The BAFMAs: Awards for Mallorcan achievement

Yes, it’s that time of the year. Time for the BAFMAs, the Blog Awards For Mallorcan Achievement. In no particular order, the following are variously well-known and less well-known or were well-publicised and less well-publicised …

Politician Of The Year (Shared): Miquel Ensenyat and Carme Garcia
Ensenyat, the PSM Mallorcan socialist mayor of Esporles, stood as candidate for the PSM at the national elections. There was little remarkable about this, except that Ensenyat is an openly gay politician in a land where the Church can issue warnings of the danger of voting for politicians who support gay marriage.

Garcia, the “turncoat” of Alcúdia, was also a PSM politician. “Was” being the operative word. She sided with the Partido Popular after the regional elections, despite the wide gulf in political ideology, leading to her being expelled from the party and to her suffering recriminations led by the previous coalition of PSOE and the Convergència. Though her ex-party and the opposition had a legitimate point and though Garcia secured for herself a role as second-in-command to the new lady mayor, her decision could also be seen as a blow for the chumminess of the previous male-dominated coalition which did not have the moral authority to expect her to support it in denying the PP, which had gained eight out of nine seats required for a majority, the right to govern Alcúdia.

Celebrity Of The Year: Tom Hanks
They sought him here, they sought him there. Through their long lenses, they sought Tom everywhere. There he was, at long distance, speaking into an iPhone, or rather there was the back of Tom’s head speaking into an iPhone. There he also was just hanging around and doing very little, assuming you could make out it was Tom behind the security and beneath his headgear.

Business Of The Year: Lidl
Disproving the notion that Mallorca is not open to foreign companies, Lidl, exploiting a relaxation in commercial developments, expanded across Mallorca, bringing jobs as well as competition to the supermarket sector.

Event Of The Year: The Inca bullfight
If campaigners sought more encouragement in banning bullfighting in Mallorca, they got it during the Inca bullfight. The promoter caused outrage by taking to the ring to kill the bull after the bull had effectively excluded itself from the fight when it broke a horn. Rules don’t apparently permit non-combatants to enter the ring. The gruesome video of the killing of the bull went viral and the video also highlighted and criticised the fact that minors had been allowed into the arena.

Beach Of The Year: Playa de Muro
The extension of Puerto Alcúdia’s beach (which was voted Mallorca’s best beach on “Trip Advisor”), the beach in Playa de Muro was the target of efforts by the town hall to improve it even further. These included instituting a fine for urinating on the beach, which drew a response from some who wanted to know where else they were supposed to go to the toilet, and a similar fine for a similar act in the sea. It wasn’t entirely clear how Muro town hall proposed policing the latter, but with concerns about rising sea levels, the consequence of climate change, a ban on using the sea was probably a wise precaution.

Website Of The Year: Mallorca Daily Photo Blog
Just going to show that wit, informativeness, striking photography and personal dedication count for far more than huge budgets chucked at websites in promoting Mallorca. It deserves an award very much more prestigious than a BAFMA.

Musician Of The Year: Arnau Reynés
While more celebrated musicians took to stages in Mallorca this year, Reynés, the professor of music from the Universitat de les Illes Balears, who has performed in some of Europe’s finest cathedrals, brought a tradition of music in Mallorca that is often overlooked to the small church in Playa de Muro and gave a summer recital, as did other leading Mallorcan organists.

Historian Of The Year: Gabriel Verd Martorell
Thirty-five years is a long time for any one historian to have sought to have proved a point, but Verd was still at it, striving, once and for all, to establish that Christopher Columbus was born in Felanitx. In a “solemn” declaration in the town, he claimed that Columbus was the illegitimate nephew of King Ferdinand and that to have had the title of governor general bestowed on him, which he did, he had to have had royal blood. You can’t blame a historian for persistence.

So, these are the BAFMAs. No science behind them, no text voting, purely my own choice. But if you have your own nominations or suggestions, please feel free … .

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Hotels’ Beachhead

Change of government is still a month away, but the tourism industry has gone into overdrive in anticipation of all sorts of liberalisation that may be ushered forth by a Partido Popular victory.

As far as the hoteliers are concerned, Mariano Rajoy may as well already be prime minister. The Meliá plans for Magalluf are partly dependent on legislative relaxation, and the specific plans Meliá has for the beach would almost certainly require some changes to the Coasts Law.

When it was announced that Meliá wished to “exploit” the beach, a thought which occurred had to do with what the Costas Authority would make of it. This is a body which, while it does, quite rightly, seek to protect the coastal environment, is also the source of obstruction and of much that runs counter to the wishes of the tourism industry.

If a likely change of government were not in the offing, the chances are that Meliá’s wishes would have been stamped on from the great height that the Costas has come to assume; or probably, the wishes would never have been made public. Without knowing for sure, one gets the sense that the Costas might find its seemingly all-embracing powers being cut back.

Meliá wants, among other things, to be able to provide temporary moorings next to its hotels. The Mallorca hoteliers federation, very much to the fore in driving a national agenda, wants a change to the Coasts Law which would not only remove any obstacle to Meliá providing its moorings but would also permit other hotels to exploit other beaches for leisure purposes.

The proposal, much as it may make good business sense for the hotels and for the tourism industry, does run up against a difficulty. Essentially, the beaches would be privatised and there has to be a risk, somewhere along the line, that the principle of free public space on the beaches might be endangered.

Where the Costas has been doing a good job is in ensuring this free space. Together with town halls, it has also kept the sea itself free. And by free, one means open and accessible. It is the open to access principle that comes into question if the hotels have their way. With Meliá’s moorings, where would they go exactly? Would they in some way impede public use of the sea?

A further factor in the hotels’ ambitions for beach exploitation is the Costas’ bureaucracy. An aspect of this does badly need to be changed, and it is that which relates to the annual rigmarole that is gone through to establish provisions for beach management and for licensing operations.

The annual bureaucratic procedures have the effect of inhibiting investment. If a beach operator cannot be sure of running a beach from year to year then it is understandably reluctant to commit itself too heavily. Meliá wouldn’t, one would imagine, put up with such uncertainty.

If there were to be a relaxation of this bureaucratic burden, it could only be a good thing. It would prevent, one would hope, the kind of delays that have bedevilled beach management operations in Puerto Pollensa, and it might also be hoped that further relaxations would get rid of the nonsensical situation whereby an operator such as Sail and Surf in Puerto Pollensa cannot put out buoys for larger craft out of high season, so restricting its ability to extend the resort’s tourism season.

This constraint is another of the Costas’ domains, just one that has consistently placed it at loggerheads with business and especially the hotels. In Mallorca, there is an added dimension. The local head of the Costas is Celesti Alomar, the former (socialist) tourism minister who was responsible for the despised eco-tax that the hotels were charged with collecting and which, in some cases, they never handed over.

The Costas locally has brushed up against some heavy hitters, not least in Muro where its interpretation of coastal demarcation and the almost unworkable notion of land that is “influenced by the sea” have threatened hotels’ interests. To put it mildly, there is no love lost when it comes to the hotels’ attitude towards the Costas.

So now the hotels can sense the opportunity to get the law changed and also bring the Costas down a peg or two. As a protecter, it does a valuable job, but its role as enforcer has created too many enemies. If the law does change and if the Costas finds itself with a diminished role, this may be no bad thing. But would things go too far in the other direction? The privatisation of the beaches and of the water.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Weever’s Tale And The Drowning Man

A common theme of most Mallorcan summers has been conspicuous by its absence this year. Jellyfish. “Plagues” or threats of plagues have not materialised, for which we should all be grateful. The absence of any biblical style invasions of the “medusa” and the resultant absence of their reporting by the media may explain why an attack by a different nasty of the waters merited some column inches. A German woman was stung by a weever fish in Peguera the other day. At first, I thought I was going to be reading that she had been killed. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case, but quite why it was necessary to report a weever-fish attack I honestly can’t say. Maybe it’s still the silly and a very slow news season.

It’s not as though there aren’t other weever-fish incidents. A former neighbour of mine was stung close to the shore in Playa de Muro three summers ago. It was, in his words, indescribably painful. Actually, given that he is French, these weren’t his words, but they amounted to the same. The sting required a trip to the hospital, but this was as much precautionary as really necessary.

Fatality by fish is extremely rare. In 1998 there was a death, that of a British teenager swimming off Cala Blava. The cause was something of a mystery, but it was almost certainly as the result of an acute allergic reaction to being stung by a “spider fish”, which is how the weever is known locally (“pez araña”).

The waters around Mallorca don’t hold great terrors, but they claim lives every year. In the Balearics as a whole, eighteen people have drowned so far this summer, one more than in 2010. Playa de Muro, for some reason, seems to attract more than its fair share of drownings. Over the space of ten days at the end of August there were three fatalities.

It is not as though there is anything dangerous about the sea off Playa de Muro. The water is shallow, and the sea only becomes potentially risky with an undertow or the wrong sort of wind. Even then, it can’t really be described as dangerous, no more so than any other shallow water subject to the same conditions. A common link in the three drownings was that of age; each swimmer was over 60 years old. The emergency services (by which one primarily means the Cruz Roja, the Red Cross) attributed the drownings to cardiac failure. Around 70% of all drownings in the Balearics are of people over the age of 60.

Advice on keeping safe when swimming includes not swimming alone, not swimming when there are no lifeguards on duty, i.e. too early in the morning, too late in the evening or at night, and even taking care if there are too many people in the water; it can be more difficult for a lifeguard to detect a swimmer in trouble when the sea is packed.

The advice is sound enough but is easily and temptingly ignored. Of the drownings that have occurred, the circumstances have not generally been exceptional. One of the drownings in Muro, for example, occurred at 3.30 on a Sunday afternoon. Maybe there were a lot of people in the water, but who considers this when going for a swim? Unfortunately, unfortunate things happen.

Indeed, the emergency services reckon that incidences of “reckless” swimming are on the decline. By reckless, one presumes they mean ignoring red flags, though it is not entirely clear, as it is also not entirely clear what Muro town hall means when it says that reckless swimmers will be fined.

Presumably not reckless, albeit she was swimming solo, was Teresa Planas who has just completed the 40-kilometre crossing between Menorca and Mallorca in under 14 hours. It’s as well that’s she has completed it, as the sea between the two islands is where the risk of the phenomenon of the meteotsunami (“rissaga”) is at its greatest, and as the autumn equinox approaches, so the risk increases.

The sea and the beach come with very few risks. Drownings are generally unavoidable if they are the result of a health malfunction. Treading on weever fish is hard to avoid. But there is one risk and one example of, if you like, recklessness that can be avoided. That is the beach at night. The sea may not be risky, unless you’ve gone skinny dipping on a tankful, but if you have gone skinny dipping, you may not find everything as you left it. Even if you keep your clothes on and just go for a walk, there is a risk. It’s best avoided.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Loud, Louder, Loudest

Human speech at a distance of one metre is normally around 50 decibels. 80 to 85 decibels is the level for shouting. An auctioneer was once charged with noise pollution for speaking at a volume which exceeded 80 decibels. In the US, if you speak too loudly in public places, the cops will be called.

The total decibel level on an average Mallorcan beach at peak times in the summer would presumably, were one minded to make an issue of it, break any noise regulation you might care to mention. Cumulative decibels don’t matter though. What does matter is the level of individuals in your vicinity. There are those who are considerably louder than others; those in the 80-85 decibel range. Any guesses as to who they might be?

One afternoon on the beach there was a woman who managed to combine the irritation of playing wooden-racket paddle tennis (dock, dock, dock) with a monologue that lasted for getting on for half an hour. With a following wind, the sound was coming right in my direction (and she was of course further than one metre away from her companion). After five minutes I had, as I imagine had this companion, got her drift; all to do with the hours she was expected to work, the money she was being paid, blah, blah, blah.

Twenty-five minutes later and after she should have been disqualified for repetition – many times – I was considering whether there might have been some handy portable nuclear warhead and missile launcher lying in the scrub at the back of the beach. In the absence of one, there was no alternative other than to beat a retreat, leaving the lady in question rabbiting on. As far as I know, she still is.

The loudness of different nations is accentuated when they gather together. It does become very much easier to discern those who make more noise than others. With this in mind, I have developed the following equation:

L = x multiplied by y adjusted by D, where L equals “national loudness”, x is one person, y is however many are in one household, and D is the distance of the household from nearby households.

This could, therefore, become L = 6 adjusted by ten metres times ten, depending on the number of (usually) relatives in the immediate neighbourhood.

The equation is one with an historical element and is largely based on local experience. Loudness, Spanish loudness, for which therefore read also Mallorcan loudness, can be generally attributed to having had to shout to be heard over all the other people in the house (of which there would have been many) and shouting as a means of communicating with the parents next door, the aunt next door to them, the grandparents on the other side, the cousins round the corner, the cousins twice removed a bit down the road … .

Spanish loudness is inbred, a conditioning over many centuries. The equation can be amended to include what might be the PI co-efficient, where PI stands for parental indulgence.

Needless to say, the woman who was conducting the beach monologue was Spanish. No other nation quite comes near to the Spanish in terms of the sheer racket they make. In the specific case of the Mallorcans, there is an extra element, the L modified if you like, where the modification is one of the additional volume and screech akin to a cat having a potato inserted into its rear end. Not, I hasten to add, that I’ve ever personally tried doing this.

Doubtless there will be those who seek to claim for other nations the mantle of European loudness champions. The Germans for example. It is not a claim without some merit, one born out of an historical Junker mentality of barking orders with a monotone guttural intonation. It is a loudness, however, that grates rather than assaults the ears with the kind of lavish hyper-accentuation that the Spanish are capable of, while, as a rule, the Germans don’t appear to be conducting a football commentary; speaking incessantly, in other words.

The British can’t compete. As a nation the British do whatever they can to avoid drawing attention to themselves through speech. The British are the only people who whisper, even on a beach, as though they were in a doctor’s surgery.

It was, however, a British auctioneer who was done for noise pollution, which says much for British attitudes to personal noise. It would be hard to imagine Spaniards being done in the same way, even if at a normal 80 decibels they should come with a health warning.

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.

De Do Do Doggy Doo Doos

It’s one of those nice dogs. On the small side, distinctly scatty and mongrelish, with blond woolly hair that hints vaguely of poodle, it isn’t in the least bit precious or snooty as poodles can be. It has a jolly old time this dog. It does a fair bit of spontaneous barking for no obvious reason, indulges in some car worrying, takes itself off for merry little trots around the neighbourhood.

Yes, merry little trots around the neighbourhood. Minus a chaperone. The neighbourhood is by the beach. The dog came romping across the sand, wearing one of those looks that dogs have which suggest they’ve been up to no good. It stopped, had a gander, woofed at a lilo and then promptly urinated by the beach fence, a fence used as a touchline for kids’ beach football games.

Beaches are meant to be no-go areas for dogs. They are go areas in winter when no one much takes any notice and when no one much is rolling around in or lying on the sand. In summer, however, whether with a chaperone or not, dogs should give a beach a wide berth. The trouble is that when a dog is flying solo, it has a habit of going where the hell it likes.

Dogs are incredibly stupid animals. They can of course be trained and conditioned. They can demonstrate some “intelligence”, but their innate stupidity governs their inability to appreciate the fact that they are perambulating and indiscriminating toilets. The dog exists, as with other animals, for one purpose. Sorry, two purposes. One is to micturate, the other is to defecate. Were a dog capable of a Descartian “cogito ergo sum”, it would be expressed as “I crap, therefore I am (a dog)”. And more to the point, I crap wherever takes my fancy. Such as the beach.

The dog question is one that seems always to be with us. Along with inflated prices, it is a sine qua non on the list of tourist complaints (and not just tourists, it must be said). I myself have developed over the years a demeanour akin to David Carradine in “Kung Fu”. Head permanently bowed, not in humility but in the constant look-out for Rover’s message from a bottom.

I don’t normally do requests, but recently someone said to me that I should do something about the dog question. So, here it is. But of course, I fall into the trap myself. This piece has started with the abysmally meaningless word “nice”. There again, dogs are often nice. They look nice. They act in a nicely ridiculous fashion, and so we all love man’s best friend.

Man’s best friend. It’s a tag that does disguise the true nature of the man-dog symbiosis. The dog looks upon man not as his mate but as his meal ticket; it has at least had the nous to work this out. And man isn’t and wasn’t daft. Had he not started to feed the dog, he wouldn’t have been the meal ticket, he would have been the meal. Thus began the relationship, one in which, because of the provision of the meal, has simply added to the dog question. It eats, therefore it must defecate.

The British have long been guilty of sentimental anthropomorphism where it comes to dogs. The Spanish, on the other hand, have a hard-earned reputation as dog and animal abusers, one they haven’t completely shaken off. They are, though, becoming as guilty as the Brits in assigning human values to the dog.

At Alcúdia’s Sant Jaume fiesta, there is something called the “Puppy Party”. Such cutesiness has echoes of the way in which the British managed to make nice (that word again) what dogs do, when the Poop Scoop was introduced. Make it all sound like the kindergarten and we can gloss over what is really going on, except when the kindergarten is struck down with toxicariasis, having had a day out on the beach.

This puppy party is in fact some sort of dog training event. It is organised by the Balearics centre for dog psychology.

A scientific starting-point for human psychology is a study of the brain. Perception, the link between the eye and brain, is crucial. Consequently, dog or any other animal psychology is a form of anthropomorphism, as we express how dogs perceive something in human terms. It isn’t a pointless exercise, despite dogs’ stupidly small brains, but more meaningful would be a puppy party for dog owners. For those who let their dogs go for merry little trots around the neighbourhood and to go onto beaches full of tourists and do what all dogs do. Doggy doo doos.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Widening The Umbrella: Beaches

I must have told you the story of the javelin-throwing nudists of Cap d’Agde. Surely I have. But if not … To set the scene, and just to add that they weren’t in fact javelins, the mayor of Agde, some time in the mid-90s, decreed that “pornographic” activity on the nudist beach had to stop. This meant, of course, that the order was mostly ignored. Things came to a head one summer when certain nudists, numbering several hundred, or so it seemed from a safe distance, were confronted by riot police on horseback during the early evening shag-in that used to occur at the far end of the beach. It was at this point, point being apt, that the nudists retaliated. The poles from beach umbrellas rained down on the police.

I tell this story, not because beach-umbrella poles are commonly used on Mallorcan beaches as offensive weapons, but because these poles could theoretically cause harm. And they are most likely to when the wind suddenly gets up.

Umbrellas are becoming, like balcony diving, the theme of this summer. The main theme has to do with the companies providing the umbrellas, the reed or grass-made ones, as opposed to the multi-coloured ones with a pole that fly into the air at the merest hint of a breeze. The kerfuffle in Puerto Pollensa over provision of umbrellas and other services appears to have died down, only for it re-emerge in Can Picafort.

There is a connection between the two. F&A Beach, the Puerto Pollensa operator, has had concessions on Playa de Muro beach, as has Bernat Riutort. They have not exactly seen eye to eye in the past. Anyway, Riutort is running the Can Picafort concession this year, and a familiar story has cropped up, one familiar to anyone who was aware of the over-provision of beach umbrellas in Playa de Muro in the past.

The mayor of Santa Margalida, Miguel Cifre (always a Miguel Cifre), said that there were too many umbrellas and sunbeds. Way too many in fact. Oh no, there weren’t, came the Riutort retort. Plod was duly despatched, unmolested and not attacked by beach umbrella poles, as would be the practice in the south of France, and found that an order for the removal of the excessive numbers of umbrellas had been complied with. “For now,” mayor Cifre has observed cryptically.

The over-proliferation of umbrellas on Can Picafort’s beach had one big advantage. Sorry, two big advantages. One was that the umbrella sunbedsraum of the beach meant that more beachside businesses had umbrellas in front of them. Now that they have been taken away, businesses are complaining and demanding that they be put back. The other big advantage was that by making it impossible to find any space that wasn’t occupied by a static umbrella meant that umbrellas on poles couldn’t be planted. And the big advantage with this was that the likelihood of death by beach-umbrella pole was lessened considerably.

I have wondered, especially as a beach umbrella hurtles past me or crashes into me in mid-snooze, whether any litigation has resulted from flying poles. They are normally the result of negligence. Off go the owners into the water or to the beach bar, leave the umbrella up, wind suddenly gets up and off goes the umbrella. And what about the harm to the environment? Wind in the right direction and the umbrella makes a dash for France, assuming it has come from a beach in the north of Mallorca. Might be useful of course if it makes its way as far as Cap d’Agde, but otherwise it will eventually come to rest and clog up the Med.

The beach umbrella, offensive though it is, is not the worst beach offender. Other items of beach furniture, though less likely to cause injury, could be said to contravene certain regulations. The beaches are public spaces, and one reason why a concessionaire putting too many umbrellas out falls foul of a town hall is that he is occupying too much of that public space.

The same could be said, however, for the beach tent. They take that much time to erect that by the time they are put up it is time to go home, and they offend in the sheer amount of space they demand. They are also offensive in reinforcing the fact that, whereas going to the beach used once to be a straightforward enough procedure, it now requires a removals van, and this includes the dog, which shouldn’t be there at all, but which is then hidden from view of the beach plod inside the tent.

No, rather than tents, rather than life-threatening umbrellas and poles, let the concessionaires put out as many of their umbrellas as they like. After all, the town halls should worry. All those lovely fines.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Fight ‘Em On The Beaches

Puerto Pollensa is not going down without a fight. You wouldn’t expect anything else. The bell is due to sound on the end of the four-year bout and, punch-drunk, they’re still at it.

If it’s May, it is time for the quadrennial elections and also for the annual kerfuffle surrounding Puerto Pollensa’s beaches. All you need to know by way of background to this is that each year the town hall manages not to get the contract sorted out for the umbrellas and sunbeds in time for the season. True to form, it has happened again this year.

In an act of altruism, the neighbourhood association in the port has taken on the task. But not everyone has been happy, including the company that is meant to be getting the contract, while it would not be a matter of town hall affairs in the port were Pepe Garcia and the Alternativa not to have its say.

Garcia, who is standing for mayor, suggested that there might be some financial shenanigans. From a report I read, it seemed as though he was levelling this charge at the neighbourhood association, a most unwise thing to do given that he would hope its members might support him.

The association seemed to read it as I had and said it would consider whether it had been defamed. Garcia insisted that he hadn’t meant the association but the town hall, but he may suffer a loss of votes because of the misunderstanding. Which goes to prove that beaches, and their management, are not something to be trifled with. Nor are their local politics and local turf wars.

Other towns have their issues with the management of beaches. I shall not identify the town or the beach, but the following example is indicative of the potentially lucrative business of being awarded with the concessions for beach management and of how the “system” can operate.

One particular lot on the beach in question had, the relevant town hall’s inspectorate was to discover midway through the summer, too many sunbeds and umbrellas. The company with the concession was duly fined. Was it unhappy? Not really; too many sunbeds and a consequent fine were part of the “system”.

When the tenders were put out for the lots on the beach, excessive bids were lodged as a means of securing the concession. The town hall was more than happy with this; of course it was. The winning bidder then went ahead and put out more sunbeds than it should have. More revenue for the town hall coffers; this time through a fine. The concessionaire was still not unhappy. Yes, it had paid more than it should have done and yes, it was fined, but it was still making money. More in fact than it should have been making. One imagines the fines and the excessive bid were taken into account in the business plan.

It wasn’t as though the town hall ordered the removal of the offending sunbeds. No, they were allowed to stay. And why do you think that was?

This “game” demonstrates how the process of beach management can and does operate. In this particular instance, however, there was a twist to the story, because local people, fed up with the sheer volume of sunbeds, took action. It should be remembered that beaches are public spaces. They belong to the Spanish state, and ordinary members of the public are entitled to use them without the space being over-invaded by money-making ventures.

What then happened was that the town hall itself faced a fine for allowing the situation to come to pass. Our old friends the Costas authority may usually trample across dunes in heavy boots looking for illegal buildings, but it does also have the final say-so when it comes to what goes on on the beaches.

As a result, the concessionaire was presented with a situation that hadn’t been bargained for; the government’s fine to the town hall being passed on. But even more was to come. A concessionaire, and there was more than one, suffered from having its sunbeds slashed. Over 500 were wrecked, and the cost of repair was put at 40 grand.

Which all goes to show that management of the beaches and sunbeds is far from being as gentile a past-time as building sandcastles. What’s been happening in Puerto Pollensa is positively serene compared with what can happen elsewhere. Fights on beaches, and kicking sand in faces.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Smile, You’re On Camera

Video and the internet have enabled us to become virtual tourists. Though I worry that there are strange people who spend hours staring at a barely changing image of a promenade or sea front in Mallorca through the medium of a shaky webcam, to be able to drop in and take a quick view of what a place is like at any time does have some attraction.

One problem with webcams, other than the fact that the images are often not very good or the camera isn’t working, is that many of them aren’t registered. Mallorca is not a heavily surveillance society. It adheres to Spanish regulations governing data protection and privacy, but it is these regulations that webcams can flout.

Security cameras for property are meant to avoid showing the “public way”. In other words, they have to be trained on entrances, access points and so on and not, potentially, on members of the public who might be passing by. Regardless of whether the public way is being shown or not, the right authorisation and controls are needed, which come from the police and the data protection agency.

There has been an increase in public way surveillance, however, and this is as a result of the police requiring systems to watch for potential delinquency. Though this increase has caused some disquiet, the use of cameras is nevertheless authorised. Webcams often are not.

Webcams have cropped up in an unexpected context. The ongoing court investigations surrounding alleged corruption and other misdemeanours at the tourism ministry have now focussed on webcams that were put up following the ETA bombs in 2009.

It was not unreasonable for the regional government to think that ETA might just place a bomb or two on tourist beaches. The terrorist organisation had done so in the past. It was this concern that was the backdrop to the tourism ministry setting about putting up surveillance webcams on hotel sites that were trained onto the beaches.

On the face of it, this may sound like it was a sensible precaution. Sensible or not, little that was occurring at the tourism ministry or at its strategy institute, Inestur, during Miguel Nadal’s period as minister is escaping the scrutiny of the investigators.

But then, how sensible as a precaution was it? The number of webcams amounted to five in total. One of them was put up at the Nuevas Palmeras hotel, part of the Sunwing Resort, in Alcúdia. Anyone with even a vague idea of the geography of Alcúdia’s coastline will know that the beach stretches for several kilometres. The other four were in four different resorts. As surveillance measures go, they were of limited or even no use.

Apart from the fact that investigators might want to know if there was any government cash going somewhere it shouldn’t have, they also want to know whether permission was actually sought or indeed granted for the cameras to be put up. Furthermore, they want to know whether these cameras are still there, whether they are working, who exactly is looking at or controlling the images captured and whether these images have been or are being stored.

Here’s a question for you. If you are a sunbather on a beach in Mallorca, do you want a camera to be watching you? I suspect you don’t. And this goes to the heart of the privacy laws. The investigators are quite right to be taking a wider interest in the webcam affair than just any possible financial wrongdoing.

A mystery of this case is the line of authorisation. No mention is being made of the security forces. It was Miguel Nadal, the tourism minister remember, who appeared to order the cameras’ installation; for the regional government, either through the tourism ministry or another agency, to undertake the sort of surveillance which appears to have occurred (may still be), it has to refer the matter to the delegation for the Balearics at central government.

It’s all about checks and balances. Privacy and data protection are taken seriously in Spain. The contrast is sometimes made between the liberal application of privacy laws in Britain with the greater rigour in Spain and in Germany. The contrast owes much to contrasting political regimes of the last century.

It may all seem pretty innocent, sticking up a webcam and showing views of a beach or a promenade or whatever. But there are meant to be rules.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Don’t Be Cold, Don’t Be Angry To Me

The 1970s were responsible for some real horrors perpetrated in the name of music. Pilot were not in the A-list of offenders, but they did bequeath us “January” and memory of a lead singer who looked like a girly Peter Marinello, which was saying something, given that the new George Best appeared to have stepped out of Pan’s People.

“Don’t be cold, don’t be angry to me.” I’m all in favour of obscure lyrics, but how does a month display its anger? And why is it angry “to” me? Wrong preposition. But nevertheless, now I think of it, it is – a month being angry – rather poetic. Pilot were the new Wordsworths. Well, maybe not.

January isn’t usually angry. But it stores up trouble. It is the month to reconnoitre the tree tops. You wander lonely staring at clouds, but in fact at the pines, their branches crowned with the coconut shies of the caterpillars’ furry, testicular wombs. Through the needles, though, you see only blue sky, for this January is like so many – alarmingly warm and bright. Don’t be cold with me; not at the moment it isn’t.

The warmth, however, is the threat of trouble being stored up for when the weather breaks and for when the caterpillar nests also break and tip their crawling caravans earthwards. In the lonely days of January, the cats can sleak around and scavenge undisturbed, but then they come across the caterpillars. From the litters of moths to the litter of a cat prone on the ground, feigning sleep but in fact stone cold dead.

You make me sad with your eyes. I’m not so sure it does. September is the sad month. January’s melancholic, but because of its silence. Until it bursts into flames. The eyes of January look down on the fires of mid-month and on the beasties that roam the villages and towns spitting the sparklers of Sant Antoni. January, the curious month when fiesta has no right to occur but does so in an incendiary fashion that is more pyrotechnic than the summer fireworks; more pyrotechnic because houses, whole streets are in the line of fire.

The month’s eyes cast a glance also at how the shorelines shift with the wind. Beaches’ edges are moulded and sculpted by the sea’s changes in direction and by the harvesting of marine crops that form bulges and mounds which, from a distance, appear as rocky outcrops newly exposed by displaced sand but are the abstract grotesques of packed seaweed and posidonia. The eyes watch as you bounce along the trampolines of the springy and spongy sand topped with its ocean scrap.

You’re telling me lies. This is what makes you worry about January. It’s what it’s telling you about what’s to come. It cascades from the skies at the stroke of the new year with the cheer of optimism, but it can be deceitful and deceiving. What’s to come? The clear skies of January can just as easily become the dark clouds of gloom, but unlike an English January when you slowly count off the days to the onset of spring, here you might hope for its delay. January doesn’t tarry though. It rushes in the spring and thoughts of the season with the swiftness and surprise of a bore racing along an estuary. Maybe it’s an illusion, but no; the days are already longer. And then suddenly January’s gone. Don’t go, don’t go.

Why would you not want it to go? January is non-month, it barely exists other than to be set light to. But this is what makes it the month that it is. Because when it’s gone, the pretend time of fiesta and holiday from early December goes with it. And things begin to start all over again. The never-ending cycle and repetition of Mallorca’s months and seasons.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.