What to do with Mallorca's abandoned old houses

Ten months later, August 2015, representatives from the Council of Mallorca's heritage department met members of the town hall to discuss the latter's plan for a revitalisation of the old centre. Part of this plan would have involved knocking down some of the buildings. Owners were being contacted to agree on prices, as the town hall would obviously have needed to buy the houses off them. In December that year, the town hall was given the Council's response - a resounding no. The historical fabric needed to be preserved.

In May 2017, the town hall came up with another initiative. As previously, this was to halt the progressive degradation. A video was made. This explained that houses had been losing their quality and their habitability. Too many had been vacated and abandoned. The citizens of Felanitx were therefore invited to offer their proposals as to how to breathe new life into the old centre.

The following year, it was September 2018, the town hall initiated the process to modify its urban plan in response to requests from owners and developers to be able to convert old houses in the centre into hotels. The then councillor for urban planning noted: "The historic centre of Felanitx currently suffers from abandonment. It has become an uninhabited area with many houses closed and in a process of degradation. Regulated and sustainable interior tourism would imply a boost to revitalising complementary activities (e.g. bars, shops) and the tourism sector in the low season."

By August 2019, the town hall had made the necessary modification and so Felanitx was now looking forward to some revitalisation to halt all the progressive degradation. But note that in none of the stages over a period of almost five years was there any particular suggestion that people might actually live in some of these degraded properties.

Yes, there were the manorial type buildings that might have lent themselves to hotel conversion, but mainly the problem that Felanitx had been grappling with - and this well predated 2014 - was the number of ordinary houses (ordinary in terms of centres of Mallorca's villages) that had simply been left to rot. The Council of Mallorca hadn't really helped by blocking purchases by the town hall, while grants of the amount the town hall was prepared to shell out were far off being sufficient. These were old houses that required huge investment.

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The town hall accepted that there was an issue with habitability but this was about as far as it went in a drive to perhaps ensure that these old houses were actually lived in. But, and this was all comparatively recent, thinking wasn't dominated by a need to create living spaces. Interior tourism had become something of a panacea, but this was to eventually run into political opposition to the growth in accommodation places, while the thinking nowadays is absolutely about living spaces because of the island's housing crisis.

Felanitx wasn't and isn't an isolated case. The villages of Mallorca have any number of empty old houses. While the property sector suggests that these are empty because of a reluctance to rent them out, the far greater issue lies with inheritance - disputes between family members and the sheer costs of renovation. I can think of stories from both Alcudia and Montuiri where the abandonment has led to colonisation by pigeons. It should really be up to owners to sort these problems out, but if family members are squabbling among themselves, it can become difficult; town halls have had to step in. And it might be pointed out that properties that are empty for these reasons aren't all confined to the old centres of villages.

There are extraordinary numbers of empty properties. More than half of all the dwellings in Costitx are classified as empty, but it has been explained that many of these are in fact uninhabitable because of neglect. In Sencelles, 40% are empty, Llubi and Sant Joan 38%, Montuiri 37%, Algaida 36%. The list goes on and includes Felanitx with 27%.

A solution offered by the Balearic government both to all this abandonment and the housing crisis is legislative reform whereby these old properties could be converted into apartments adapted to the current-day reality - smaller families who don't need as much space as the large families of years ago. Which is fine, but why should this require legislative initiative?

But there would still be issues, such as the investment needed to undertake conversion. Developers would no doubt be happy to help in this regard. Another could be strains on infrastructure, e.g. parking. Convert three or four houses along a narrow street into multi-occupancy and parking would become even more impossible than it is already.

There again, what's more important? Somewhere to live or somewhere to park? It's the former, and there are a hell of a lot of empty properties that could do wonders for the housing shortage.