- Sara K Arnold
- Nov 17, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 1, 2025
Community Spotlight
Mallorcan Threads
How Artisans are Turning
Heritage into Resistance
by Sophie Gonzalez Alegre M.
Video and Photos by Immo Klink
In the Balearic Islands, the intensification of tourism has profoundly reshaped local dynamics, creating unprecedented pressure on housing, the environment, and the forms of life rooted in the territory.
Mediterranean regions face a constant tension between tourist attractiveness and the preservation of local identities. In Mallorca, mass tourism, concentrated along the coast, has fueled real estate speculation, soaring rents, and the disappearance of traditional living spaces. In the rural areas, once shaped by agriculture, craftsmanship, and tight community bonds, the pressure of mass tourism generates cultural reconfigurations in which practices, landscapes, and daily rhythms increasingly respond to visitors’ expectations rather than residents’ needs. Paradoxically, the very values the tourism industry seeks to consume—nature, tradition, slowness, and handmade culture—are the ones most at risk, often reduced to aestheticised representations or commodified heritage.
This is precisely where the work of Belgian anthropologist David Berliner becomes crucial. In Perdre sa culture (2018), he invites us to look beyond narratives of cultural loss or uniformisation, urging us instead to analyse transformations through situated, local dynamics and the agency of the communities themselves. He proposed looking beyond the alleged loss of cultures to understand each cultural transformation through a local, situated lens, driven at least partly by the internal will of local populations. A central idea of his book is the distinction between endonostalgia (nostalgia rooted in lived experience) and exonostalgia (nostalgia detached from personal experience). Berliner shows how this external, imagined nostalgia often drives heritage making processes, shaping the way certain places or cultural practices are selected, preserved, or transformed.
This reflection does not erase the damage of neo-colonisation, globalisation, and capitalism but urges us to analyse each situation in its specificity. It calls on us to consider each indigenous group in its complexity and individuality—not as passive victims but as empowered actors navigating between injustices suffered and affirmations of resistance.
When questioning the impact of mass tourism on communities such as those on the island of Mallorca, it is essential to remember that local populations are neither helpless nor devoid of resources in addressing the environmental, housing, or cultural challenges they face. Local culture, far from being lost, evolves and transforms.
Within this landscape, artisans play a crucial role as guardians of local knowledge and cultural mediators offering an alternative to the standardisation imposed by mass tourism. Crafting the Future — a collective initiative by the European Training Foundation together with UNESCO, UNIDO, the Union for the Mediterranean and the Michelangelo Foundation — describes craftsmanship as “a tangible expression of material culture,” a space of education, identity, and creativity.
Through their craft, local artisans reaffirm their identity and imagine new futures. Their resistance, at this critical time, is ecological, economic, and cultural.
In Mallorca, artisans embody this resistance by sustaining techniques rooted in the territory, embedding stories into objects, and restoring beauty as a social and political value. Craft becomes a lever for resilience: it reinforces local economies, counters urbanisation and biodiversity loss, and promotes tourism where culture is lived rather than consumed.
Mallorcan Landscape
Addressing the idea of Balearisation requires nuance. The one dimensional vision of Mallorca as a mere seaside playground for tourists has clear consequences for the island’s ecosystems and economy. Yet Mallorcan culture is not disappearing; it is transforming. Through their craft, local artisans reaffirm their identity and imagine new futures. Their resistance, at this critical time, is ecological, economic, and cultural. In October 2024, OC.M met four artisan communities in Mallorca committed to ethical, sustainable practices that challenge growth-driven models. By engaging closely with them, we witnessed visions deeply rooted in local contexts—perspectives that resist global trends and affirm the value of grounded, community-based knowledge.
Rediscovering Mallorcan Identity Through Ikat Weaving with Feel Mallorca
Yasmin Rodríguez Rus (left) and Hannah Evans wear clothes from Feel Mallorca
Joana and Cinzia of Feel Mallorca embody this spirit of resistance. They are a link between Mallorcan textile craftsmanship and the island’s youth. Collaborating with the workshops of Teixits Vicens, Teixits Riera, and Bujosa, they perpetuate the practice commonly known today as ikat—a resist-dye weaving technique found across Southeast Asia and Central Asia. The word itself is Indonesian, but the method circulated widely along the Silk Road, where Mallorcan artisans developed their own distinctive variant. For these creators, identity is found in continuity, in roots, in history, but above all, in the present. As they emphasise, "feeling Mallorca" means feeling the land, not just as a landscape but as a community, territory, people.
Joana Borras and Cinzia Bertocci, founders of Feel Mallorca
This cultural resistance goes beyond mere nostalgia: it is grounded in a deep awareness of contemporary issues and rejects the simplistic dichotomy between tradition and modernity.
Through their work, Joana and Cinzia redefine ‘acculturation’ as a dynamic of reinvention, not dilution, where traditions transform to adapt without losing their essence.
Antic Mallorca: Braiding as Collective Resistance
At the Antic Mallorca workshop, another form of resistance takes shape. Araceli, Antonella, and their students gather around Llata, a braiding of palm leaves passed down by the women of Capdepera. This collective, slow, and meticulous work celebrates the strength of community bonds. Each woman perfects a specific step of the braiding – a practice that intertwines stories as much as palm leaves.
An Antic Mallorca workshop
Here, artisanal production is a response to globalisation's effects, which fragments communities and weakens local resources. In this exclusively female space, these women create a safe environment free from interruptions and judgments, where shared stories explore their identities and experiences. Know-how passed down through generations finds new resonance.
Araceli Iranzo, founder of Antic Mallorca (left) and a workshop attendee (right)
The collective creation strengthens their self-confidence and sense of belonging. It is a way to reclaim traditions, to subtly challenge imposed norms while weaving a network of solidarity among craftswomen. This mutual support, inherent to the creative act, illustrates a form of empowerment that extends beyond the workshop: it is a concrete response to the erasures of feminine knowledge in historical narratives.
In a context of growing ecological awareness, artisanal initiatives like Antic Mallorca show, once again, that traditions can be preserved in harmony with nature and local values. These craftswomen are the perfect illustration on how craftsmanship builds cross-generational relationships and connects people with their shared sense of place.
Tatiana Sarasa’s Open Studio: Creativity Against Individualism
In the fishermen’s area of Palma, Tatiana Sarasa embodies another facet of this resistance: the artisan's role in engaging with those unversed in its themes.
Tatiana Sarasa, founder of Open Studio, wears Celia Ingesson
Her workshop, Open Studio, is a space for experimentation where every texture, every creation, is designed to touch and engage. According to her, creation is a process of connection and transmission, of sharing in its purest essence through generosity. She shares her learnings and experiences from workshops that shaped her skills, viewing her knowledge not as a closely guarded secret but as a shared treasure. She questioned with us the difference between an artist who’ll be more self centered and a craftsperson who makes for and is made by his community.
Tatiana Sarasa wears Celia Ingesson
Open Studio is on a street corner. Here poetry and installations, alchemy and textures coexist and craftsmanship is conceived as a quest for an identity free from the pressures of globalisation and an act of resistance to hyper-individualism. By inviting visitors to discover the depth of each creation and emphasising the process over the result, Tatiana strives to convey that Mallorca is a rich, living territory, as is its craftsmanship.
Leela Romeo and the Resilience of Local Materials
In her open-air workshop in Mallorca’s pine forests, creator Leela Romeo breathes new life into local materials.
For her, craftsmanship is a laboratory where she explores and reinvents the island’s resources. Each Desanuda Fiber Lab collection is a form of resistance and community engagement, expressing her personal emotions, often shaped by local issues, through an alchemy-like process.
Listening to her words, one can sense the pain of a community that struggles with access to housing and is forced to consider leaving the island due to exorbitant property prices driven by foreign buyers.
According to the Spanish Ministry of Housing Report, 2025, over the last decade, housing prices have risen by 82.4% making it one of the most expensive regions of Spain. There are 30 tourist beds for every 100 inhabitants and a fifth of houses in coastal areas are holiday rentals (Rosselló-Geli, 2025). Simply by existing as a local contemporary craftswoman and artist selling her work to Mallorca’s visitors and hotels, she raises awareness beyond the community, like a Trojan horse.
Leela’s creative lab, celebrating autonomy and ecology, is a symbol of resilience against globalisation's pressures and invites us to rethink our privileged desires to change life and go to live in the south, under the sun.
Towards a New Image of Mallorca: Between Resistance and Reinvention
In Mallorca, we met local ambassadors of sustainable change; artisans and creators deeply connected to textile traditions and acutely aware of the pressures brought by globalisation. Conversations on and off camera often returned to the same concerns: the effects of mass tourism, the surge in real estate prices, and the ecological disruptions reshaping the island. For many of these artisans, working with textiles is not only a livelihood but also an act of cultural and environmental resilience, a way to counter the forces that push the island toward homogenisation.
Hannah Evans wear clothes from Feel Mallorca
They challenge the old narrative of “Balearisation”—the destruction of local culture for the sake of tourism and show instead a generation determined to reinvent its heritage to meet contemporary needs.
Recent studies underline the severity of these pressures. The Balearic Sea shelters more than 400 fish species and half of all Posidonia meadows in Spanish waters, yet 78 marine species are currently threatened (Marilles Foundation, 2023). These seagrass meadows are among the Mediterranean’s most powerful carbon sinks: one hectare of Posidonia stores the annual emissions of a thousand cars (Marilles Foundation, 2023). And in Ibiza, over 50% of the Posidonia meadow in Talamanca Bay is now dead, following summer seawater temperatures exceeding 30°C (IbizaPreservation, 2024). In this fragile ecosystem, tourism is accelerating local climate impacts by an estimated 20%.
Yet the artisans we met remind us that tourism does not have to be extractive. Visitors, if they choose mindful forms of travel, can help sustain rather than consume local resources. This is where the lessons of alternative tourism matter: initiatives rooted in local participation, respectful encounters, knowledge transmission, and the recognition of intangible heritage. These forms of tourism reveal Mallorca not as an endless summer destination but as a land shaped by rituals, seasons, and community ties. They challenge the old narrative of “Balearisation”—the destruction of local culture for the sake of tourism and show instead a generation determined to reinvent its heritage to meet contemporary needs.
Through their work, Mallorcan artisans demonstrate that culture is alive, adaptive, and strengthened by the integration of new influences when rooted in local knowledge. Their creations weave together memory and innovation, offering a vision of an island where the past dialogues with the future. By organising to preserve and reinvent their heritage, they invite us to rediscover Mallorca as a territory of transmission, creativity, and resistance, where craftsmanship becomes both a gesture of care and a commitment to a more sustainable, resilient future.
*"Balearisation" refers to the process transforming areas to cater to mass tourism, marked by rapid, often unplanned urban growth, shifting land use, and large-scale tourist infrastructure. The term originated in the Balearic Islands, which include Mallorca, and highlights how tourism reshapes landscapes—creating environmental pressures, commercialising public spaces, and sparking conflicts over land use and access through privatisation.
References
• Folisi, F., Rosso, F., & Prina, M. (2024). Crafting the future: Five squared [Report]. European Training Foundation. https://doi.org/10.2816/36996
• David Berliner. (1018). Perdre sa culture, Bruxelles, Zones sensibles, 2018, 156 p., bibl., index (« Pactum serva »).
• Altaba, P., & García-Esparza, J. A. (2021). A Practical Vision of Heritage Tourism in Low-Population-Density Areas. The Spanish Mediterranean as a Case Study. Sustainability, 13(9), 5144. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13095144
• IbizaPreservation. (2024). Talamanca Bay monitoring report. IbizaPreservation. https://ibizapreservation.org/en/project/marine-protection/
• Mallorca Sustainability Observatory. (2023). The carbon footprint of Mallorca’s tourists (2022). Majorca Daily Bulletin.
https://www.majorcadailybulletin.com/news/local/2023/11/17/118951/mallorca tourism-carbon-footprint-tourists-twice-that-residents.html
• Marilles Foundation. (2023). Informe de la Mar Balear / Balearic Sea report. https://marilles.org/images/report/INFORME_5_ANYS_DEF_EN.pdf
• Nuevo López, A., & Martínez del Vas, G. (2021). Turismo sostenible versus depredación turística: El caso de las Islas Baleares. Revista Geográfica Venezolana, 62(2), 216–241. https://doi.org/10.53766/RGV/2021.62.02.07
• Ordóñez-Martínez, R. (2024). Tourism impact on natural resources and public space saturation. Data, 9(3), 41. https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/9/3/41
• Rodríguez-Alcántara, A., Santiago Medina, P., López Rubio, M. L., & Gracia Bartolomé, Y. (2024). Environmental risks of sewage discharge on coastal marine ecosystems. Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
• Rosselló-Geli, J. (2025). Tourism-related gentrification: The case of Sóller (Mallorca). Social Sciences, 9(7), 246. https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/9/7/246
• Spanish Ministry of Housing. (2025). Housing price statistics 2015–2025: Balearic Islands. Gobierno de España. Data reported by La Voz de Ibiza.
https://lavozdeibiza.com/en/current-news/balearic-islands-leads-the-escalation-of housing-prices-in-spain-over-the-last-decade/
Comments