On A Carousel: Mallorca’s Fairs

You can tell that summer has shifted into autumn. The fiestas cease to be fiestas and become fairs. The transition is all but seamless. The fairs are fiestas without the religion. It is replaced by a different religion – that of commerce. The Mallorcan fair, such as that in Alcúdia this past weekend, substitutes the worship of images being carted through the streets with a bowing before the polished icons of agricultural machinery. For what in summer might have been a Saint John, in autumn read a John Deere.

The Mallorcan fair has something of the English country fair. It’s the village fête colliding with the landed gentry. Horses, a touch of medievalism, stands for this or that, local delicacies fortunately not being judged by a Maggie vomiting in front of a Judy. On top of this are the trappings of the fairground, the carousels and dodgems, the exhibitions of government departments, shows for boys and their toys – classic cars and trial bikes – and of course the stuff of the land, such as the tractors.

Just as the fiestas are a reclaiming of the past, so also are the fairs. A key difference is that the fairs are a reminder of Mallorca’s pre-industrial age, i.e. the time before mass tourism. They are as much a celebration of an agrarian past (and present) as they are an expression of modernity, be this equipment or a DJ’s night party. (As with the fiestas, there’s always a DJ or several on hand to scratch into the early morning.)

As such, it is appropriate that the fairs take place once the tourists have started to clear off. The reclaiming of the past can be equated to a reclaiming of a present without the hordes cluttering the place up. Moreover, the fairs are representative of a Mallorca that most tourists have no interest in, that of the land.

I say this, but of course plenty of visitors are interested, while the fairs are also symbolic of a “patrimonio” (heritage) that the tourism authorities are keen to make tourists take an interest in. Which does therefore beg the question as to why they don’t feature more prominently.

Come to Mallorca for its fairs. In November you can nip from one to the other, as they coincide or follow on. Pollensa and Muro, Inca’s Dijous Bo and Sa Pobla. In the case of each of these fairs – Pollensa less than the others perhaps – it is the land which is the point of them. Dijous Bo has its traditional and huge farm market. No towns are more synonymous with a Mallorcan agricultural heritage than Muro or Sa Pobla. They still are, given that they are centres for potato-growing and market gardening. Muro is taking this culture further with the laudable revamp of the ethnology museum to depict rural life pre-tourism.

The local agriculture industry may have declined, but after tourism and construction it is still significant in terms of the island’s economy. It is significant in a different way, in that it is an indigenous industry. It hasn’t been artificially created. It is, if you like, the real Mallorca, one that isn’t so far removed from the present; it is a recent past to which the fairs provide an important link.

But the significance of the fairs seems to be lost on those who would like to promote this heritage. As ever, the promotion of the fairs is inherently parochial; it talks to the converted, those who know what to expect and when to expect it. A few years ago, I mentioned to someone in Puerto Pollensa, a Brit, that the Alcúdia fair had been on. He hadn’t known about it. Therefore he hadn’t known about the horses. His daughters would have loved to have seen them. And this wasn’t a tourist. He was a resident.

As far as tourism promotion goes, the fairs hardly get a look in. Yet at a fair you can typically encounter “alternative” aspects of tourism that are supposed to hold so much promise, such as gastronomy, Mallorcan produce, wines and so on, topped off by the traditions of giants, “big heads”, pipers and dance. They are, or should be, showpieces for the towns and a tourism ideal. But they are not. And you have to ask why not.

The local fairs are not like this:

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

As The Miller Told His Tale: Restoration of mills in Mallorca

The transformation of Mallorca during Franco’s time, and since, has been one of contradictions. The greatest change occurred in the ’60s with the onset of mass tourism. It was one that set in motion a shift, a fundamental shift, away from what was almost exclusively an agrarian economy, one that had served Franco well; the farmers’ co-operatives, such as those in Muro and Sa Pobla, formed part of the syndicates of self-sufficiency that was the economic model Franco preferred but which, by the mid to late-50s, was being shown to be unsustainable and unrealistic.

Tourism, and therefore increased urbanisation, meant a move away from the land. With this came the basis for the wealth that has made Mallorca what it is. At the same time as the foundations of tourism were being laid, the island was also subject to certain proscriptions, e.g. the practice of the Catalan language and culture and some fiestas.

Despite Franco’s desire for self-sufficiency, it was he – and his regime – who altered Mallorca for good and pushed it towards a more outward-looking perspective. This was the greatest contradiction of them all. But the process of modernisation that continued after his death, the movement towards greater cosmopolitanism and internationalism, has brought with it a further contradiction in terms of retrenchment and a re-invigoration of what, prior to Franco, was the Mallorcan orthodoxy – of Catalan, fiestas and also agrarianism.

The latter of these might be the hardest to comprehend. The socio-political nature of the language and cultural as well as the fiestas are clear expressions of a rediscovery of what had been undermined for many years. A return to the traditions of the land are less easy to understand. Yet this does represent the latest of contradictions within Mallorcan society; a desire to have the wealth of tourism while also clinging to a nostalgic past. It is understandable in a way. Any society that undergoes an upheaval as great as Mallorca has over the past 40 years will find solace in some continuity with the past, especially a past that had been partially banned or, in the case of agrarianism, partially abandoned in the pursuit of economic growth and a wholly different economic model.

This isn’t so much a return to farming – which has never gone away of course – but to traditional machinery and operations of a rural past. The restoration of a variety of mills – for flour, water, olives etc. – is advancing at a phenomenal pace. There are over 600 flour mills, over 400 olive mills and over 2,000 windmills for extracting water. Of these, the greatest number of olive mills are to be found in Pollensa.

Many of these mills had fallen into a bad state of disrepair, but rather than demolish them there has been an ongoing programme, under the auspices of the rural department of the environment ministry at the Council of Mallorca, to bring them back to life. The style of some of these mills reflect an island landscape of stonework akin to the dry-stone walls in the countryside, while they are indicative of a pre-industrial Mallorca, i.e. one before tourism. Certain mills even operate by means of horse power.

These mills do not necessarily offer anything highly productive. What they do offer are sympathetic adornments to the landscape and an educative element – how life once was and how rural machinery used to operate. They also offer an attraction; one to the tourist. Some Mallorcans might actually hanker after a return to the old ways. But in bringing back to life those old ways, they – the Mallorcans – are also in the process of looking to add greater sustainability to the industry that all but destroyed those ways – to mass tourism. Another contradiction.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.