The reputation of Maria Antònia Munar was shot to pieces by corruption charges of which she was found guilty; she was sentenced to a total of fourteen years. Munar was one of Mallorca's most important politicians and leader of the Unió Mallorquina, a party of the centre-right founded in 1982 which had nationalist pretentions but was better defined as regionalist.
In 2001 she was the president of the Council of Mallorca, the UM having secured the presidency through a post-1999 election deal with the left by which PSOE got the presidency of the Balearic Government for the first time. In that year, Munar created controversy - a hell of a stink, one could say - because of observations about 'quality tourism'. Reverberations from this were felt in Germany and not in the UK. German quality was seemingly under attack and the German media went to work, Bild most obviously.
For the most part, a fall of around half a million tourists in 2002 was erroneously attributed to the introduction of the ecotax in that year. The tax may have had some impact, but the decline was overwhelmingly German and Munar had helped bring it about. It was shortlived and tourist numbers more or less totally recovered in 2003. In a way she may have felt vindicated by the slump, because in 2001 she had argued the need for a reduction in tourism to be controlled by the regional government and the tourism sector itself. "This would be positive because it would tend towards a quality tourism."
It was this to which Germany in particular took exception. An accusation of xenophobia was compounded by the fact she had also advocated limiting the entry of more residents into Mallorca. "There will come a time when this will not be Mallorca, but Hong Kong. And when that happens, not even tourists will come; neither quality nor poor quality." The limits were needed because of, among other things, the rising prices of homes.
Move forward to the present, and the Balearics as a whole have a population that has risen faster than anywhere else in Spain. As of January 1 this year it was 1,244,394. At the start of the century it was 817,313, and Mallorca - now with a population of 966,908 - has born the brunt of this increase. Immigration has been the principal cause.
This has led the College of Architects in the Balearics to say: "It is important to define, with the broadest possible consensus, what the horizon of our region is and how far we are willing to grow in population." In its submissions to the government's housing decree, the College added: "We must be aware that continued growth year after year is not sustainable in a finite territory with limited natural resources. In our community, all growth compromises other fundamental values, always in a fragile balance."
There are key issues for the architects - more vehicles, greater demand for housing, more hospitals, more schools. They allude to a social transformation and a 'demographic bomb' that historian Miquel Payeras has previously highlighted. The consequences of this, he has argued, will be felt even more acutely in the middle of the next decade.
So much focus has been placed on tourism and the pressures it has created, but the population growth is every bit as significant, more so given the implications for the issues the architects identify. The population of the Balearics is projected to grow by a further 300,000 by around 2036: more people but also a furtherance of the social transformation linked to immigration.
Had Maria Munar been right in 2001?