The Council Tack

The Unión Progreso y Democracia (UPyD) party has nicked my idea. It has proposed that the islands’ councils, and the Mallorca council in particular, be scrapped. You may know that I had suggested this recently, as I have suggested it before over the years.

I don’t suppose for one moment that there are those in the UPyD who are paying any attention to what I have to suggest, but I’ll settle for the fact that one party at any rate seems to see the sense in getting rid of the Council of Mallorca and therefore the lack of sense of its being.

There again, the UPyD, new kids on the political block, having been only formed in 2007, doesn’t have much to lose by making audacious proposals. Not that it is necessarily that audacious. There are hints that the Partido Popular (PP) might be thinking along similar lines, while the PSOE candidate for national president, Alfredo Rubalcaba, has sort of flagged up the idea as well. The UPyD, though, is the only party to come out and say unequivocally that the Council should go.

The UPyD is a party that you might describe as being a bit like the Liberal Democrats. It is of the centre, and while it is against nationalism, and so distances itself from the PP with its nationalist tendencies, it also believes there is too much decentralisation of government in Spain. This is less an anti-regionalism philosophy and more a practical one.

The momentum towards eliminating the Council and therefore the cost of running it and the duplications it causes is gathering, as also a momentum is growing to cut back or eliminate other forms of provincial government in Spain below that of the autonomous communities (of which the Balearics are one).

What might hold this momentum back is the history of the Council. It is only relatively new, having been formed, along with the councils of the other Balearic islands, after the collapse of the Franco regime and with the introduction of autonomous government in the islands in the early 1980s.

Consequently, the Council is symbolic of the new democratic era in the Balearics and in Spain as a whole. And there is a bit more history to it. Island councils were due to have been formed in the 1930s, but the Civil War got in the way. Prior to this, there had only been a provincial deputation for the Balearics as a whole (which dated back to the first half of the nineteenth century). The fact that the Council’s existence was delayed by some fifty years by Franco does give an historical as well as an emotional force that demands that it should stay.

The Council has a whole raft of responsibilities, granted to it under the constitution and statutes relating to the autonomous communities. To take these away completely, and so follow the trend started by the removal of tourism promotion and absorbing them within the regional government, would require a constitutional change. Or at least, one would imagine that it would.

Getting rid of the Council would be fraught with danger because it would be nuanced by parties with strong regional philosophies as turning the clock back to the bad old days and as undermining the authority given to the islands when they were made an autonomous community.

Of these parties, however, only the Mallorcan socialists really count for anything at present. PSOE (nationally if not locally) appears as though it might be adopting a more pragmatic approach which would allow for the Council’s dismantling, while the PP locally would probably be prepared to go along with it. The UPyD doesn’t really count for much either, but it has at least brought the subject fully out into the open.

The threat to the Council comes mainly because of financial pressures. The discussion as to its future is belated though, which may sound odd as it is an institution barely thirty years old. But its youth tells a different story. The Council was formed in the glow of the new democracy. It is symbolic, there is no question about this, but whether the organisation in that glow of democracy was the right one is the question that now should be asked. And it is being asked.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Paying For Sand: Prices on beaches

How much are you paying for a sunbed? It’s one of those questions, on a par with what’s the weather like in (add as applicable), that is on the list of the Mallorcan visitor’s enquiries.

I confess to not knowing a great deal about the cost of sunbeds. I have never, ever hired one. They are a part of beach life that has passed me by, and I pass them by on the way to finding a piece of soft sand. But the sunbed is important for many. The beach should be comfortable and not be a place where no end of patting the sand down can seem to eliminate the annoying ridge that’s sticking into your back.

My knowledge of the subject has, however, increased thanks to the fact that sunbeds have been very much a theme of this Mallorcan summer. They have either not been provided (Puerto Pollensa for a time) or too many have been provided (Can Picafort, before the mayor ordered the removal of excessive numbers).

And I can now thank the local Chamber of Commerce for adding to the body of the sunbed knowledge. It’s put out a report and is asking for a harmonisation in pricing in the different resorts, differences in which can be as great as five euros for a bed and a shade combination. The average price is 7.6 euros.

The cost of sunbeds has increased markedly since the turn of the century. One reason for this has been an increase in the tax charged by town halls. It’s a simple equation: the higher the tax, the higher the price.

The beach operators, however, have other costs to take into account, such as those for the sunbeds and parasols themselves, which are often meant to comply with certain specifications. For example, some of the parasols in Pollensa have not been of the required reed material, which has added to what has become an annual controversy in respect of beach provision.

With the tax that has to be paid and all the other costs, it is perhaps unsurprising that you got a situation such as that in Can Picafort where the operator was exceeding the number of sunbeds by some 550. It’s all about profitability, after all. Nevertheless, Can Picafort is one resort where the cost is said to be reasonable.

The differing costs to the operators and the differing prices they charge mean that the overall annual benefits to operators also vary. The report suggests that in Felanitx (by which I guess it means Portocolom) the return is just under five hundred euros a unit, way higher than in Manacor (92 euros).

Sunbeds aren’t the only elements of beach life that come with a price. Some come with a pretty significant one. Well, would you pay 50 euros for 20 minutes on a jetski? Maybe you would. Less expensive though and also more sedate are pedaloes. Average going rate 11.7 euros, says the report. But it can be nine euros or it can be 15 (Alcúdia). What you win on lower sunbed prices in Alcúdia, you lose on a pedalo.

And what about the beach bars? The “chiringuitos” and “balnearios”. They too are subject to varying taxes according to resort, and so charge accordingly.

Last year, before the season had even properly started, I was being told about the fact that the beach bar prices were too high. An example was given in respect of Swedish tourists to Alcúdia who now found a “pint” in a beach bar to be roughly the equivalent of that back in Sweden, a country hardly known for its cheap alcohol.

But when the chiringuitos are being taxed in the way they are, the prices start to become understandable. They have to pay the town halls, the inland revenue and the concessionaire who actually runs the beach bars.

The town halls make a mint out of their beaches. If they have a number of them and/or they have large beaches with high occupancy by tourists, then they are quids in. One of the largest beaches is that in Alcúdia, and the town hall here rakes in the most of any town hall from its beaches, more so than Palma: nearly three and a half million euros. Even Pollensa, with smaller beaches, can outstrip even Calvia when it comes to its revenue: around a million less than Alcúdia.

There’s money to be made from sand. But you know, the beach should be simple. Take a towel and lie on the sand, forget about the pedalo, pack your own drinks and snacks. And then there soon wouldn’t be money to be made.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Good, The Bad And The Holiday Let

I’m going to give you a list of organisations. When you get to the end of the list, here are your questions – what do they have in common and what is missing? Here goes, and pay attention:

The hotel federations of Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera; the association of hotel chains; the association for agrotourism; the Mallorca Tourism Board; the chambers of commerce in Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza; the federation of local authorities; the University of the Balearic Islands; the associations of small and medium-sized businesses in Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza (PIMEM); the association of travel agents; the school of hostelry; airlines; tour operators; unions.

Ok, if you have said they have all been invited to form part of the Balearics Tourism Agency, then have a banana. This is indeed what they all have in common.

Pretty big agency, huh? Yes, but a reason behind them all joining the agency is to avoid duplications in tourism efforts. So, credit where credit’s due. The agency may now sound unwieldy, but better this than numerous bodies here and there doing their own things.

But what of the second question? What’s missing? Need some help? Just look at the list again. Which are the really big players? Tour operators, airlines, yes, but also the hotels. Still don’t know the answer? This is a tourism agency, don’t forget. Tourism requires accommodation. Are you getting warmer?

Nowhere in this coming together of pretty much all those who matter in Mallorca and Balearics tourism is any representation of non-hotel accommodation: the holiday lets. The tour operators are one player that has an interest in this type of accommodation, others do to a degree as well, but otherwise there is no voice at all.

Why isn’t there? The obvious answer is that there is no body to represent what is a highly fragmented part of the local tourism industry. Even if there were, how well organised it would be would be open to question. There are all sorts of reasons why owners of holiday lets might not wish to be part of an organisation. This aside, the chances are that it wouldn’t be invited anyway.

Two summers ago some grand strategy talking-shop was meant to have been organised by the tourism ministry. It never actually met, but had it done there were to have been two key problems to be addressed, those of seasonality and holiday lets. While mostly anyone associated with the tourism industry would agree that seasonality is a serious problem, only certain parties openly state that holiday lets are. Who were due to have been involved in this strategy talking-shop? The hotels and unions for a kick-off. Both of them antagonistic towards holiday lets.

Amongst the organisations being pulled into the tourism ministry’s agency now, there are few which might speak out in favour of non-hotel accommodation. You might hope that the university would offer an independent view, for example. But as for others, they will mostly tow the line, the one that the hotels, the unions and therefore also the tourism ministry promote: that holiday lets are a bad thing.

Not completely a bad thing, as the tour operators will be quick to point out. But their interests lie with the regulated and registered villas of Mallorca. The airlines might also point out that holiday lets are not a bad thing. What about PIMEM? Where would it stand on the issue?

PIMEM has a bar and restaurant division. PIMEM is quite vocal on different matters, such as all-inclusives. A bad thing, it has been saying recently. It has also been saying that permission for hotels to convert to condohotels would be a good thing.

A hundred or so hotels are already said to be planning to sell off rooms and apartments in anticipation of a change to the tourism law which would permit condohotels and which would therefore create a type of residential tourism, akin to holiday lets but to the hotels’ advantage.

PIMEM reckons this is a good idea because it isn’t all-inclusive and because it would benefit its restaurant members, given the type of tourist it would attract.

But this is precisely the same argument regarding holiday lets. Or one of them. So why doesn’t PIMEM come out and support these? Probably for the same reason that the tourism ministry won’t. It doesn’t want to upset the hotels.

The newly constituted tourism agency is a good thing in many respects, but in one, that of a whole sector of the tourism industry, it isn’t. The momentum against holiday lets is unlikely to let up. Unless there are now voices at the agency to say otherwise, it is likely to get very much stronger.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay

Payback time. As reported in “The Bulletin” (17 August), the Council of Mallorca faces a likely demand from central government to pay back subsidies for road building that didn’t happen and which were used for other purposes.

The Council faces an additional demand. The national finance ministry is owed 9.8 million euros by the Council. It is the shortfall between money that was paid on account by Madrid in the expectation that tax revenues generated by the Council would meet the estimate of this payment and would be handed over to the finance ministry.

This system of advance payment, a sort of cash-flow measure if you like, works only if the local authority is in a position to pay it back and only if the estimate was realistic in the first place. The estimate may have been realistic, in historical terms, but the demand for the 9.8 million relates to the year 2009. The year of crisis taking hold. Tax revenues plummetted.

The Council is far from being the only local authority which faces a demand for payment. The town halls of the Balearics are into the finance ministry for a total of 32 million euros. Palma owes 7.9 million, and the five largest towns in Mallorca after Palma – Calvia, Manacor, Llucmajor, Marratxí and Inca – all owe over one million euros; very nearly two million in Calvia’s case. Of other towns, Alcúdia owes most – close to 800,000; Pollensa faces a demand for 350,000, Santa Margalida for 439,000. The only municipality that is owed by the ministry is Escorca – all of 1,600 euros.

How are the local authorities going to pay these demands? If they are all like Santa Margalida, they won’t be paying. Its mayor says there isn’t any money. Of course there isn’t. One estimate of Santa Margalida’s debt puts it at eleven million. The Council of Mallorca would seem to have little hope of handing over virtually ten million, not when it is technically bust and over 300 million in the red.

The demands have led to all manner of accusations as to where the blame lies. In Santa Margalida it is the fault of the previous Partido Popular-led town hall administration. For Manacor’s PP mayor it is the fault of the PSOE socialist national government for not having reformed local authority financing. Pollensa’s PP mayor says that central government got its sums wrong.

Wherever the fault lies, extracting repayments out of many town halls is going to be a tough call. Manacor, for example, faces, in addition to over a million being demanded of it, the unexpected cost (around one million itself) of complying with the idiotic demolition of the Riuet bridge in Porto Cristo. And it’s not as though the towns can just wave their hands, plead penury and expect to not have to pay. Higher authorities than the town halls have been known to seek legal and financial redress from the municipalities and indeed from mayors for non-compliance with certain orders; as Antoni Pastor, Manacor’s mayor, knows only too well.

What does the finance ministry do though? Does it withdraw advance payments and expect future tax revenues to cover the repayment? If so, then the town halls will be bankrupted. In addition to the debt which hovers over most of them are the constraints placed on them in respect of seeking credit. Tax revenues down in any event, how do they continue to function?

The system of public finance gives the impression of being close to collapsing. While there is a sense of chickens coming home to roost and of previous profligacy now being punished, this does nothing for assuring that public services are maintained. One ray of light in the mess comes from what Alcúdia’s lady mayor has to say, that some formula will be worked out. It may well be, and it may well be that her colleagues in the PP nationally, if and when they assume office after the election in November, will find an accommodation. A question would be, what sort of accommodation? The PP is more minded to slash public funding than the current government.

Where the Council of Mallorca is concerned, its repayment burden simply adds to its precarious position and to its highly questionable viability. And what exactly was it doing spending state money on projects other than those for which the money was intended?

Perhaps this was it though. The Council, as with the town halls, had just looked upon the state as their sugar daddy and had expected that the good times would continue to roll along with the cash, whether fully accounted for or not. Unfortunately, daddy bet the house and lost, and the IMF and others have attributed Spain’s financial troubles less to shaky banks and more to the amounts spent by regional authorities.

The local authorities can’t pay and probably won’t pay, and so Spain’s financial woes just deepen.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Ice-Cream Man

The heat of a Mallorcan summer’s afternoon. A refreshing beer perhaps? A can of chilled over-priced Coke from a beach-side supermarket? Or what about a lolly?

There can be little finer than some fruity ice with which to quench a thirst; the sweet taste of orange concentrate being sucked to the point where its colour disappears, leaving a spear of silvery frost. The lolly is a greatly underrated pleasure, inclined to be overlooked in favour of more exotic packaging to be picked over in a shop’s freezer, the chill from which, on sweaty hands and forearms, is worth the price of what’s to eventually be chosen: the Magnum; the one in a tub with a Venetian twirl and a suggestion of cherry; the variety of white chocolate coating, dark chocolate, chocolate with nuts. Ice cream.

The lolly is, suprisingly perhaps, a relatively recent innovation. It is little more than a hundred years old. It is a johnny-come-lately of the world of things on a stick. The ice cream has an altogether longer history, yet both share a common bond, that of ice. That it took a couple of hundred years for someone to add fruit juice to ice when cream and ice had been being combined since the early eighteenth century is a curiosity of uninventiveness. (In fact the first lolly didn’t even involve fruit juice; it was made with soda water powder.)

The heritage of ice cream partly explains its dominance when it comes to the sunny-afternoon refreshment decision. The ice cream is firmly embedded in our collective consciousness. We have become instinctive ice-cream eaters. And the ice cream, because it has infinite versatility in a way that the lolly doesn’t, is a marketing man’s dream. We are attracted to its packaging, to its tubs of all colours, to its never-disappointing moreishness.

We grew up with lollies and ice cream, but the ice cream has stayed with us. The lolly, despite its greater thirst-quenching properties, is very much more infantile. Grown men are more likely to hide their lolly consumption than openly display it on the beaches or streets of Mallorca. The ice cream, on the other hand, holds no possible stigma. It is an accepted indulgence, a totally unguilty pleasure. One can be outed as an ice-cream eater without any thought of recrimination.

We all carry our ice-cream baggage with us, our own histories of ice cream. My own goes back to the ice-cream parlour in the village at the foot of the hill going up to the church. Fortuna’s Ice Cream. The very name was parodical. Mr. Fortuna was parodical. He was an Italian before Italian stereotyping had been thought of. And he made ice cream.

The strangest thing about Mr. Fortuna was that he was an uncle of mine, despite there being not the slightest Italian connection between our family and anyone else’s. He, Uncle Fortuna (we never actually knew his first name), was an uncle purely on account of the fact that every man back then was an uncle, just as every woman was an aunt. My childhood was full of confusion; I could never quite work out who I was actually related to.

To the Italians has fallen the honour of history in assigning to them responsibility for having invented certain foods and drink. Pizza, pasta, cappuccino, ice cream. Arguably, they didn’t invent any of them, and a claim on ice cream is the most tenuous. The problem is, however, that the history of ice cream is not exact. The English have as much right to be named as the inventors of the modern ice cream as anyone else. But so also do the Mallorcans.

Where common ground appears to exist in the arcane world of ice-cream historians and researchers is with regard to when the modern ice-cream era started: the early 1700s. Though there is no evidence as to actual ice-cream manufacture in Mallorca at that time, the wherewithal for its manufacture was taking shape, and it was in the form of what still exists today, the Can Joan de s’Aigo chocolate parlour in Palma, and in particular something you wouldn’t immediately associate with Mallorca – ice. Sr. de s’Aigo used to gather snow from the Tramuntana and store it, while a growth in almond plantations in the eighteenth century was what was to lead to the Can Joan ice cream. Almond milk met mountain snow, and the rest was ice-cream history.

Amidst the Häagen Dazs, the Ben and Jerry and the Magnum, almond ice cream assumes pride of place in the freezers of Mallorca. Along with other flavours, it is churned out by the “gelats” and “helados” of the island. Ice cream passes from generation to generation, the children’s parties at fiesta time concluded with the handing out of free ice cream for all. And so the tradition is perpetuated. The ice-cream tradition. Pity the poor lolly.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Invisible Station

I’m making an apology on behalf of “The Bulletin”. If you had gone along to the ferry terminal in Puerto Alcúdia on Sunday and had expected to find some free watersports activities which you could have enjoyed, you would have been disappointed.

I showed a short news item (from Thursday’s paper) to someone in Alcúdia who, how can I put this, is in the know. The jaw dropped, followed by an expression of understanding as to how the mistake had been made. I understood it as well, as it’s a mistake many people are making.

What happened on Sunday was that there were indeed free watersports activities, but they were nothing to do with the terminal or the commercial port. They were part of a promotion, in the form of a “fiesta”, for the estación náutica. And it is this which caused the mistake and causes other mistakes to be made.

The estación náutica doesn’t exist. It is not bricks, mortar, aluminium, glass or any material. It is a “station” without physical manifestation. It is an un-thing. But the concept, and that is all it is – a concept, begs an interpretation of the physical. Of course it does. A station is a thing not an abstraction; hence a not unreasonable confusion with the terminal.

Since the estación naútica concept was first raised in Alcúdia – at the start of 2009 – I have written about it on a few occasions, and I keep making the same point; it is not understandable. The concept is elusive, it doesn’t translate into anything sensible in English (even watersports centre doesn’t work because this can also imply something physical), and it doesn’t even mean much to the Spanish; they also expect to find an actual centre.

This is not Alcúdia’s fault as such. There are other such stations in Spain and in the Balearics. But the confusion that has existed in Alcúdia with regard to the concept makes you wonder if it hasn’t occurred elsewhere. It must have done, and the same mistakes and misinterpretations are surely being made there.

In Alcúdia, however, to make matters less clear, there is a website for this station. It doesn’t work. For a time at the weekend it didn’t even load. Yet, there it was, proudly mentioned on the publicity, assuming it was seen. There was another website, for the “Fiesta del Mar” which is what occurred on Sunday and which was one of a series arranged by the estación náutica people in their different resorts, but it was in Spanish only. At least it worked though.

As part of this fiesta, there was also an evening event. The “orange fiesta”. Nice poster, shame about the language. Catalan only. I had an exchange on Facebook about this. Catalan is an official language and the fiesta was directed at locals. Well yes, up to a point, but Puerto Alcúdia is a tourist resort and why was the tourist office emailing the poster to those, such as myself, who have a stake in the local tourism industry? Moreover, the estación náutica concept is meant to be a way of attracting more tourists, of the so-called quality type.

But Catalan-only material appears all the time. In all sorts of resorts. The estación náutica concept, the publicity in Catalan are different types of example that raise the same question: what thought process lies behind any of this? Is there one?

I had a chat with a tourist about this. Is it stubbornness that results in the Catalan-only publicity? I don’t know that it is. It’s more likely a case that no one stops to really think who they are meant to be marketing to and what they are marketing. But who makes these decisions?

Alcúdia is a tourist resort with a highly diverse market. It would be impractical to put out material in all the languages necessary. But at a minimum it should be in English and German; more so than even Spanish, where tourists are concerned, as the level of Spanish tourism in Alcúdia is well below that of either the UK or Germany.

The counter argument is that Catalan (and Spanish) are the local languages and so this is how it should be. Sorry, but it isn’t much of an argument. Not if the market doesn’t understand either language.

Poor marketing occurs because the starting-point is the wrong way round. It should be the consumer, the intended market or markets, and it is this fundamental thought process that seems to be lacking.

I don’t know that there should be an apology for the mistake in “The Bulletin”. The apology should be coming from somewhere else. The trouble is you don’t where that somewhere else is.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Hope Lies In The Proles

I was interviewed by the BBC the other day. The interview was about all-inclusives and was to form part of a feature for the “Fast Track” travel programme.

The background to the feature was two-fold: the announcement by First Choice that it will be only offering all-inclusive packages as from next year, and the impact that all-inclusives have on local businesses.

The location that First Choice had suggested for filming was the Holiday Village in Can Picafort. This is a fine complex. It is modern, offers a good range of services and generally speaking is well regarded when it comes to reviews on the internet. It is four-star, and herein may lie a tale.

On the First Choice website there are ten hotels which appear most prominently when you search for Mallorca. The Holiday Village heads the list. In the Alcúdia-Can Picafort conurbation, there are four hotels in all, and only the Holiday Village is four-star.

Fair enough though; why wouldn’t you pick the best that you have?

The presenter of “Fast Track”, Rajan Datar, was not overly familiar with Alcúdia and Can Picafort, so I took him for a bit of a tour one evening. A port of call was a hotel complex that had been dropped by First Choice during the 2009 season. Bellevue.

The level of all-inclusive offer at this vast resort in Alcúdia has increased substantially over the past four to five years. In 2009 it was around 50%. The word locally is that it is now 80%, though local word is often not reliable. Let’s just say that it would be a surprise had there not been an increase since 2009.

We went to a bar nearby. The owner is preparing to close at the end of this season, attributing this primarily to the impact of AI. He was happy enough to be interviewed for the feature. He was less happy when it came to the actual filming and choked up when reading from a poster that announces the closure.

A suffering bar owner is not the most objective of subjects for a report, but it can make for powerful telly. He displayed a lack of objectivity, understandable enough, when dismissing benefits that AIs might offer families on a tight budget.

For me, as I said during the interview, it’s a no-brainer. I can completely understand these families opting for AI. But you always come back to the same seemingly intractable problem; that of the effects on the wider economy and on bars and restaurants in the shadows of all-inclusives.

I don’t know what was said when the filming moved on to the Holiday Village, but I can guess. First Choice and TUI have been doing their best to put positive spin on all-inclusives, such as it being a myth that AI guests do not go off-site and do not spend outside. It is a myth, but then why do some guests find it necessary to go off-site and spend? Because the AI they have ended up at isn’t much good. Holiday Village is more the exception to the fifteen to twenty-minute rule; how long it can take to be served with a beer in a small plastic glass.

However, the spend of AI guests is low. It has been proven to be so by research conducted by the university in Palma. TUI, perhaps inadvertently, added to the proof when it revealed that only 11% of guests’ total spend found its way into the local community at a different Holiday Village, one in Turkey. And that is also a four-star.

This, the star rating, is relevant, because the higher the standard of the hotel and AI offer, then the more the myth of guests not spending off-site ceases to be a myth. I am at a loss to understand the logic as to why, if you get really good AI service, you would ever spend anything outside the hotel.

There is another reason for going off-site and that is because guests tire of what is on offer and also need a release to stop going stir crazy. And it is this which is perhaps inducing something of an AI backlash, together with a growing appreciation among many tourists as to the effects on the economy outside the hotel. There are plenty of tourists who will mock a bar owner saying hello in the hope of business by waving a wristband in his face, but there are plenty who are sympathetic. Without wishing to sound disrespectful, it’s a touch Orwellian. The hope lies in the proles.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Football: It’s not cricket

At five minutes past four local time yesterday afternoon Luis Suarez missed a penalty for Liverpool. It would have signalled the first cries of exasperation and the first curses of the new Premier League season in Bar Brits the length and breadth of Mallorca. The footy was back, the Saint Mick was flowing and the tills were alive with the sound of euros.

In a multi-screen Bar Brit would have been a corner of a bar in a foreign land that was forever, or at least on Saturday afternoon, England. An England that once was. Cheers there would have been, but they would have been a momentary distraction for the bellydom bemoaning Suarez’s miss. At five minutes past four local time Kevin Pietersen caught Sree Sreesanth. England had thrashed India, had claimed the number one spot in the world test cricket rankings and had restored the order of Empire.

During the lunchtime interval before the confirmation of England’s newly acquired status, there was an interview on “Test Match Special”. It was with Dan Stevens who plays Matthew Crawley in “Downton Abbey”, a period drama set at a time when Empire was starting its decline but when civility was encapsulated by the village green and a gentlemanly ethos of cricketing fair play and values.

Stevens went to Tonbridge School. Its annual fee of over 31,000 pounds is greater than the national average wage and, so, far greater than that earned by inhabitants of inner cities, assuming they earn at all.

Cricket is still a sport of the public school. As it always has been. Yet it was, until around the fifties and sixties, a game of the people as much as football was. It is popular now, but not to the extent it once was. The downturn in its popularity and the supremacy that football assumed coincided with the irreversible changes to English society from the sixties onwards.

Football reigned through the wasteland years of the seventies, the brutality of the eighties and into the newly aspirational nineties, the Premier League being born out of clubs’ demands for ever more television money. So started the golden era of English football, golden in terms of the sheer amount of cash the game could generate. It became unquestionably the people’s game.

Yet this people’s game, at least in its Premier League manifestation, is far removed from the people. They have been taken in, exploited and made complete fools of. But they still lap it up. They still flock to the Bar Brits, donning their replica shirts.

The richness of the sport, the attitudes that surround the game and the exposure of the wealth and misbehaviour of players are the stuff of constant media fascination, fed to a fanaticised public incapable of discerning the degree to which it is being manipulated and driven by the game’s marketing. Despite the cost of football, be it that of a Sky subscription or the cost of attendance and travel, the public refuses to turn its back on a sport which has lost any sense of moral compass. The most sickening word in the football vocabulary is a four-letter word – “scum”. Teams are scum, other fans are scum. It is a filthy word that sums up the attitudinal wrongs of a sport that in its playing is the preserve of the filthy rich.

Cricket has acquired its own wealth, its own disposability, its own attitudinal failures. It is still played on the playing fields of the public schools, attended by the sons of bankers who can afford thirty thousand a year fees. Yet despite its wealth and a history redolent of Empire and the public school, it is more of a people’s game in that it has not lost sight of its core values. It comes close to doing so, but somehow manages to pull back from the brink. Fair play just about prevails.

It fails, though, to capture the following of those who inhabit a Bar Brit and who have been sold and continue to be sold a game that is as socially divisive as bankers earning huge bonuses. Football constantly searches for role models, as though this quest were an admission that the game has no core values. And who does it throw up? Terry, Cole, Rooney. Millionaires all.

The Bar Brit football fan who bleats about the criminal avarice of rioters fails to appreciate that what’s on a plasma screen on a Saturday afternoon is avarice gone mad. Football is a game lacking a sense of fair play. It is one dominated by its “scum” attitudes and its glamorisation of those of questionable intelligence and personal values. This, not cricket, is what you mainly get on a plasma screen. So why should anyone be surprised when someone smashes a shop window and helps himself to his own screen?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Luis Salvador And The First Tourists

Luis Salvador María José Juan Bautista Domingo Raniero Fernando Carlos Zenobio Antonio. A name for each month of the year. Or a name for each member of a football team plus a sub. Are these the names of a football team? Actually not. They are, were, the names of an Austrian archduke. A Habsburg. One of Mallorca’s most famous adopted sons.

It is an unpalatable truth for the patrimonially obsessed Mallorcans that the most notable figures in the island’s history tend not to be Mallorcan. To a Frenchwoman, George Sand, you can add her Polish beau, Chopin, and the noble Luis Salvador. Unlike Sand and Chopin, whose contributions to Mallorcan culture are vastly overstated, Luis Salvador remains one of the most important figures in the island’s history. Together with the remarkable and mystical mediaeval polymath Ramon Llull and the missionary Fra Juníper, who were both Mallorcan, the archduke forms a triumvirate of Mallorcan greats.

For Brits, however, and much like both Llull and Juníper, he is a largely obscure figure who is most likely to be known, if at all, as a street name.

The Germans, however, will know all about him. It was his opus “Die Balearen”, a colossal travelogue and regional and ethnological survey, that endeared him to the people of the islands and to a succession of German visitors. Luis is credited with having introduced tourism to Mallorca; he went on to become honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorca Tourism Board).

Luis was not your typical royal wastrel. He attracted to the island not a cast list of late nineteenth century scoundrels but a diverse group of artists, poets and scientists who joined him at the Miramar finca in Valldemossa. Appropriately enough, given his association to him by Mallorcan fame, the finca included the monastery founded by Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century.

The interdisciplinary range of these first tourists to the island, as they are sometimes referred to, helped to forge Luis’s ambitions to being a polymath in his own right and in a style similar to Llull. It was a combination of the arts and sciences that formed the basis for his interest in Mallorca and which went into the compiling of the astonishing “Die Balearen”.

Luis, much though he was captivated by Mallorca and the islands, extended the scope of his inquiries into natural and social sciences and took off around the Mediterranean in his boats, Nixe I and Nixe II.

Nixe III is currently retracing Luis’s travels in the Med. It set sail for the first time last year, departing from the yacht club in Puerto Pollensa; its five-year mission to boldly go where an archduke had gone before and to draw comparisons with what he discovered in examining the diversity of the Mediterranean and also in questioning whether there is such a thing as a Mediterranean culture.

This summer Nixe III has journeyed from Venice to Montenegro and to Lipari and the Aeolian islands which were also visited last year. The head of the Nixe team is himself from Pollensa. A doctor in the social sciences, Juan Ramis is journeying with a German expert on the archduke and a specialist in environmental studies.

The scientific nature of the expeditions is in keeping with the way in which Luis conducted his enquiries. And one of his greatest contributions was the fact that, travel writer that he was, he was an objective observer. This is what was said of his approach: “He observed everything with an absent, distant gaze and a contemplative attitude … (he) never lapsed into the speculative, subjective introspection of romanticism. Instead he personally examined reality in the most direct manner possible.”

I quote this because it is a strong statement of how a critical eye and an inquisitive mind can produce, as it did, some of the best travel writing that has ever been committed to print. Luis showed, and it should be a lesson to those who fall into the trap of adopting the indulgent and romanticised styles that one commonly encounters in describing Mallorca, that objectivity and knowledge plus a love of a place are what count.

And there is a twist to the tale of Luis. In Ramon Llull’s “Blanquerna”, often said to be the first European novel, the knight of the story turned out to be an emperor. He was in fact Rudolf of Habsburg, from whom Luis was descended. Nixe III might be said to be continuing a story of Mallorca itself that goes back to the thirteenth century.

Follow the journeys of Nixe III at http://www.nixe3.com which I acknowledge for the quote in this article.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Free For All: Mallorca and the arts

If you caught Kenny Garrett and his quartet in Sa Pobla earlier this week or will be rocking up at Pollensa’s Sant Domingo cloister to get a bit of the Chamber Orchestra of the National Theatre of Prague tomorrow, then I hope you have made and will make the most of them. Both the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival and the Pollensa International Music Festival could become dodos of Mallorca’s arts world. Extinct.

The Pollensa festival very nearly didn’t happen this year. It did thanks to a sofa-thon at the tourism ministry. Carlos Delgado had his people scrambling around on the ministry settees, hunting for any loose euros that had fallen down the backs, and they came up with a couple of hundred thousand in the nick of time. The mountain of coins duly deposited in the Sant Domingo cloister, the sound of their jangling competed with an ominous bass, the noise of the ministry saying we’ve helped you out this time, but don’t expect us to in future.

The ministry will announce next week which events have passed a test that will guarantee funding from a reserve pot that isn’t exactly overflowing. 600 grand is up for grabs for various arts festivals, but not all might qualify. As important is what happens to them down the line. For some the end of the line may well have been reached, and this includes the Sa Pobla Jazz and Pollensa festivals.

Arts funding is often at the bottom of the public spending food chain, though in Mallorca it has seemed to occupy a rather higher level. In part, this has been because the arts are seen as a “good thing” rather than there being any real attempt to quantify benefits. But this is the nature of the beast. Arts contribute to a general welfare, a general quality of life; they shouldn’t always be the target of bean-counters. The attitude has not been wrong, far from it, but current circumstances have exposed the vulnerable sustainability of the arts, Mallorcan style.

Certain judgements do occasionally have to be made. In the case of the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival, it hasn’t simply been a case of putting on some free concerts. There are also the workshops that take place each year, so there is a music educational element to the festival as well. But to come to the free concerts, for whose benefit really are they?

The concerts attract a “nice” Jazz Club crowd (of the type satirised by John Thomson’s Louis Balfour character in “The Fast Show”), but they also attract the locals. Nothing wrong with this, the concerts are after all taking place in their town. However, a thing with jazz is that it is an acquired taste. Some of it can be a dreadful racket. Jazz is most certainly not Mallorcan folk music or the direness of the “orchestras” that get dragged onto the stages of Mallorca’s fiestas and churn out kitsch cabaret versions of sixties’ tunes; the sort of act that might once have been on the under card at Bournemouth’s Winter Gardens below Norman Vaughan, the Rockin’ Berries and Mrs. Mills. They’re rubbish, but the Mallorcan oldsters seem to like them.

Put a McCoy Tyner thumping a piano, a Kenny Garrett wailing on a sax in front of an old Sa Pobla farmer who has pitched up with his missus along with their picnic of potato fritters, trempó and vino, and what exactly does the old farmer make of them? Not a lot probably, but it’s free.

I might be doing old Sa Pobla farmers a disservice. Perhaps they are all avid jazz enthusiasts who have vast collections of Blue Note and ECM discs stashed in an outhouse, but I somewhat doubt it.

Free bring free, and free having been free for several years in Sa Pobla creates an expectation that free it will always be. Free is wonderful, and the provision of free entertainment in Mallorca has been laudable. It has enhanced the general quality of life. It would be sad for it to no longer be free, but the alternative has to be considered.

The problem is that charging probably wouldn’t cover costs. It doesn’t in Pollensa. You can fork out up to 45 euros for a concert during the music festival, but the festival still needs huge amounts of state funding. The Sant Domingo cloister is not exactly Wembley Stadium; it’s tiny in terms of what it can generate through ticket sales.

We are, I’m afraid, going to have to accept that some of the cherished and sometimes superb free arts in Mallorca are likely to disappear. Unless, that is, they sell their soul to the corporate shilling of sponsorship. Were it available.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.