Another brick in the wall: Mallorca’s wounded land

The outrage this caused required a response from officialdom. Caterina Amengual was the director-general for natural spaces. She initially said that environment ministry agents would be pressing for sanctions. Some weeks later, she gave an interview in which she said that fines and disciplinary proceedings were not the solution. The government was committed to raising awareness as a way of protecting natural spaces. For Terraferida, this may have sounded half-hearted. Was is it a case of running into an “impermeable” wall - institutions and political parties in Mallorca?

Terraferida, it means wounded land, are calling it a day. It’s possible that they will return, but not if there is still the same wall. “It’s a waste of time,” says spokesperson Jaume Adrover. For eight years, they have been drawing attention to the likes of beach privatisation; the proliferation of illegal lets on Airbnb; the similar proliferation of building on rustic land that has been replete with swimming pools and other desires of the wealthy. For eight years, they have been making proposals and suggestions for legal changes to make people’s lives better. They have been fighting battles, but Adrover believes that they haven’t won a single one. “Social movements need to achieve objectives from time to time. That is their reason for being.” But if objectives aren’t achieved, largely because of that wall, then what is the point of carrying on?

Unlike GOB, who this year celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, Terraferida have devoted most of their attention to compiling detailed reports which have meant that they have only entered the public consciousness periodically. These reports have typically contained eye-catching headlines. Examples have included the level of contamination by cruise ships in Palma and the increased amount of land for building luxury homes in the countryside. This has not been an organisation to issue ‘denuncias’, which is something GOB do frequently. And also unlike GOB, Terraferida have generally always hit a majority opinion nerve, be this to do with holiday lets or beaches being taken over by the occupants of superyachts - and Cabera wasn’t the only case of this in 2016.

While they may have the strict letters of legality on their side in making their claims, GOB can sometimes badly misjudge the public mood. The order to demolish the El Bungalow restaurant in Ciudad Jardín and GOB’s insistence that the Costas Authority proceeds with this order is a case in point. With Terraferida, it has been different. They have been in the news, but they haven’t been the news, which is what GOB can tend to be. They have not been controversial per se; they have just referenced the controversies.

Is Adrover right that they have not won anything? He clearly believes so, in which case it is hard to disagree. But it’s not as if there haven’t been positive advances. Anchoring on posidonia was an issue with the 2016 superyachts. This may have been incidental, but the law outlawing anchoring wasn’t long in following. And have there been other cases of beach privatisation of the 2016 type since then? If there have been, they haven’t aroused publicity.

Fundamentally with Terraferida, their campaigning has focused on the wounded land and so therefore on construction and human pressure. One campaign for which they didn’t gain majority support was the opposition to the Llucmajor-Campos road, the redevelopment of which was necessary on safety grounds. Yet the amount of publicity that the road attracted had an impact on policy. Over the period of the current administration, the Council of Mallorca hasn’t built new roads; it has focused instead on improvements to existing ones.

The timing of the announcement that they are giving up and that they have come up against an impermeable wall over the past eight years is not a good one for either the government or the Council of Mallorca. President Armengol has of course responded. Hers has been a “progressive government in favour of environmental protection”. The government’s policies have been “the greatest in the democratic history” of the islands (and so since 1983).

But what does it mean for the environmental cause? GOB say it is “very bad news”. Xavier Pastor, one of the founders of Greenpeace España, laments the loss of “one of the best things” to have happened to the environmental movement over the past ten years. He describes Terraferida as having been “rigorous”, and indeed they have been with the detail of their reports. But even with this rigour, as Adrover has concluded, there is always the wall - a concrete block to what they have sought to achieve and one erected, when talking about urban planning for instance, by “the interests of the real-estate business”.