Mallorca is usually framed as one of Europe’s tourism success stories — seasonal income, employment, regional growth. But that story is hard to reconcile with life inside real ecological limits. For many year-round residents it shows up as a set of persistent contradictions: housing exclusion, ecological degradation, overloaded infrastructure, precarious work, an everyday life that keeps getting harder to sustain. In a tourism-dependent territory, in other words, economic growth and a decent life can quietly come apart from each other.
That framing runs deeper than economics — it is symbolic too. A recent airport advertising campaign put it bluntly: “What happens in Mallorca stays in Mallorca.” The island gets sold as a bounded zone of exception, where excess is normal and its consequences are reduced to something you settle before you leave. That is not just a slogan; it is part of how the island itself gets built and organised — as a site of pleasure, circulation and transaction, rather than a place where people actually live.
Territory as a living system
Territory, in this sense, is not an empty container. It is a living system of relationships — between people, ecosystems, infrastructure, labour and history — and a space where development becomes a struggle over how social and ecological life gets organised. Seen this way, the “right to say no” is not a separate idea but a normal expression of that struggle: a community’s capacity to refuse development that undermines its own conditions for life.
In Mallorca, that right exists mostly on paper. Residents hold formal democratic rights, but the island’s whole economic organisation around tourism narrows what those rights can actually do. Some of this has deep roots — land concentration on the island is partly traceable to violent redistributions during and after the Franco dictatorship, when land taken from peasants was later folded into speculative property regimes whose effects are still shaping unequal access to land today.
Tourism reorganises the island across every dimension of daily life. Housing gets diverted into second homes and short-term rentals while residents face rising prices and displacement. Healthcare strains during peak season. Mobility is squeezed by congestion and overloaded transport. Water is stretched thin every summer, on top of historic, partly privatised rights to local springs. Wastewater systems run over capacity, waste outpaces local processing, and coastal ecosystems like Posidonia meadows are damaged by anchoring and marine traffic. None of these are isolated failures — they are what one territorial model, built around continuous outside demand, actually looks like up close.
Prosperity cannot be measured by tourism revenue or visitor numbers. It has to be measured by a territory’s capacity to sustain life within its own ecological limits.
A degrowth perspective does not ask for a return to the past — Mallorca today faces different pressures and different possibilities than it did a generation ago. What it asks for is a redefinition of prosperity: strengthening ecological sovereignty — the capacity to govern housing, water, energy and land within real limits — reclaiming the practical right to say no, and putting the reproduction of life ahead of the endless pull of outside demand. Dignity, in this frame, means being able to stay in your own territory without being pushed out of it. Justice means sharing the ecological burden fairly. And wellbeing is something built collectively, not handed down from a balance sheet.
Drawing on the work of Arturo Escobar, Breno Bringel & Sabrina Fernandes, and the collection Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary.