The conservation group Terraferida warned on Friday that the Human Pressure Index (HPI) has skyrocketed in the Balearics ‘like never before’. During the winter months of 2025, the islands already handled more people than on the busiest days 29 years ago, in the middle of August 1997.
The HPI, which estimates the actual demographic load in the Balearics on a daily basis, indicates that during the winter months of 2025, when tourist numbers are at their lowest, there were more people than during the summer months 25 years ago, according to Terraferida based on data from the Balearic Institute of Statistics, Ibestat.
It gives as an example that the highest IPH in 2000, which was reached on 10 August, was 1,538,375 people, lower than that of 20 April 2024, which reached 1,544,089. The difference is even more striking between March 2025, with 1,416,896 people on the islands, and the busiest day in 1997, also on 10 August, with a total of 1,419,316 people. On the busiest day of 2025, which was 6 August, the figure shot up to 2,062,787 people.
To calculate how far this figure could grow, Terraferida has estimated the number of residential properties that remain to be built in Mallorca, within the different non-urban areas, and warns that the most conservative calculations show that the island could accommodate 178,252 more homes and 554,756 more people, considering a low density of 3 people per home.
Added to this is the extent to which Mallorca’s hotel industry can grow, which continues to expand despite the government’s promises of limits and the statement by its president, Marga Prohens, that ‘there is no room for more people here’. Terraferida points out that Law 4/2025 on urgent measures to obtain land, approved a few months ago, paves the way for the development of rural land classified as a Transition Area within the seven most populated municipalities of Mallorca.
The organisation emphasises that ATs are rural land surrounding urban centres, a concept that was conceived ‘to curb urban expansion and guarantee a reserve of land for infrastructure and facilities’.
The organisation stresses that the law passed last year ‘reverses its function and allows for high-density development of up to 225 inhabitants per hectare, a figure that doubles the most conservative estimates’.
The total number of hectares that becan be developed under this regulation alone is 1,246.
Terraferida warns that ‘all this development land is a demographic time bomb on an island that is already saturated and whose resources are stretched to the limit’. It is calling for an urgent moratorium to halt urban and tourist growth in Mallorca.