PalmThe urban planning deregulation brought about by the Administrative Simplification Law—approved by Parliament last December with the votes of the People's Party (PP) and Vox—will allow the construction of up to 1,500 villas in areas considered at risk of fire in Mallorca. These constructions could not be carried out until now, because a decree-law of the Pact expressly prohibited the placement of houses in forests. But the Simplification Decree-Law of May 2024 and the December law have opened the door to building villas even in areas at risk of fire.
The figure was calculated by geographer Mateu Vic, a member of Terraferida, the organization that, despite currently being less active, has decided to delve into what it considers "a true aberration." "We see that, with climate change, forests are dustbins. And the PP-Vox majority has no other idea than to authorize the construction of chalets within them," Vic laments.
The left-wing Pact decided in 2020 to end the possibility of building houses in areas considered at risk, both from fire and from landslides, erosion, and flooding. Decree 9/2020 prevented the construction of thousands of chalets in Mallorca and partially in Ibiza, since Menorca has a territorial plan that prohibits any new rural construction. The larger Pitiusa has also protected areas at risk of fire through its territorial regulations.
![While half of Spain has burned, in Mallorca they will build houses in the forest.](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 4962 3509"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Under the pretext of simplifying and streamlining the administration, Marga Prohens's government approved a significant amnesty for illegal housing on rural land in May 2024, which was also accompanied by the complete repeal of planning bans in high-risk areas. After the flood in Valencia, "they panicked and backed down on flood zones, taking advantage of the parliamentary process of the simplification decree law," confirms an administration technician who requests anonymity. But the remaining high-risk areas were permanently unprotected when the law was passed at the end of the year.
Houses in Llucmajor
The municipality that will benefit most from the deregulation promoted by Prohens is Llucmajor. Terraferida warns that this municipality has already sacrificed some of its most valuable land for residential developments, detached villas, and solar farms, and demands that the City Council decree a suspension of licenses, as it also requests for Manacor, a municipality governed by the left, which declares itself an environmentalist party.
The Terraferida geographer has analyzed all the plots in fire-risk zones and recalls that, "with the Pact regulations, if you had a property partially within a fire-risk zone, you could put the house there." "On the other hand, if the entire plot was in a fire-risk zone, it was simply unbuildable," Vic points out. With the current regulations, adding the two assumptions, the total number of chalets that can be built within forested areas and that couldn't be done before exceeds 1,400. There are also "those plots that can be added. We've already identified a hundred to start with, but there are many more," Vic confirms.
For Carolina Rodríguez, dean of the College of Forestry Engineers, "the first problem is accepting that rural construction is possible. At this point, all the remaining rural areas should be unbuildable, because their purpose is not urban planning. Destruction of natural heritage."
Furthermore, Rodríguez points out that, "in the event of a fire, the existence of houses complicates safety and operations, because houses have no role in the forest." "In the Mediterranean, we have reflected models from other places, such as northern Europe, mythologizing the concept of a cabin in the woods, by the lake. This doesn't make sense here, and it's a shame they're authorized," asserts the dean of engineers.
Furthermore, the increasing urbanization of forested areas requires the creation of self-protection strips "which are still aggressions in the forest." "But of course, they must be done for safety," explains Rodríguez, adding that "the more chalets, the more strips and the less forest." As forestry engineer Oriol Domenech emphasizes, "administratively, trees can be cut down, unfortunately." "You're eliminating the risk and increasing the impact," he says.
As if that weren't enough, some housing developments near forest and scrubland areas have so forced the occupation of land authorized for construction that, when the time comes to create the mandatory protection strip, "they've already consumed the land and are forcing the neighbors, property owners who haven't speculated, to cut down the trees. This, according to the dean of forestry, shows that "they want to get the maximum profit from the land through urban development."
If we analyze the data compiled by the members of Terraferida, the municipalities that will be able to build the most villas thanks to deregulation are, in this order: Llucmajor (198), Manacor (156), Felanitx (112), Campos (94) and Santanyí (62). According to the spokesperson for the organization, Jaume Adrover, "these are precisely the municipalities that have caused the greatest urban development pressure on the territory." "Where the most rural development has been built, where the most swimming pools have been built, where the most solar parks are being built and, curiously, where the last highway, the Llucmajor-Campos, was built," recalls the activist.
In this sense, Adrover believes that "we are facing a process of accelerated urbanization in these municipalities of the Levante and Migjorn, which are becoming luxury suburbs." "Furthermore, sloping areas will be affected, both in Llucmajor and in the mountains of Manacor and Felanitx, which are very visible, with a significant impact," he emphasizes. In the opinion of Mateu Vic and Jaume Adrover, "the time has come to change the model and stop exploiting rural land as if it were a space for urban development with no alternative." "Municipalities can no longer look the other way, especially those that have been filled with villas in recent years. They need to urgently suspend licenses, stop apologizing, and compensate for the nonsense committed by the PP and Vox, if they really care about their territory," Adrover asserts.
Aggregations
One of the problems facing rural land is the possibility of aggregating plots, that is, joining different properties to create the necessary square footage for new buildings. Along these lines, specialists believe there are at least 100 cases in forested areas where a simple aggregation would also allow for the construction of chalets, which until now were not permitted.
According to data from Terraferida, more than 11 km² of land was developed between 2015 and 2021, the equivalent of 1,400 football fields. In Mallorca alone, more than 0.55 hectares of fertile land or forest are consumed every day—an area the size of the Seo de Mallorca every 19 hours—and 5,271 swimming pools have been built, many of them on rural land. This rate has not slowed in recent years. The peculiarity is that, in addition to legalizing irregular construction, the Simplification Law and the Land Acquisition Law approved by the PP and Vox allow the continued use of rural land for houses, and even apartment buildings.
These decisions have provoked strong opposition, especially from the political opposition and environmental movements. The GOB has stated on several occasions that the government of Marga Prohens is promoting a policy of deregulation of rural land, including protected land. "This involves eliminating legal obstacles and facilitating speculative operations under pretexts such as housing and administrative simplification," the environmentalists point out. The Administrative Simplification Law has been the subject of a constitutional appeal supported by the PSIB-PSOE, Sumar MÁS, and Podemos. Now, the High Court will be the only party that can prevent further construction on fertile land.
