Drinking Mallorca By The Bucket

Once upon a time you took a bucket and spade to the beach. You still take a bucket to the beach, but you no longer fill it with sand. You fill it instead with the boys’ bevvy. Booze. Booze by the bucketloads.

The season has witnessed a growth in the sale of buckets in Mallorca’s resorts, mainly Magalluf, Palmanova, Arenal and Cala Ratjada. The attraction of the bucket is not restricted by culture. Both the Brits and the Germans are bucketheads. There is a whole in their buckets, dear Lisa and liebe Lisa, a whole load of beer in their buckets.

“Drunken tourism” is becoming such an accepted term in the tourism lexicon that the Balearics Tourism Agency should give serious consideration to its inclusion in its marketing strategy. Alongside the alternatives of culture and good scoff, there would also be the promotion of drunken tourism. Where alcohol is concerned, they might have more in mind the attractions of local vino, available from boutique bodegas at absurd prices per bottle and with designer labels. Instead, they’ve got buckets with a sticky bar code and cold drink at bucketshop prices.

The agency wouldn’t of course promote any such thing. All bad for the image and what have you: British and German youths traipsing off to the nearest beach with their buckets, crates of cheap drink and a box of straws. Oh no, you can’t have gatherings of public drinking. You wouldn’t get the local lads and lasses doing this. Except of course, that’s exactly what you do get. If the locals can stage a “botellón”, why shouldn’t tourists do something similar? And, moreover, do it during the day when the sun’s shining.

Boozing has been around in Mallorca as long as mass tourism has been. It might have changed in its nature – the bucket did used to be reserved solely for its accompanying spade in the good old days – but it has always been an essential part of the holiday experience. It was not only essential, it would also have been a badly missed opportunity in those good old days. A handful of pesetas for a liberal measure, followed by another handful of pesetas … and for the same cost as a couple of Double Diamonds back in the UK, you could get tanked up enough to require a stomach pump.

Resorts in Mallorca may not be the leading exponents of drunken tourism in Spain – Lloret de Mar, as I wrote about previously, lays claim to the number-one slot – they may not even be among the leaders in the Med (think the alternatives such as Zante and its industrial alcohol), but they are still prominent, as they always have been.

Nevertheless, the growth in the phenomenon of drinking by the bucketload is causing sufficient concern for the Mallorca hoteliers’ federation to call for a commission to look into the matter. What do they think this will achieve? A ban on the sale of buckets perhaps?

They could always try and get the drinking of alcohol in public places banned. Except they’ve tried this with the botellón with usually no effect whatsoever. In Alcúdia, there was meant to have been such a ban. If there was (or indeed still is), no one has taken much notice. Moreover, how would you define such a ban? You couldn’t stop a holdaymaker (or indeed a local) cracking open a can of Saint Mick on the beach.

What the hoteliers are really concerned about is the fact that there are too many young people pitching up and occupying rooms that the hoteliers would prefer were kept for families. They’re never satisfied, are they. TUI, and for once TUI is not trying to skirt the issue, has said that the youth market is important. Of course it’s important. It means bums on airline seats and hanging out of balconies in hotels. Hats off to TUI. It is reported as also saying that “golfers and five star hotels alone don’t fill airplanes”. Well, well, well.

Quite how the youth market with their buckets and beer equates to a TUI vision of sustainable tourism I’m not sure. But sales of holidays are sales of holidays; sustainability can go hang, along with any sense that a tour operator should discriminate in terms of who it actually sells a holiday to. Which it most certainly shouldn’t.

Ultimately, there is a fear that the bucketheads will drive away the family tourist. But it is a vastly overstated fear. Mallorca’s tourism has always been a mix, as has that of its resorts: a bucket and spade for the kids and a bucket and beer for the older kids.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Drinking World Cup

When Saturday comes. This Saturday it will be all-day pinting. Footy in the afternoon, but before comes England’s first match in the Rugby World Cup. All-day pinting for Bar Brits.

A 10.30 local time kick-off. Too early for pinting? Not on your life. The rugby fan has a prodigious capacity for alcohol. Any time, day or night, it matters nought. Cometh the rugby, cometh the drinking. A match lasting eighty minutes. A game of two halves, and a game of at least four pints.

I became truly aware of the industrial amounts of beer that can be consumed in the name of rugby in 1978. Wales versus the All Blacks at Cardiff Arms Park. A match that ended in controversy, which was about the last thing I remembered before waking up the next morning in a bedroom that was unknown to me, in a house that was unknown to me, and in a house that wasn’t in Cardiff. It was in fact somewhere in Somerset.

The obsessiveness of the true rugby devotee is as great if not greater than that of the most myopic of football fan. A then house mate of mine (who also happened to be captain of Wimbledon 1st XV) used to rise uncommonly early for him on a Saturday morning in order to watch the Lions tests against New Zealand in 1983. The early rise was doubly necessary; one, to watch the match and two, to prepare and then consume the entire contents of a supermarket by way of breakfast, liberally washed down with cans of Guinness.

For Bar Brits, the opportunities await during the World Cup. Other matches may start at eight local time, but there will be hordes of thirsty and hungry rugby aficionados banging on the shutters demanding extra full breakfasts and several large, foaming drinks. It should be rugby gold for the next few weeks.

This said, not every bar benefits from a rugby audience. During the 2007 competition, one particular bar, no longer with us (and not particularly surprising) seemed determined to do everything it could to deter the rugby watcher. An England game was suddenly switched off and the dual TV system went over to some God-forsaken Championship football match and the racing from Haydock. “No one’s interested,” came the explanation from the misery of the bar owner, which came as a shock to those who were. He was left, studying the form for the racing in his copy of “The Sun”, as the rugby deprived trooped off to find another bar.

Rugby, like cricket but unlike football, requires an intimate acquaintance with rules that not even the true fan, let alone the players, really understands. Furthermore, it is such a whirr of big blokes smashing into each other, that no one has much idea what is actually going on, and no one can follow the ball, which seems at times to be largely incidental to the game itself.

But for the completely uninitiated, suddenly captivated by the possibility and excitement of England winning something, it is a total mystery, which nevertheless demands a running commentary of incomprehension interspersed by matters unrelated to what’s happening on the plasma screen. I give you, therefore, the ladies’ view of rugby, as it was during the 2007 final, with occasional male interjections to offer a correction or information:

“Ooh-ooh, come on, push them. That’s good, ooh-ooh, what’s happened? He’s good, who’s he? Tait. Ooh-ooh, come on guys, what was that for? Too many tackles? No that’s League. I am trying you know. Ooh-ooh, that was good. Who’s he? Robinson. I like him. That was good. What’s happening now? Did you breast feed? That was a try. Who was that? Ooh-ooh, Steyn, he’s good. But he’s not one of ours. Isn’t he? Oh no, come on guys, well, George got this allergic reaction to eggs. What’s happened now? Who’s this referee? He’s Argentinian. Ooh-ooh, push him. Oh look he’s pushed him into that camera. England are better. Ooh-ooh. Oh, is it over?”

Sadly of course, England failed in their attempt to win the last World Cup. But four years before. Four years before. Matt Dawson’s incursions, Jonny Wilkinson’s drop goal, Mike Catt’s boot into the terraces. England had won, and a bar in Puerto Pollensa erupted. It must have been, I guess, one o’clock or later, thanks to the extra time. The pinting had been going on since mid-morning, and by the time that Catt kicked to touch, few could really make out what they were meant to be watching. All they could make out was that England had won, and it was therefore time for yet more pinting.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Nights On The Tiles

The truth that dare not speak its name.

A survey – yes, another one – finds that 80% of Brits between the ages of 16 and 35 come to Mallorca for one reason: nightlife. Well, not just one reason. There’s also the matter of cheap booze. Two reasons then. You can add the other ones; they’re not so difficult to figure out. Three reasons. No, four. Four reasons. No one expects the Spanish immoderation.

The same survey discovers, disquietingly, that 22% of Brits (female, one assumes) have in some way been sexually accosted while on holiday in Mallorca. I make no comment, other than that it comes as no surprise. Nor does the revelation that 71% are drunk for half the time, albeit that this seems on the low side.

You feel that behind these findings there is the unstated sound of self-deflecting  and holier-than-thou disgust. You wonder quite what motivates Spanish surveys into the behaviour of British (and also, it must be added, German) youth. It’s as though a Philistine pursuit of hedonistic nightlifing, too much alcohol and sex are reserved for the marauding hordes of northern Europe. It is, of course, far from the truth.

Barely audible but barely undisguised though this disgust may be, it is highly vocal compared with the truth that dare not be spoken. It is the truth that, for Brit and German youth – and older others whom tourism grandees might prefer to think have other things on their minds – going out at night and drinking are very important.

Getting off their faces and getting laid may be more the preserve of the younger end of the tourism masses – the younger end formerly known as the 18-30 crowd, now younger and older – but there was another survey, one that came out last summer, which found something very similar to this latest one. Of 3,000 tourists – of different ages – this reported that 80% of Brits (the good old 80% again) go to a night bar, club or disco on five or more nights during their stay. Nightlife is not just for the young, and that survey proved the point.

The truth that dare not speak its name is that for the great majority of tourists the priority is not figuring out which damn cell Chopin did or didn’t live in; it is not admiring the interior of Palma Cathedral; it is not scrutinising some dust and bits of old stone at the excavations of Alcúdia’s Roman town. It is going out. On the razz. On the lash. On the tiles. It is karaoke, trib acts. End of. It is into the wee small hours with a thumping musical accompaniment and next morning’s thumping head. End of. Culture is the trip to the market. Excursions are to Pirates. End of. The priority is enjoying yourself. Having fun. It is what, for many, many tourists, holidays are about.

I said the other day that a mistake is made in referring to the “tourism market”, as though it were one unified body of humanity. The other mistake is in referring to tourists as tourists. They are holidaymakers. There is a difference in terms of emphasis. One implies going out and having a good time, having a laugh, having some bevvies. I leave you to conclude which one.

The truth that dare not speak its name is that Mallorca has forgotten that people come on holiday. Consequently, the mindset, when it comes, for example, to promotion, is one quite removed from the experiences, the wishes, the motivations of great numbers of holidaymakers, the hoi polloi of the current-day Hi-de-Hi transported to the sun. And this isn’t just the “yoof”. Anything but.

This survey will be used as a stick with which to beat the drunkard Brit generation, as though such a thing had not previously existed. I can testify to the fact that it did. But it should be looked at more objectively. Combined with the other survey, it says much about what Mallorca represents. This may not be what tourism officialdom would like to think it represents, but it is. This may not be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth where Mallorca’s tourism is concerned, but it is a truth nevertheless. Just that they don’t want to speak it.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.