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The Plenary of the Constitutional Court has decided to admit the appeal lodged against the Balearic law that regulates the so-called “strategic residential projects.” This action has been promoted by different civic entities and has the formal support of more than fifty members of parliament from the Socialist, Sumar/Més and Mixed (Podem) groups, along with the involvement and work of their respective legal teams.

The Balearic Parliament approved Law 4/2025, known as the law on strategic residential projects, which allows the construction of houses on rural land without previous service provision in municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants, as well as on urban and developable land in municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants.

These projects may modify the conditions established in current municipal planning, increase the maximum residential density foreseen in existing planning, and may have a higher building coefficient. This may entail ignoring the need to foresee parking, supply infrastructures, and other basic urban-planning requirements. Moreover, urban developments falling under this law will benefit from positive administrative silence.

The core arguments

The appeal of unconstitutionality, now admitted by the Court, is framed within a context of defending fundamental rights, the territory, and the right to decent housing. From a territorial perspective, the appeal states that the regulation:

• Violates the principle of legal certainty and alters the normative hierarchy, using decree and exceptional mechanisms to abruptly modify urban planning and rural land regulations.
• Affects municipal and island autonomy, since it imposes mechanisms that blur the competences of town councils and island councils in favour of external interventions and “strategic” projects decided at the regional level.
• Fails to comply with basic state legislation in matters of urban planning, the environment and the protection of rural land, establishing mechanisms of “positive silence” and expedited regularisations that may disregard participation processes and environmental control.
• Reduces the protection of rural land and enables a covert amnesty of activities and constructions that under ordinary conditions would have been declared illegal, creating inequality among citizens.

The scramble for rural land and legal uncertainty

The admission of this new appeal of unconstitutionality adds to the one already before the Constitutional Court against Law 7/2024, of 11 December, on urgent measures for administrative simplification and rationalisation in the Balearic Islands.

Parliament is generating new legislative texts that repeatedly target rural land. Time and again, attempts are being made to shift urban pressure toward the countryside of the islands.

These intentions are often disguised with other arguments, such as wanting to simplify administrative procedures —when, in reality, urban-planning offenders are being rewarded—, helping farmers —although the Agrarian Law modifies numerous urban-planning criteria— or, as in the case of this appeal, facilitating access to housing while speculative operations on rural land are being promoted.

This new admission by the Constitutional Court also concerns local councils, since if legislative texts must eventually be corrected, the municipalities that have applied them may find themselves in situations of non-compliance afterwards.

In any case, the start of the Court’s examination of potential unconstitutionality is another step in defending the territory and opposing urban speculation in the islands.

The GOB expresses its gratitude to all the people who have worked on the appeal.