Following a three-year hiatus, environmental activists Terraferida have returned with a study which points to construction on a vast scale in Mallorca's rural areas.
Geographer Mateu Vic has spent a year mapping "a plague that is spreading across the island". From analysis of satellite photographs taken between 2021 and 2024, Terraferida estimate that 846 villas have been built and that 546 hectares of agricultural and forest land have been destroyed.
Spokesperson Jaume Adrover explained on Thursday that "these are large luxury homes with swimming pools and large gardens, many geared towards holiday rental".
"The process has a greater impact than the system of large urbanisations built decades ago because back then there was a social response. Now, a large part of the population is unaware of what is happening because development has spread." With this spread, he suggests, mobilisation against development has been diluted.
At a presentation in Palma, the rate of development over the past decade was said to be the equivalent of the entire area of the municipality of Consell. "Had a development of that size been announced, there would have been a huge social response. But by going about it in a diffuse way, the impact is not perceived," said Adrover. This, he added, was one of the reasons why Terraferida have made a comeback, so to as to show how land is being ravaged.
The buildings being constructed are very diverse. Some villas even have their own golf courses, something that Terraferida plan to denounce to the government's water resources directorate. They have also discovered the construction of a 1.6-kilometre dirt track to access a development in Cala Murada and several villas in the Tramuntana Mountains that are not designated as areas of special natural interest.
"Wherever there is space, they build, and since they have so much money, they do whatever they want," concluded Adrover.
Three years ago, Adrover observed that current urban planning legislation in Mallorca was "useless". He pointed out that Menorca decided 20 years previously to prevent everything that was happening in Mallorca by creating a territorial plan that concentrated growth in the towns and specific rural areas. Three years on, and nothing has changed.