When Blossom Falls: Mallorca’s almonds

February. In parts of Mallorca there is a familiar and pretty sight. Almond trees in blossom. The tourism they attract may not rival, say, the tulip fields of the Netherlands, but it does attract some. But for how much longer?

In the past five years, the amount of land devoted to almond cultivation has shrunk dramatically. A loss of 33,000 hectares has left the island with less than half the area for almond-growing that it had in 2005; 25,000 hectares remain.

The decline can be attributed not to crisis but to a change in productive agricultural land use. Where once were almond trees are now olive groves. The decline can be attributed also to factors of competition, consumption, markets and to the Common Agricultural Policy.

Almonds are only one example of a shift in agricultural production. One of the more dramatic has been the move to rice and away from potatoes. Less prone to the capriciousness of nature, rice has altered the pattern of agriculture in the traditional potato-growing area in and around Sa Pobla. Yet, the rice is primarily for domestic consumption, whereas the potatoes of Sa Pobla have long had a significant export market.

Export, however, has been highly influential in driving greater olive production. Indeed, most of Mallorca’s olive oil goes overseas. Prized for its quality, it has found new and large markets; China, for instance. Almonds, though also highly valued by these new markets, don’t represent the same opportunity, and this is in no small part due to the competition and the market dominance that comes from California.

In the late 1970s, the US overtook Spain as the leading producer of almonds, or rather California did. Some 80% of the world’s supply of almonds now comes from California. In a manner similar to that of the Californian wine region of the Napa Valley and its inroads into French supremacy in the global wine market, so agricultural technology, way in advance of Spanish methods, secured a position of dominance for the Californian almond from which Spain and Mallorca have never really recovered.

International competition is not confined to American almonds. Imports of other types of nut have altered Mallorcan and Spanish consumption, eroding the demand for the mainstays of Mallorcan nut production, hazelnuts as well as almonds.

Though Spanish production of almonds in 2011/2012 is due to rise by around 11% on a five-year average, this increase is largely down to natural factors; the harvest will have benefited from generally benign conditions. But the vagaries of nature have, as with the potato, occasionally taken their toll. In 2009, Mallorca’s almond production was poor by comparison with other parts of Spain, the result of too much rain and wind inhibiting pollination during the flowering season. And the almond faces another natural threat, in Mallorca and elsewhere: that of worries about the honeybee.

But over and above these different factors, successive reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) have probably been most influential.

CAP regulations have been both positive and negative. They brought about a general improvement in the quality of olive oil, but they also, thanks to subsidies and guaranteed minimum prices above world-market prices, brought about a boom in olive-tree plantation. Though the subsidy has changed since the 1980s, the growing of olives has continued to increase, and this despite the adoption of more environmentally sensitive policies in a 2005 reform.

The effects of this reform haven’t necessarily been that environmentally sensitive, notwithstanding CAP criteria that are meant to place environmental issues to the fore. Intensive olive plantations have taken over from what were more traditional crops and, in the process, have reduced biodiversity, and not just in Mallorca.

Allied to this has been a calculation in subsidy known as the coupled payment suppression and its impact on nuts. The outcome of this has been a 13% reduction on margins for Spanish nut farmers and pretty much Spanish nut farmers alone.

Agriculture is only a tiny part of Mallorca’s economy, just a bit over 1% of GDP, but it is being looked at anew for its potential growth. The appointment as environment and agriculture minister in the regional government of Gabriel Company, an independent from agriculture, highlights this renewed attention being given to agriculture. But which priorities are grabbing his attention?

While olive-oil production has clear economic advantages, the minister, in his combined role, will know that almonds, a faltering element in the agricultural mix, contribute also to the natural environment and landscape of Mallorca. And at the current rate of loss, by 2017 there will be no almond growing and no almond blossom.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Rules Of The Playground

Campanet is one of many villages in Mallorca which masquerades as a town. With a population of just over 2,500 people, it hardly merits the title of town. In Spanish (or Catalan), it wouldn’t receive such a title, but in English, it does, for the sole reason that it has its own town hall.

Not a lot happens in Campanet. Its proximity to the motorway means that it isn’t off the beaten track, and it does lay claim to reasons why it might be visited – the caves and the aquatic phenomenon of the “Fonts Ufanes” – but like other villages, it is easy to overlook it.

It is rare for Campanet to register for any reason other than that the springs are being particularly active (which they have been, thanks to recent deluges). On one occasion, a year or so ago, it did come to wider attention because of regular cuts to the water supply; the system was so antiquated, it was falling to pieces.

It now has another, doubtlessly brief moment in the spotlight owing to a little local difficulty, and it all has to do with its town hall.

In January this year, the president of the Mallorca hoteliers federation suggested that, as a way of saving money, the town halls in Mallorca should be done away with. Though she argued that all the ayuntamientos should go, she probably had in mind the likes of Campanet in particular. What, after all, is the point of a village of 2,500 people having a town hall?

There is sense to the hoteliers federation argument, and it is one that has been made by others, but were it to be acted upon, it would undermine the principle of localism and of the devolution of representation, even to the smallest of communities. It would also run up against the forces of loyalty to these communities, the strength of which resides in families, the local networks and sheer parochialism.

The principle of localism is a sound one in that it takes democracy ever closer to the ordinary people. The strength of the system is, though, also its weakness, not just in making local government as a whole more expensive but also in creating what amount to fiefdoms, rife with rivalries.

It was once said to me, about Muro, that the town hall is a playground for adults. The individuals know each other, grew up with each other and had their fallings-out in the school playgrounds which they now take into later life. It is that strength of families, networks and parochialism that fuels small-town (and village) competition, squabbles and vendettas.

Campanet’s little local difficulty has its roots in events that go back two decades. The decision of the mayor, Joan Amengual (PSOE), to chuck councillors from the PSM socialists out of his few-months-old coalition administration has more to it than the mayor having apparently taken umbrage at the PSM councillors having organised a committee to arrange festivities for Three Kings.

Petty this may seem, and is, but the PSM councillors having seemingly gone behind the mayor’s back has echoes of what happened in 1991. Amengual, who, in true dynastic fashion, had succeeded his father as PSOE chief, was the then second in command at the town hall to the PSM mayor, Francesc Aguiló. Amengual withdrew PSOE support for the then coalition when Aguiló, without telling him, called a meeting with the village’s pensioners.

The bad blood, over something this inconsequential, has festered ever since. Aguiló went on to be mayor until 2007. He was succeeded by the PSM’s Francesc Morell who was mayor in coalition (with Amengual) and who gave up the mayorship – just one of the peculiarities of how pacts work in Mallorca’s town halls – so that Amengual could serve for a year.

And now, PSOE and Amengual, finally in a position of dominance, have, or it would appear, taken their revenge. Moreover, Amengual has said that he had not agreed that Morell could share the mayorship and take over in 2013.

Amengual maintains that there have been other factors behind his breaking of the pact with the PSM, but it is being seen as simply the outcome of a long-standing feud predicated on utterly trivial matters.

In the small towns and villages, such feuds can and do arise, and they dominate local politics; Santa Margalida is just one other example. They are not really about the rules of politics but about who controls the fiefdoms, and lend support to calls to scrap the town halls – and not just on financial grounds. They are really about the rules of the playground.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Blue Monday (For Holiday Lets)

Don’t like Mondays? Well, if you are the owner of a holiday property in Mallorca that you rent out illegally, you will like the one coming up even less. Because on Monday, the brave new world of the Balearic Government’s reforms to the tourism law will be presented, and among them will be a beefing-up of dealing with the so-called “oferta ilegal”.

No one should of course be surprised by what is to be contained in the revised law. It has all been well publicised well in advance. There will be all the stuff about relaxing procedures and rules, so that, among other things, condohotels can be created. But it’s not all about being more flexible. Oh no, not where holiday lets are concerned. The government will be paying – and mark its ominous words – “special attention” to the “illegal offer of dwellings and tourist apartments, applying tougher sanctions and mechanisms to monitor directly this irregular activity”.

Don’t say you hadn’t been warned that the heat was to be turned up higher. Whether it will be turned up to maximum remains to be seen. There has been a tendency for tough talking but for relative inaction, save for the odd raid here and there and the dishing out of thirty-grand fines. But running parallel to legal reforms, certain organisational changes are being put in place, which might just have the effect of making the tough talking translate into tougher action.

These changes, and I have noted them before, include the establishment of an interdepartmental committee to support tourism developments and the formation of the “mesa de alcaldes” (literally, the mayors’ table), which is designed to improve co-ordination between town halls and the tourism industry. They are very positive and welcome changes. However, they can also be seen as a means of improving the flow of information to tackle aspects of the tourism industry that the government doesn’t wish to be supported, e.g. holiday lets. Consequently, various mechanisms of government can become part of those “mechanisms to monitor directly this irregular activity”.

I can predict, with a reasonable amount of certainty, that, once the penny drops among the holiday-let-owning population (either living in or not living in Mallorca) that the government is planning more of a crackdown, pens and keyboards will be taken up and letters fired of. They will say, as they always have said, the same things. As with the other “burning issues”, such as all-inclusives or expat voting, the arguments will be the same and they will achieve precisely nothing.

Did people seriously believe that a change in government was going to result in a fairer crack of the whip for the holiday-let sector? A change in government to one so aligned with the powers that be within the industry, i.e. the hotels, and the main hotel chains at that? A change in government to one that had flagged up its commitment to condohotels, a move that effectively allows the hotels to operate their own private holiday accommodation?

There is no opposition to the government or to the hotels, and the government and the hotels know this full well. Where would it come from? Property owners themselves? Are you kidding? It was all very well thinking that a Majorcan Holiday Property Owners Association could be created and wield some influence, but it was a non-starter. And non-starter, unless I am missing something, it has indeed been. Its website seems not to have been updated since a first announcement and a call in the spring of last year for people to join and to make donations; its Facebook page also seems to be inactive.

But who was going to take the risk of making themselves known in attempting to lobby the tourism ministry? They may as well just stick a damn great sign up outside the apartment saying “this property is being rented out illegally, please come in and fine me”.

It’s not as though I am not on the owners’ side. I am. And I fully appreciate all their arguments and the fact that undermining the holiday-let sector is absurd. But the arguments will cut no ice, as the tourism industry is a closed shop and one that turns illegality to its advantage – when it suits. Did you know, for instance, that there are 120 or so hotels and related accommodation that have applied to have rooms regularised that are illegal? And did you know that the government is pretty much applying an amnesty? All in the interests of improving tourism, you see.

Nope, you certainly aren’t going to like this Monday, a real blue Monday, black even, for the holiday-let market.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Quiet Man And The Serious Man

Amidst all the euphoria (?) of Mariano’s march to victory, the local leadership, i.e. that of President Bauzá, could find itself a sideshow to the main event in Madrid. It could do, but it won’t. The inevitable scrutiny that a president is subject to and some personality cultivation for Bauzá make sure that it won’t.

Rajoy is the Quiet Man, the brothers Iain and Duncan Smith (to lift an old Paul Merton gag) of Spanish politics. Actually, “quiet” doesn’t do him justice. Mute is a bit more like it. Whether he ever gets round to acquiring a personality is questionable, but Bauzá, in the meantime, has been.

The spin médicos have it that Bauzá is “serio”, a proper politician, as opposed to one who isn’t (and there are plenty of candidates, to be fair). “Serio”, but he has also undergone something of a metamorphosis, not just in acquiring the facial-hair trappings of Partido Popular politics but also in being portrayed as being vaguely human, though there are those who would disagree.

Before Bauzá was elevated to party leadership n March 2010, his stock, publicity-wise, wasn’t that high. Indeed, it was his relative anonymity and unremarkableness, save for a resemblance to Richard E. Grant and/or Count Dracula (or perhaps because of in the case of the latter), that made him the perfect choice for the PP, determined to appoint anyone but Carlos Delgado, who was said not to be shy in promoting himself.

“Serio”, and confronting the serious challenges threatening the Balearics with Armageddon, Bauzá set to work after the elections in May. Since then, the new improved Bauzá has emerged with his designer-stubble beard sprouting from the chin of political ambition.

Bauzá is close to Rajoy, so close in fact that it has been implied that Rajoy has, in spirit if not in body, taken up residence in the regional presidential palace in using the Balearics as a test site for national policy to come.

The closeness has caused the electoral commission to describe Bauzá’s call for votes for Rajoy at the national election “inappropriate”. It also fuels opposition from within his own party as well as from rival parties. Similarly, it does nothing to hold at bay sections of the media, alert to any opportunity of gaffe akin to that which Bauzá made when he had what he admitted later was a “mental lapse” regarding language policy during a radio interview.

The media has, for example, jumped on a more recent admission, that of having a mortgage of some 800 thousand euros for a property said to be valued at well over a million. There is nothing wrong about the mortgage, but it does send out a confused message to all those who had pressurised the poor banks into handing over fat mortgages for which they haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance of paying off this side of hell freezing over and who, in the process, precipitated the potential for financial Armageddon.

There has also been the issue of Bauzá on the golf course. Opponents have argued that photos of the president in full fairway-swing mode sent out another confused message. There are more “serio” things he should be doing (like cutting even more public-sector jobs, presumably).

The jibe should have been ignored. But no. It was the right message. Golfers spend 400 euros a day, came the reply, and not the average 97 euros a day of regular tourists. Absolutely. The message, one takes it, is that Mallorca doesn’t need damned, cheapskate tourists filling the place up and not running to a daily hundred sobs.

Rajoy has met with the different PP regional presidents, emphasising the need for them to comply with the need to reduce regional deficits. In the Balearics, compliance hasn’t needed to be sought. Bauzá can be relied upon; “serio” can, after all, mean reliable.

But this compliance is what threatens Bauzá. His image and personality making since the regional elections has been partly for internal party consumption, because there is someone whose greater “presence” was apparent long before the elections: not Delgado, but Antoni Pastor, the mayor of Manacor.

The PP should be riding the wave of success, but it has been holding back the tide of internal division that was evident last year and which now may break over the party’s flimsy beachhead. An “ants nest” is how the local party has been described, with Pastor on one ant hill, that of the malcontents whose murmurings of perceived influence of the party nationally and of the party losing its humanity are starting to become louder.

Euphoria can swiftly turn into dysphoria, and for Bauzá, it could be “serio”.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Most Precious Time Of All

Have you seen the Thomson ad? You must have done. Watch “X Factor” and you can’t miss it, which will probably be why I have. Or had.

The Thomson ad is being given added prominence among the Spanish media for two reasons: one, that Tenerife reckons that it is benefiting from it specifically; two, because Thomson (i.e. TUI) is making as much play as it can out of the travails at Thomas Cook.

The ad is one of the most remarkable pieces of holiday promotion you could wish to see. Unashamedly and gut-wrenchingly sentimental, if it doesn’t move you, then you have no soul. It does everything an advert should do, with an emphasis on playing with the emotions.

Break the ad down and you appreciate just how effective it is. Take the language used. Key words and phrases such as “those close to you”, “share with them”, “cherish”, “the people who mean everything in the world to you”, “holidays are the most precious time of all” make you well up just by reading them; they are the art of a neurolinguistic programmer who has got right inside the heart, head and mind of the audience.

The words are those of a child, just to add greater poignancy to the whole thing, but they are spoken by a child for a hard-nosed reason: children are massively important when it comes to family purchasing decisions and especially where holidays are concerned. Advertisers know this and exploit the fact for all it’s worth.

Then there’s the music, a plaintive reworking of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” with a distinct nod in the direction of Coldplay. It is recognisable without being known.

And finally, there is the imagery: Tenerife, because that’s where the ad was filmed. The island may not be mentioned, but Tenerife is doing all it can to cash in not just in summer but also this winter. Hard luck, Mallorca, the Canaries win again, both because they were the location and because they are open for winter business.

Behind the creativity of the advert, before it was even first worked up and story-boarded, was something much less slushy. BMB (Beattie McGuinness Bungay), the agency which created the ad, was set a “business problem”. From the agency’s website, I quote: “Consumers see little difference between any of the large holiday operators, resulting in low brand preference and attribution”. The “idea” to address this problem was to “remind consumers of the importance of spending quality time with your loved ones and how Thomson truly facilitate this”.

The campaign will end up costing Thomson five million pounds, which equates to over two million euros more than the Balearics have in total for tourism promotion in 2012. But were the tourism ministry to embark on television campaigns in the future, it could learn an awful lot from the Thomson ad.

Look at the business problem again. You can easily substitute “large holiday operators” with “leading holiday destinations”. From this, you can change the idea to “how Mallorca truly facilitates this”.

The advert is generic, not that it has prevented Tenerife from working it to its advantage, but there are important lessons. Firstly, the ad is believable, and this, unlike Mallorcan (Balearics) attempts, is partly because there are no celebrities, which has been a Mallorcan obsession for too long. Secondly, though the imagery of Tenerife is obviously integral, it is also incidental. Shots of landscape and what have you, another usual obsession, do not sell like emotion sells, especially when you want to grab a television audience by the throat.

I have been highly dismissive of adverts such as the Nadal one. They have been ineffective in all sorts of ways, which is why the small promotion spend for 2012 is a blessing in disguise, as it stops the same mistakes being made; mistakes that have centred on a belief that you sell through “place”, which translates as landscape scenes. Yes, you can, but not initially. You sell, most powerfully, through emotion, which is exactly what BMB have done for Thomson. They have taken the simple concept of the family holiday and the simple and familiar representation of the family on holiday and come up with something really rather wonderful.

I am not suggesting that Mallorca should imitate the Thomson ad, even if it had the money to do so, but if an appreciation can be made of the power of emotion then future promotion might just become more effective and might also go some way to demonstrating how Mallorca can truly facilitate the spending of quality time and can differentiate itself from other leading holiday destinations.

 

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Biggest Wave: Tourism and climate

Periodically the issue of climate change and its impact on Mallorca’s tourism raises its head. And when it does, it is usually accompanied by the sight of an entire industry and a host of politicians preferring to bury their own heads in the sand. They should be careful and not tarry long or they might be washed away by the rising seas.

Even if one is a disbeliever in the human element in climate change, a great deal of evidence has been cobbled together over the past few years that should make the tourism industry (and not just the tourism industry) stop and think for a moment. Unfortunately, there has been an absence of any sort of long-term thinking, and some of this thinking doesn’t even have to project that far into the future.

It is just conceivable – actually, more than just conceivable – that plans for tourism and indeed much else on Mallorca could be rendered irrelevant, if more extreme predictions of the consequences of climate change were to manifest themselves.

A problem, though, lies with a not unreasonable scepticism when questionable predictions are made. I’ll give you just one. In 2007, a Nobel Prize winner, Professor Martin Beniston, argued that south-west Europe (to include Mallorca) would experience average temperature rises of six degrees over the following six years. Well, it’s now 2011 and the prediction has some way to go yet.

Far less dramatic and far less speculative are what are said to be the actual increases in temperature. Playa de Palma, for example, has experienced an each-decade increase of 0.6 of a degree compared with a global 0.7 average each century. So says Professor Sergio Alonso from the Universitat de les Illes Balears. What time frame he refers to isn’t totally clear, but he considers human intervention to be the main cause of climate change since the eighteenth century and, in particular, since the middle of the last century.

The relatively far greater increase in Mallorca’s temperature may well be evidence of what is said about the island, which is that its location at just about 40 degrees latitude makes it particularly susceptible to the impact of climate change. Whether it is or not, Professor Alonso is one of those who is trying to address this impact on tourism, and today there is a conference in Palma which does just that.

One of the more obvious impacts is likely to be beneficial. Alonso isn’t the only one to have suggested that it could be positive in reducing seasonality. Warmer off-seasons would bring more off-season tourism. The same point was made by another Mallorca-based professor, Carlos Duarte of the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies, a couple of years ago.

However, there is the issue of just how hot it might get in summer. Current heatwaves which push the temperature up to a point where the heat becomes dangerous will begin to become the norm. It’s a question of when rather than if and also of whether this would deter summer tourism. It probably would to an extent, but if there were benefits for the off-season, the sooner the higher temperatures really kick in the better.

The negatives, though, are potentially far more profound. The loss of 20 metres of beach and a 20 centimetre increase in sea levels will cause a fundamental alteration of the coastlines, and they are on the cards by the middle of this century. It is the effect on the coastlines which, more than other aspects of climate change, threatens to undermine both current and future plans for resorts, but it is an effect which seems to be studiously ignored.

More damaging, though, is the potential for extreme natural events, tsunamis especially. Last year, the university issued a report warning of greater tsunami risk and a few days ago another report, by the Institute of Environmental Hydraulics in Cantabria, gave its own warning – that of a potentially devastating tsunami, one worsened in its effects by the lack of adequate alert and emergency systems in Spain as a whole.

In addition to the tsunami threat, there is also that of drought. A marked decline in rainfall, added to the greater heat, would place a burden on resources that Mallorca couldn’t cope with. Plans for the supply of water and for energy for ever more air-conditioning are just one element of where long-term thinking should be taking local industry and politicians. Are they thinking, though?

Get your heads out of the sand, fellas, because here comes a damn great wave.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Old Folks At Home (29 November)

I went to the old folks home in Alcúdia yesterday. They had rung me up and asked me to come by. There was a surprise on entering the “residencia”. I remembered it when it was the Alcúdia hospital. The place has been completely transformed. They describe it as not really a hotel and not really a hospital, but it looked and felt more like a hotel.

I said to them that a perception of a residencia, among many Brits at any rate, is probably that of the “old folks home”, one of elderly people sitting around in stiff-backed chairs, staring aimlessly at a television screen, not always smelling of lavender, and waiting for the next trolley of tea to come by. The residencia really isn’t like that.

They wanted to do something about increasing awareness of what the place is really like, but that’s for elsewhere, as there is – along with every other part of Mallorca’s economy – a crisis in the residencia sector.

Workers at residencias across Mallorca have added their voices to the growing number of personnel that is either not being paid or is being paid late. Though the regional government or town halls don’t operate residencias, the companies which do are paid by government and the companies in turn pay staff salaries. Or don’t, as the government is in debt to them, as it is in debt to all manner of providers.

A protest planned for today outside the regional parliament by workers from different residencias adds to one staged by a hundred workers at the residencia in Marratxí on Saturday. It had been announced that November salaries for the staff in Marratxí would not be paid, this coming on top of delays in the past few months.

The residencia workers are far from being the only ones who have suffered because of the inability of government (or town halls) to pay suppliers, but problems with payment at this time of the year are particularly acute, given the proximity of Christmas.

The system of payment for those in the public sector isn’t collapsing, but it is on foundations that seem to be becoming ever more shaky, as is the edifice of the Mallorcan and indeed Spanish welfare state.

The residencias, in addition to their permanent residents, provide an important service through their day centres. These are important especially for the elderly who live alone and/or in conditions that are not much better than destitution.

A misconception that surrounds local society, in addition to one that the welfare state is particularly generous, which it isn’t, is that the family always takes care of its own, the elderly included. The family does of course provide, but not quite to the same extent that it once might have.

The Economic and Social Council for the Balearics has released information regarding the number of people aged 65 or older who live on their own. The percentage in the islands as a whole is just under a third, and one half of these either have no or very little by way of contact with family, while some 22% also have no obvious friends to call upon. Pensions, which Mariano Rajoy says he will safeguard, can be as low as 250 euros a month.

Demands placed on agencies outside the established welfare state have rocketed in the past few years, and not only for help for the elderly. The Cruz Roja and the Catholic charity, Caritas, are just two that have had to step in as a combination of economic crisis and a societal shift that has lessened the strength of the family has left an increasing number of people with little or no safety net; and crisis has itself contributed to undermining the wherewithal of some families to go some way to providing this safety net.

Crisis is not just damaging economically but also socially, and the strain of crisis is such that opposition parties accuse the regional government of stripping away nearly 250 million euros from that part of the budget that includes welfare and the family; a budget described as the “most anti-social” that the Balearics have experienced.

It is against this background, therefore, that the services of the residencias, more important than ever, find themselves also subject to the virus that is crisis and to a cycle of crisis that is vicious and seemingly never-ending.

Alcúdia’s old folks home, and more than just an old folks home, is mightily impressive. Whether the agencies of government are taking much notice of how impressive, however, is another matter entirely.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

A Real Farce (28 November)

Put the words “real” and “farce” together and the potential references are all but endless. What’s today’s real farce? Iñaki Urdangarín perhaps. A real, as in royal(ish), Brian Rix character, and now presumably, thanks to the farcical goings-on at Palma town hall, referred to as the Duke of Palma de Mallorca, where he had been merely “of Palma” until a few days ago.

If not dukey, then what about Real Mallorca? So committed to farce, it’s the only thing the club’s any good at. They can’t even manage to find themselves caught up in a decent bit of old-fashioned fan hooliganism; only an accident.

Real and farce could apply to a host of things in Mallorca. Every day of every year. Not all, though, have real inscribed onto the farce. But there is one other which does. Just what on earth is going on at Son Real near Can Picafort? Or maybe we should call it Son Unreal.

If you have never been to Son Unreal, and the chances are that you haven’t, as I’m none too sure many people actually go there, you may be unaware of the fact that it is arguably the single most important historic site in Mallorca. It isn’t just any old bit of finca, and at getting on for 400 hectares you probably wouldn’t expect it to be.

Its provenance either is or almost prehistoric. And just part of this prehistory, the necropolis burial site, is under threat from nature, i.e. the sea, and from man, who tramples over it (those men who do in fact go there), because there is a lack of preservation and a lack of control.

The necropolis isn’t the only part of Son Real that is suffering. With the exception of the restoration of old houses and the creation of a visitors’ centre, the story of Son Real has been one of neglect for years.

The finca was acquired by the then government nine years ago. Prior to the acquisition and then for some time afterwards, Son Real was paid scant attention to. So little did it seem to register that there was a serious proposal to turn the finca into a golf course. Yes, really, a golf course. When common sense prevailed and the proposal was ditched, leaving Santa Margalida town hall making somewhat ambiguous statements, as it seemed to be in favour of the course, some attention was finally paid. And it cost three million euros.

This was the price tag put on the restoration and the visitors’ centre. A whole bunch of dignitaries turned up at the start of September 2008 to celebrate the spending of three million, partook of the tapas and wine and, like any freeloader who goes to a restaurant inauguration, promptly forgot about the place, along with everyone else.

Among those who forgot about it, or so the town hall reckons, are the local hotels, which do precious little or nothing to publicise Son Real. The town hall isn’t much impressed by the efforts of the tourism ministry either, though the ministry is finally putting the Foundation for Sustainable Development, which supposedly runs the place, out of its misery and scrapping it.

The town hall wants to knock heads together in making improvements to the maintenance, management and promotion of Son Real. It represents something of an about turn for an administration, admittedly of a different make-up, that not so long ago quite fancied the necropolis being turned into a series of bunkers.

Its enthusiasm in wanting to see something being done may not be completely without some other motivation. For sure, it would like there to be more tourists coming into Can Picafort in order to visit Son Real, but it has had its spats with the foundation and so may see the opportunity to join in with kicking it while it is down and on its way out, to say nothing of perhaps eyeing up a possible involvement in running the finca, despite the fact that it is meant to now come under the environment ministry.

Whatever the motivation, the town hall isn’t wrong to highlight the problems at Son Real, and these aren’t simply confined to deterioration to the historic remains; rubbish, broken signs, these are just other examples of the lack of care.

The real story of Son Real and its neglect, though, is one of questions arising as to quite how serious are the desires to preserve Mallorca’s heritage and to promote it to tourists. Tourism bodies bang on about heritage and culture, everyone bangs on about it, but at Son Real no one does much about it. Farce? Really, it is.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Mallorca’s Political Formula One (27 November)

While sport for all may be being brought into question because of the lack of financing of Mallorca’s sports facilities, sport for an elite poses its own question: is Mallorca really going to get a Formula One circuit?

Long in the suggestion, the regional government is, as it said it would, giving the proposal a serious once-over. The seriousness of this once-over has to do with the financing of a circuit, the government hoping that, were it a real goer, the money would be mainly or totally private.

When the idea for the circuit was doing the rounds last year, the cost of the project was put at some 90 million euros. A plan has in fact been drawn up, one that would pretty much completely re-develop the Rennarena in Llucmajor, which currently is totally inadequate for F1.

The plan would, for example, require a lengthening of the circuit by almost three kilometres plus creating grandstands capable of holding way more than the existing 1500 spectators. As with any plan for a building project, there are the inevitable procedures. The government says it will look at how this bureaucracy can be tackled, which probably means ignoring any planning issues. Already, one can hear the sound of GOB and other environmental protectors revving up their engines (with bio-fuel) in the protest pit lanes.

But talk of finance and procedures are only partially relevant. The chances of Mallorca’s F1 circuit ever even getting onto the starting-grid of potential grand prix, let alone being shown the green lights, have to be slim.

Bernie Ecclestone has been courted and Bernie has made some encouraging remarks, but then Bernie says all sorts of things. One of them is that he is against there being more than one grand prix per country. This hasn’t stopped Spain from currently having two – the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona and the European Grand Prix around Valencia’s street circuit – but Rome has pretty much given up on staging a street race from 2013 since a letter from Ecclestone in an Italian newspaper said that “no one” wanted two races per country (Italy already has Monza).

It also hasn’t stopped the USA being awarded two grand prix from 2013 – the revived US Grand Prix in Austin, Texas and a so-called Grand Prix of America in New Jersey. However, and despite F1 not being particularly popular in the USA, Ecclestone is largely motivated by commercial opportunities and by a desire to develop F1 geographically.

With these motivations in mind, where does a grand prix in Mallorca fit in? What is being hoped for in Mallorca is that it would replace Valencia as the location for the European Grand Prix. Valencia’s contract lasts until the 2013 race, though it has been rumoured it might be dropped after next year. So there may well be some substance to the Mallorcan hope. But it is one based on an assumption that there will still be a European Grand Prix. Rome probably saw this as its chance, but, and notwithstanding the American contradiction, Ecclestone is opposed to another race in Italy and may well see the end of Valencia as a reason to scrap the European Grand Prix.

There is significant competition from across the globe for circuits to be included in the F1 calendar, some of it from other countries in Europe. Croatia, for example, has its eyes on a grand prix. This competition merely adds to F1’s commercial and global ambitions in raising serious doubts as to whether Mallorca is a realistic option.

Given all this, therefore, should the government really be giving the proposal a serious once-over? The investment, were it to be private, wouldn’t be an issue, although the environmental objections are bound to be. But why would there be investment without any guarantee of success in securing a grand prix? It might be that, were the circuit designed appropriately or flexibly enough, it could also stage MotoGP, which is Spanish-dominated in terms of who runs it and the number of races – four in Spain for next year’s calendar. MotoGP isn’t F1, however; either its cachet or its cash.

The proposal isn’t particularly realistic, and one has the impression that its discussion both before the regional elections and now has been for political consumption. Former president Matas wanted a grand prix as well; one to be held on a Palma street circuit. That was an absurdity. Llucmajor isn’t, but the stewards flags should nevertheless be being waved furiously and warning that all the talk may just be PR and a raising of expectations that cannot be fulfilled.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Sport For All (26 November)

If you are a government minister, let’s say for tourism and sport in the Balearics, you would hope that you would have both some tourism and sport to be in charge of and both some tourism and sport on which you could lavish your ministerial munificence.

Tourism there is, but it has to scrape by on only a few quid for promotion, though when your ministry is in fact 32 million euros in the red, it’s surprising that there is a ministry at all.

Then there’s sport. Or rather, then there isn’t any sport.

Linked to the ministry is one agency from within the Balearic Government’s tourism organisation that has been allowed to escape the axe for being either pointless or up to its neck in misappropriation of funds, or both.

The Fundación Illesport came to public notice recently, as it was invoices to this foundation that first alerted the world to the inconvenience with which the Duke of Palma now has to contend. The foundation was handing over great wads of cash in return for what would appear, allegedly, to have been very little.

But the foundation has long been there, doing something about sport, which mainly seems to have involved spending the tourism ministry’s money, of which there now isn’t any. It’s a reasonable question to ask why a foundation has been needed when presumably they could just as easily have got some secretary in the ministry to prepare cheques, so one has to assume that the foundation has some altogether greater function.

It does, or did. It was still really only a case of doling out ministry money, but the foundation is (was) responsible, among other things, for sorting out financial assistance to town halls for their sports facilities. An agreement of May this year should have realised the release of 24 million euros to different municipalities, only eight million, therefore, short of the ministry’s total debt for this year.

Should have, because now the foundation says that it hasn’t got any money to meet these grants. A town hall that stands to suffer most from the lack of funding for sports facilities’ improvements is Sa Pobla; to the tune of 338 thousand euros. The mayor is threatening legal action.

There had already been an indication that money for sport was not going to be forthcoming, as a couple of weeks ago Santa Margalida had been told that it was not going to get the quarter of a million it had been promised.

As a consequence, sport, in the case of sport to support the health and welfare of the island, is being allowed to trail in well down the list of all the runners and riders that the government has to feed and nurture.

There are, though, two types of sport: that for the people of Mallorca and that for tourists. The tourism and sport minister, Carlos Delgado, took office with a brief that included giving a new impulse to sport in Mallorca and the Balearics. If there is an impulse, it appears to be directed at sport for tourism. When announcing recently that there was going to be only a negligible amount for tourism promotion, he did also refer to initiatives to further develop three “puertos deportivos”, one being that of Alcúdia.

What this would entail wasn’t made clear, and even though only three “sport ports” are being targeted, the priority for sport, where the ministry is concerned, seems clear enough, and it isn’t sport for the locals.

Sport usually finds itself losing out when governments come to having to make tough decisions. Perhaps we should be grateful that there aren’t proposals to sell off the playing fields and sports areas and hand them over to developers. Yet.

But sport plays a central role in the life of the island’s communities. One only has to scan through pages of the Spanish press on a Monday to get an appreciation of the scale of sport and its organisation in Mallorca. Pages of results, reports and photos of teams for football, basketball, athletics, whatever; men and women, boys and girls.

Sports tourism is one of the Big White Hopes of tourism diversification. It deserves to be prioritised. But for every development of a resort’s watersports, for every possible new golf course or – the new vogue – polo field, and for every route set aside for German oldsters to clack along with Nordic walking poles, sport at the local level should not be neglected.

The tourism ministry and its foundation will know that sport will just carry on without the injection of new money. But nothing lasts without investment. As a slogan once had it, “sport for all”. And not just for tourism.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.