without meaning to frighten anyone, if the devil walked around Moscow in the 1930s in the form of a cat, it warns him that he might not also be able to do so in Palma in the 1920s. Is he perhaps acting as an observer for a vulture fund...