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.

Getting Into A Flap

Good weather for them. Ducks that is. The rain that has been about has been well-timed. We are entering the duck season, or we would be were there any ducks. And in Can Picafort of course, there aren’t. Not officially anyway. In a rare display of unity, however, the warring political parties of Santa Margalida are as one in demanding the return of the ducks.

The town hall is calling for a change to animal-protection law that would legalise the release of live ducks during Can Picafort’s August fiestas. Under this law, or so it would seem, traditions that can be shown to date back more than 100 years from the time of the law’s enactment in 1992 are allowed to continue. The great duck-throwing event of Can Picafort isn’t that old. Consequently, Santa Margalida wants the threshold reduced to 50 years; ducks were first let go into the sea for locals to swim after them and capture them in the 1930s.

The town hall has never truly bought into the law and the banning of live ducks. It was persuaded to comply with it when it was fined for not having complied. Ever since the live ducks were replaced by rubber ones, the town hall has only grudgingly gone along with the law. And by town hall, one means all the parties, whether ruling or opposing.

The unified front that is now being displayed has, though, not always been evident. The former administration proposed a similar change to the law late last year. The opposition didn’t go along with it, yet it, now in power, has made the proposal. Even in unity, the parties can’t avoid having a dig at each other. You didn’t support us, say the Partido Popular. It was our measure. We didn’t support you, respond the combined forces of the Suma pel Canvi and the Convergència, because it wouldn’t have done any good; the former regional administration wouldn’t have approved it.

Though a national law, there would seem to be flexibility for a regional parliament (the Balearics one) to amend it. As the Partido Popular is now in power at regional level, the town hall would reckon that it might get a more sympathetic hearing.

The banning of live ducks, and Santa Margalida finally got round to complying with the law five years ago, has turned the tradition into a new one. The event attracts way more publicity as a consequence of the law being flouted than it ever did when ducks themselves were being released.

That said, before the ban there was the annual ritual of the animal-rights activists getting into an argument with the pro-duck-throwers, a ritual that has now become one of the animal rightists trooping off to make a “denuncia” when the law is broken. And the poor police, who surely have better things to do, have been caught in the middle, both the local police under the command of a town hall whose attitude has been ambiguous, to say the least, and the Guardia who have had to resort to bringing in divers and boats to try and prevent the throwing of live ducks and to try and apprehend the miscreants.

Last year, one town hall official said the police presence was more akin to security for the royal family or an ETA threat. The law may have been likely to have been broken, which it duly was (and no one was caught), but the publicity and the security were absurd for what has always been an absurd occasion, one that became more absurd as soon as they started to use rubber ducks instead. They should have scrapped the whole thing rather than allow it to become the farce it has.

The duck-throwing saga of Can Picafort can be considered an example of what happens when you mess with tradition, but how traditional really is the duck throwing? Establishing a time frame, be it 50 or 100 years, seems pretty arbitrary. Indeed, it seems ridiculous. If it is felt that something requires outlawing, then so be it, regardless of how long it has been going.

The ducks only came about as a bit of sport. Wealthy landowners would make a gift of some ducks, and the young men of the village would compete to capture them. Do 70 or 80 years represent a “tradition”? Maybe they do, or maybe they represent the history of something basically frivolous. Whatever the case, there are enough people, on both sides of the argument, who get into a flap about the ducks. And they will continue to do so, whether the law is changed or not.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

For Sale: Hotel, Needs Work

The possibility that the Posibilitum investment group, the owners of Alcúdia’s Bellevue complex, might acquire the Hotasa hotels of the troubled Nueva Rumasa conglomerate should be viewed as welcome news by those running the hotels. I am told that the hotels are experiencing difficulties in providing services they should be. When the hotels opened for the season, and at one point it looked as some might not, suppliers made it clear that they would supply only on a cash-on-delivery basis.

The Hotasa hotels, which include three in Can Picafort, are an extreme case, but they are far from alone in having owners seeking buyers. Much of Mallorca’s hotel stock is up for sale. And there are very few buyers.

The accord between tourism minister Carlos Delgado and the hoteliers that should pave the way for reform of the tourism law and so facilitate hotel conversion and change of use has been sought by the hoteliers for some years. The antiquity of many hotels makes their redevelopment a pressing necessity, but even with agreement and legal reform, a question would remain. How would these conversions be funded?

Delgado has said that the days of expecting grants, especially from central government, have passed. The banks have all but turned the taps off. The markets are reassured by this summer’s rise in tourism numbers, but the leading hotel chains – and those which would be listed and more attractive to investors – have tended to look overseas for growth potential.

The hype of all the talk of hotel renovations and changes of use and the unions getting hot under the collar and threatening protests as a consequence may therefore be just that – hype. Some hotels and hotel chains are in good enough shape to effect changes, but many are not.

One reason why owners want to sell hotels and why it is proving difficult to do so and would also prove difficult to convert them is because they are that old that the cost of conversion would be nigh on prohibitive. Buyers are unlikely to take on hotels that demand significant investment in addition to what are sales tags which are too high. Like with many restaurants or bars that are for sale, the expectations of owners are unrealistic, based on past or expected performance and divorced from the circumstances that now obtain.

Bellevue, though taken on by Posibilitum, is a case in point when it comes to old stock. The complex, all 1400 apartments of it, is nearly 40 years old. Its sheer size is a constraint on renovation as is its age, but renovation is badly needed. Bellevue has acquired a more diverse market over the past few years – it isn’t the ultra-Brit complex it once was – but it tends to be hotels for the British market in the resorts of Alcúdia and Magalluf that are the oldest and which attract less profit because of the very nature of the particular market they cater for. Another reason, therefore, why prospective buyers might be wary.

A further reason is the complexity of financing arrangements and ownership issues. The travel and hotel group Orizonia had, still has as far as I am aware, a mortgage on Bellevue which was raised as a guarantee against a debt to the company run up by the previous owners, the now bust Grupo Marsans. And there is a similar story with Hotasa.

Bank funding requires security, and in the case of Hotasa, the house has well and truly been bet. The court bankruptcy proceedings relating to Nueva Rumasa have revealed the scale of the mortgages that hang over Hotasa. One hotel alone, Santa Fe in Can Picafort, has been used as a guarantee four times, to which can be added the embargo slapped on it by the Hacienda in respect of a debt of some 120,000 euros. In total, the seven Hotasa hotels in the Balearics have mortgages valued at just short of 138 million euros, three and a half times the size of the mortgage debt said to be owed to Orizonia.

The judge presiding over the proceedings has been obliged to appoint five administrators because of the sheer complexity of the hotels’ affairs. The labyrinth of different companies in addition to the various mortgages would surely make a purchaser riding to Hotasa’s aid, be it Posibilitum or any other, pause while the administrators try and unravel the affairs. Hotasa may be a specific case, but who’s to say what complexity might apply to other hotels or hotel groups and which might add to deterring prospective purchasers.

Outdated, unprofitable, underfunded, debt-ridden: the reasons why there are so few buyers for hotels and why the much-hoped-for conversions may yet never take place.

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.

Quackers In Can Picafort

It is the fate of certain places that they get lumped in with larger ones nearby or are thought to be a part of these neighbours. So it is with Can Picafort. It’s part of Alcúdia, isn’t it? No, it isn’t. It isn’t even a direct neighbour. Playa de Muro intervenes. But that’s part of Alcúdia, isn’t it? Wrong again.

Can Picafort suffers a fate twice over when it comes to what it is a part of. “It’s part of Santa Margalida!?” ask some, incredulously, who do nonetheless know that it isn’t part of Alcúdia. “Well, I never knew that. I always thought it was its own place.”

It’s a simple mistake to make, though. Can Picafort. Santa Margalida. Where’s the name link? There isn’t one. The resort is several kilometres away from the town that owns it: a once wealthy town, birthplace of Franco’s banker, Joan March, he of the Banca March. Its one-time affluence was what led a poor boy of the town to up sticks and find some then more or less worthless coastal land on which to build a home. Mr. Picafort. How he would be laughing nowadays.

The reversal in fortunes of town and resort is not dramatic, however. Can Picafort is, with the greatest respect, the poor man of the tourism-centre trinity of the bay of Alcúdia (you can pretty much discard Artà as a fourth member). Santa Margalida, if not a poor man’s town by any means, is not wealthy in the way that Alcúdia is.

Arguably, Santa Margalida should be better off than it is, if only because of the sheer volume of hotels in Can Picafort. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the benefits of the resort’s tourism have never quite rubbed off on the municipality. It could all simply be down to two quite different cultures that have never found a way to work with each other.

The meeting of these cultures was a feature of the town’s mayoral candidate debate. At present, the Partido Popular (PP) holds the whip-hand in the town. It governs in alliance with something called the CPU. Not a computer’s central processing unit, but the Can Picafort Unit.

One of the candidates, representing an amalgamation of the PSOE socialists and independents under an umbrella party called Suma pel Canvi, lambasted the CPU. It was responsible for “nonsenses” and “sins of management”, said Miguel Cifre. (How many Miguel Cifres are there, do you suppose, in Mallorca? But that’s a side issue.)

The PP and CPU are not responsible for all the sins of Can Picafort. One, the quite appalling state of the marina, has required a judge to arbitrate, giving the company which is meant to look after and develop the marina its marching orders. But the marina is symptomatic, despite an upgrading of the resort’s promenade, of what is widely felt to be neglect.

The bad blood between opposition and town hall government has never been far from the surface over the past four years. At times, it has come pouring out of the wounds inflicted on the PP, such as when the what is now the Convergència published a news-sheet with a front cover showing mocked-up 500 euro notes with an image of mayor Martí Torres. The squandering of public money was the accusation, which you might think was a bit rich coming from what was then the pre-corruption-charges Unió Mallorquina (UM).

The sheer pettiness of Santa Margalida’s politics was no better summed up than by what appeared to be a retaliatory gesture. The CPU’s Can Picafort delegate vetoed the handing out of trophies donated by the UM for a football tournament a day after the news-sheet appeared.

Back at the election debate, though, there was one issue which didn’t get a proper airing. It should have, because in the bizarre world of local politics, there is little more bizarre than the row that has been going on over Can Picafort and its August duck-throwing fiesta.

Can Picafort may be mistaken for being a part of somewhere else or for being a town in its own right, but its greatest claim to fame is that it’s the place where the burning issue is whether live or rubber ducks should be lobbed into the sea. If you think local politics and issues are mad elsewhere, they are positively sensible compared with those of Can Picafort. Absolutely quackers.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Damned If You Do … : Road works

“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” An expression widely attributed to Bart Simpson, whose familial association seems apt if you side with the critics of the Homer Simpson approach to road works and traffic systems in Mallorca. As Homer once said: “If they think I’m going to stop at that stop sign, they’re sadly mistaken”.

Homer, some might suggest, appears to be in control of re-modelling the main road through Can Picafort. How to build a road with no actual road. But he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. It wasn’t in fact Bart who first coined the expression. It was apparently an American preacher by the name of Lorenzo Dow. There are a fair number of Lorenzos knocking around in Can Pic, damning this and damning that, the main road in particular. “Dow!”, or is it “Doh!”? exclaim the Lorenzos in exasperation.

This main road, the Carretera Artà, has long been a joy of an unstable surface, crossings designed to have in mind the propelling of inattentive tourist pedestrians into orbit, and insane side roads some of which you can enter or exit, some of which you can’t. Much like other main roads on the island therefore. Far from unreasonably, the highways department wants to improve it. Something not meeting with everyone’s approval.

The road works are having a negative impact on bars and other businesses. They are making difficult the movement of residents. Thus go the criticisms. They do rather neglect the fact that building what in effect is a whole new road system, and one that is necessary, does require a bit of disruption, even if it does also mean that you can’t quite figure out how you are meant to navigate what is currently the non-road.

Why the fuss? It’s not as though as any drivers used to travelling along the whole stretch of road between Puerto Alcúdia and Can Pic these past few years won’t have already experienced exactly the same issues since the plan to re-model the whole stretch was started back in 2006. The fuss smacks of criticising anything that can be criticised. The fussers are probably the same ones who have been demanding improvements. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Part of the reason for the fuss is the timing. Just as there is a start to the official tourism season (1 May), so also there is a start to the let’s-snarl-everything-up-by-doing-some-building-work season. Usually the first of February. Why so late, enquire the fussers. Budgets normally. Or maybe the chaps just prefer to hang around drinking beers, in a Homer style, until the Mr. Burns’s from highways appear.

What Can Pic will end up with is a system like that which has come into being in Alcúdia and Playa de Muro. Apart from a better road surface, this will mean more roundabouts. Part of the justification for the re-modelling of the main road has been improved traffic circulation. It’s spin of course, because circulation in summer is as bad as it ever was, but at least pedestrians run less risk of being mown down than previously. Well, this is the theory behind all the crossing-points. The practice is rather different, tourists traversing the road wherever is convenient, lightly-held lilos in hand which are caught on sudden gusts and plant themselves across windscreens. But at least you can’t blame the highways people for trying. Except if you’re in Can Picafort and you’re a Lorenzo.

The new roundabouts will have the added advantage of giving Trafico greater work opportunities. Currently, they have limited numbers of roundabouts in Can Pic at which to stand about looking ominous or sheltering under trees when it gets too hot. Once the new road is finished, they’ll be spoilt for choice.

And the finished road will add to the general appearance of Can Pic, just as the re-developed carretera did to Playa de Muro. When its stretch was completed in May 2009, various dignitaries turned up and one, Francina Armengol, the president of the Council of Mallorca, announced that it (the road) was “magnificent and emblematic”. Emblematic of what exactly? Tarmac?

Ah, but what we all failed to appreciate was that this was part of a different strand of tourism. Road tourism. Come to Mallorca and admire our roads. Marvel at how level they are (until a good deluge of rain or two breaks them up again). See how many crossing-points you can ignore. Be inspired by the white lines and markings that fade rapidly and have to be repainted each year (normally in June just to aid more the traffic circulation). Yes, this is it. Road tourism, a whole new type of tourism promotion. Brought to you by Homer Simpson.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

On The Dunes: Can Picafort and Playa de Muro

I am looking at some old photos of Can Picafort. Circa 1960. Two people are walking along what is recognisable as a road but which has no tarmac. It is made of sand. It became the Via Suiza. In the distance you can’t make out the sea. Not because of buildings, because there aren’t any, but because of something else that is obscuring the view. In another photo there is a boy sitting on a deckchair on the beach. You might expect to be able to see, in the background, the Via Suiza from a different angle. But you can’t. Because there is something in the way. Dunes.

Can Picafort, in keeping with much of the bay of Alcúdia and with other stretches of Mallorcan coastline, is made up of dunes. Or rather, it used to be. The only dunes now are at the resort’s eastern Son Bauló end, extending into what is the “rustic” coast past the Son Real finca. The dunes in Can Picafort can no longer be seen. Because they are no longer there.

The loss of the dunes along the bay is evident in Alcúdia. But here the beach is wide. Nothing sits on top of the sea. Nor does it in much of adjoining Playa de Muro. Only once past the canal that connects Albufera with the sea does the beach start to become appreciably narrower. This is what has now been lovingly signposted as “Sector 2”. The resort as military installation.

Where the hotels in Playa de Muro finish there is a stretch of some two kilometres of rustic beach, backed by dunes and forest. There are no buildings. They only re-emerge as you come into Can Picafort. The dunes end abruptly. Can Picafort is built on dunes.

The creation of the resort was not so much environmental vandalism as environmental rape and pillage. The dunes were levelled and what was formed was a generally charmless front line of barn-style restaurants only a short distance from the shoreline. The restaurants, for the most part, are unremarkable. And there is probably a good reason. Being so close to the sea and being so undefended, in winter sand and water encroach. Until recently, before some new drainage, there used to be regular and damaging floods. Why create something of beauty if it’s going to be ravaged by nature.

Behind the front line is a town. Shops and hotel after hotel. The dunes and what lay behind them were destroyed in constructing an urban development.

One of the points of contention surrounding the Costas demarcation plan for Playa de Muro is Can Picafort. With no small amount of justification, the murers point to what happened to what was once hardly even a village, just a bit of a fishing harbour and the old fincas of Sr. Picafort. In Playa de Muro, where the environmental destruction has been less extreme, it might just be that the destruction is reversible. In Can Picafort, it can’t be reversed. But the targeting of Playa de Muro by the Costas strikes many as supremely unfair when compared with the wholesale degradation of the natural environment just a few kilometres away.

The language and the actions of the Costas in Playa de Muro have been ratcheted up since the demonstration against the demarcation took place. Celestí Alomar, the boss of the Costas in the Balearics, talks of there being “many people and organisations without any sort of consideration”. He has taken particular exception to the fact that gardens have been created and that volleyball is played on the dunes. But note the words. On the dunes. They are still there. They may be subject to what Alomar calls “degradation”, but they haven’t all been taken away. Unlike in Can Picafort.

Meanwhile, Alomar has been suggesting that the holiday homes of Ses Casetes des Capellans could have a reprieve by their being ceded to Muro town hall and escaping any threat of demolition. Good news perhaps, and aimed at the ordinary people of Muro who own the bungalows. But it smacks of politicking, driving a wedge between the holiday-home owners and the businesses and residents of the resort.

Alomar wants an improvement to the beach in Playa de Muro, one that will create “tourism of more quality” and one that, with greater respect for nature, will offset the seasonality that local hoteliers bemoan. Who is he trying to kid? The nature is now just something to admire from a distance. The Costas has made and is making the dunes no-go areas in Playa de Muro. There may be sound environmental reasons for doing so, but what they are becoming are things to just look at. You can no longer wander in the forest and dunes areas in the way you used to be able to. Yet isn’t this public land? Isn’t there meant to be public access? It’s contradictory, just as much as a short walk along the beach from where dunes do still exist confirms that there is a place where they no longer do.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Another Day In Paradise: Homelessness

He had a pretty impressive suntan. His feet, open to the elements thanks to the flip-flops, were a mahogany colour. He wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting there on a wall by the Eroski supermarket in Can Picafort. His company was a plastic bag. Inside which was a bottle. I knew who he was. Or at least he fit the description. He’s the German who lives in an abandoned house. To be more accurate, a house that the family which owns it cannot agree as to what to do with it. Somehow, he had come to be living there. When a member of the family had been to the house, she had been shocked to find it inhabited. Along with all the junk that had come to be stored in it was this German, together with no electricity and no water.

He wasn’t doing any harm, so he stayed on. Maybe it was an advantage. Someone to watch over the place. To stop youths getting in. Having a “botellón”, taking drugs. It didn’t really matter how he had come to be in the house. He couldn’t exactly go back. Back to Germany, that is. His passport had long expired. He was a non-person. Time was when he used to work over in Alcúdia. But now he had no bike, and when the weather was bad that was a nightmare to use anyway. He might occasionally get some work around and about. Otherwise, he would wash in a bar in the morning. And in the evening he would be at another bar to take the odd coffee and a leak before bedtime. And at other times he would sit on a wall.

Outside a different Eroski, one in Alcúdia, a gaggle of the outer edges of society gathers to pass the time of day, to shout, to bring the dogs, to raise the plastic bags. Strictly speaking, it is an offence to drink alcohol on the streets. Sometimes they are a nuisance, but there’s not trouble like that elsewhere: at the derelict, former nightspot palace of Es Fogueró, the imposingly mysterious ruin by the industrial estate in Alcúdia that gives a similar impression as to having been abandoned, despite its being new.

In Es Fogueró there was a body back in the summer. “El Gallego” was dead. He’d been killed, so the Guardia were to reveal. A brother and sister, also “residents” of the ruin, face a homicide charge. In the building where Julio Iglesias had once performed, the dance had stopped for the Galician. When you end the beguine.

It was a perishing late afternoon in January. Outside yet another Eroski. He was crouching in the walkway to the supermarket. You can forget just how cold it can get during a Mallorcan winter. A coin or a few. What does it take? How utterly merciless I had been. It would have taken very little. Little to shrug off a foul mood and a memory of the “aggressive begging” of London. Because his hadn’t been.

While there isn’t much overt evidence as to homelessness in places such as Alcúdia, it exists all the same. It is the lie to the nonsensically unthinking rote-speak of “this paradise island”. Paradise found and paradise lost.

No one much talks about or wants to know about poverty and homelessness in Mallorca. It’s not what the brochures would have you think about. The exact scale of homelessness is hard to put a finger on, in Mallorca and across Spain. Some town halls are now conducting censuses. What is reckoned is that a half of the homeless are foreigners. But not all are recent immigrants. The German has been in Can Picafort for years.

In addition to much low-paid employment in Mallorca, there is now the issue of reductions in assistance from the state. Compounding this are the increased costs of energy – electricity and butane both on the rise again. How many live in fuel poverty in Mallorca? A Mediterranean climate might make you believe such a thing couldn’t exist. It does. In housing wholly inadequate in terms of insulation, draught exclusion and damp-coursing. Where the housing exists of course. Because not everyone’s that lucky. So they end up on the streets and, in the case of Palma, have a council that wants to impound their consolatory alcohol.

Much of the help extended to the homeless comes through the offices of the Cruz Roja (Red Cross). In 2009 the level of help it gave in the Balearics rose by 38%. Back in 2007, the number of individuals either socially excluded or at risk of being so that it assisted was 697. The actual homeless figure it dealt with then amounted to 547 people. With the withdrawal of much state-based “ayuda”, the 2009 percentage rise is unlikely to fall.

The numbers may not sound as though there is a crisis. But these scratch the surface of poverty and of those at the breadline. To whom you have to add the homeless. The soup kitchens of Mallorca have already announced a marked rise in “business” this autumn.

There is an unedifying aspect to Mallorca. It is one of real-estate division. In winter you can walk past the second homes, the villa rentals and hotels of Playa de Muro. You can repeat the exercise elsewhere. Empty. They aren’t of course about to be opened up to the homeless. This isn’t the point. What is, is the insult of so much land in non-productive use for so long a period. Through the winters.

At least in an abandoned house in Can Picafort, the German has a roof over his head.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Número Uno: Can Picafort and occupancy stats

“And at number one in August, it’s Can Picafort!”

The charts for August hotel occupancy in Spain have been topped by Santa Margalida. Can Picafort, in other words. How on earth has this happened?

Back in the middle of August, the Mallorcan hotel federation was indicating that, unlike some resorts which had enjoyed decent Julys, Can Picafort had been on the opposite scale. Rather than number one, it had bombed. What a difference a month makes, especially to a resort often seen as the poor relation within the trinity of conurbation it forms together with Puerto Alcúdia and Playa de Muro.

The Spanish national statistics office is the one that has elevated Can Pic to the lofty heights of suddenly being the country’s most successful resort. Does the town get a plaque or something? The town hall should put up a new sign. “Welcome to Can Picafort, number one in Spain”, with August 2010 in small type. 50,630 foreigners and 3,981 Spaniards can’t be wrong. 97.67% occupancy. God, how they love all this junk. And for many it is junk because they don’t believe it. Maybe the chaps at the stats office just stick a pin in a map and then roll some dice to see what numbers they can come up with.

To explain Can Picafort’s ascendancy may have to do with factors like discounts, Germans and the position of the planets. I had wondered if having a fiesta during August, and one with some hugely entertaining duck tossing, might have been a further factor, but under four thousand Spaniards suggests otherwise; foreign tourists are not normally attracted by fiestas per se. Nope, quite why it’s number one is a mystery to me, and will also be to many in a resort who are prone to wearing the long face of “cree-sis” and to letting anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot to know about it. They will also let you know about the devil’s work of the all-inclusive.

Getting to grips with quite how prevalent all-inclusive is in Can Picafort is difficult. Look at certain hotels’ websites and you will find no mention of it, but go off to an agency’s site and you will. There are hotels in the resort which everyone knows to be all-inclusive and which don’t mind telling the world that they are, but there are others which are a bit coy. Of the approximately 50 hotels (depending on your definition) in the resort, it’s not unreasonable to assume that at least a third of them offer AI; the number is probably higher.

August’s celebratory occupancy figures for Mallorca as a whole, partly attributed to the rain-soaked British who fortuitously found an under-used credit card stashed in the pocket of a hastily retrieved winter overcoat, disguise the real truth – what’s being spent. Despite the positive figures on spend, issued generally rather than per resort, the all-inclusive/spend relationship has been proven. The research at Palma university says it all: an average daily spend by an AI guest that is under half of that of a guest staying B&B. There are plenty who would probably disagree with this, putting it at more like a quarter, if that.

To compensate for this 50% lower spend, you need an awful lot higher than average spend by all the other tourists. With the greatest respect to Can Picafort, it has a reputation for tourism which, how can one put it, is not at the wallet-bulging end of the market. And this is not me saying this; it’s a view often expressed by business owners. Nigh on full occupancy for the peak month of August doesn’t mean a great deal when you place it in the context of the nature of the market.

The statistics which get pumped out may be questioned by many. I’m less inclined to; they aren’t always positive. But more fundamentally, the regularity of their production and the prominence granted to them can create an illusion, or indeed a delusion. They may be correct, but they enable politicians and others to boast of “records” and of tourist seasons being “good” ones (and this one has been, according to Spain’s minister for tourism) and thus fail to appreciate how tourism is working – less at the macro level but more at the micro levels of the individual resorts.

Well done though, Can Picafort, you could do with a break, but you will also know that having a number one can be deceiving. Milli Vanilli, anyone?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Adopting Positions: Chopin should have played golf

Chopin is to be made an adoptive son of Mallorca. No doubt he’ll be rubato-ing with contentment in his Parisian grave, well away from where his interred non-missus, Amandine Dupin (aka George Sand), will be cursing the fact of his joining her in adoption but rejoicing in her having secured the gig before him; she was made an adoptive daughter of Mallorca some years ago. Beat yer to it, Freddie, you sexual inadequate.

Chopin and Sand were simultaneously enchanted and appalled by Mallorca, and specifically Valldemossa. It’s the enchantment that gets hyper-brochured, alongside mentions of Chopin’s output while in his mountain retreat and of Sand’s legacy to the island, commemorated in the annual Winter in Mallorca cultural programme, named after her book. The selective writing of the history of the Chopin-Sand stay in Mallorca disguises the brevity of that stay and the deterioration in Chopin’s health during it, a consequence of a miserable and cold winter. How he actually managed to play the piano, rubato or otherwise, is a mystery. Or perhaps he was blessed with warm extremities. Well, a couple if not one other, if George is to be taken at her word.

Chopin was from Poland. It’s a happy coincidence. Name some of the “new” markets from which Mallorca hopes to attract more tourists, and Poland will appear high on the list. Having an adoptive son to boast about doesn’t presumably harm that objective: the tourism juan-ies should be frantically casting around for a few Russians or Chinese who might have some adoption credentials, other than members of the Russki Mafia or owners of shops in a Mallorcan McDonald’s style – the Chinese bazar; one on every street.

While Chopin and the not-missus Chopin are invoked as part of the island’s cultural and winter tourism, they might have greater contemporary impact had they played golf. Perhaps someone could conveniently unearth a 170-year-old pitch ‘n’ putt in Valldemossa; it would do wonders for the golf tourism project. Possibly. Golf, though, holds the key to greater off-season riches than piano playing. Or that’s what they would have you believe.

It’s doubtful that Chopin ever made it as far as Muro or the north of the island. But it is here that the battle for golf tourism is being waged – as if you weren’t aware of this already. Muro’s golf course development is going through yet another eighteen holes of it’s on, then it’s off; the promoters threatening to sue is the latest. Not, I imagine, that you care. No one much does any longer, except the main protagonists, one of which is the enviro doom merchants GOB.

The pressure group has been playing its own statistics game. What it has found, it reckons, are figures which “prove” that golf doesn’t do anything to bolster tourism off-seasonality. I had hoped that the figures would be proof, as at least it would have been evidence of someone making a hard case one way or the other as to whether the Muro course, or indeed others, are of any significant tourism value.

The statistics show that in the lower months of the “summer” season, i.e. April and October, occupation in hotels in Muro and Santa Margalida (for which, read Playa de Muro and Can Picafort) is higher than those in Alcúdia and Pollensa. From this, GOB argues that golf does not benefit either of the latter two resorts, ones where there are golf courses extant, while it also argues that Muro and Can Picafort are already doing nicely thank you by comparison, and therefore, by dubious extrapolation, don’t need a golf course (or courses). It then goes on to extol what are the highly limited business virtues of small niche tourism in the resorts, e.g. bird-watching.

What this argument overlooks is the fact that the early-season occupancy of hotels in Playa de Muro and Can Picafort can be explained by these resorts being centres of cycling tourism, more so than the other two resorts. By concentrating on hotel occupancy figures, it also neglects the fact that Pollensa has a far lower number of hotel places by comparison with the other resorts. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the fact that golfers might stay in other types of accommodation (and GOB doesn’t take this into account), the findings do underline a point that I have made in the past, which is precisely the one that GOB is implying. Were there real tourist demand for golf in Alcúdia and Pollensa, then more hotels would open. Wouldn’t they?

GOB’s argument is persuasive up to a point, but there is one big hole in it – there are no figures for the months of November to March. The seasonality issue is a twelve-month affair. Winter tourism, or the lack of it, cannot be defined in terms of April and October. Which brings us back to Chopin and Sand. Has anyone ever attempted to prove a link between Winter in Mallorca and winter tourism? Maybe they have, and they’re keeping schtum. GOB’s claims are based on some science, but they seem post-hoc. However, they are not without a dash of merit. There ought to be more science, but one suspects that certain vested interests would rather there weren’t.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.