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.

Luis Salvador And The First Tourists

Luis Salvador María José Juan Bautista Domingo Raniero Fernando Carlos Zenobio Antonio. A name for each month of the year. Or a name for each member of a football team plus a sub. Are these the names of a football team? Actually not. They are, were, the names of an Austrian archduke. A Habsburg. One of Mallorca’s most famous adopted sons.

It is an unpalatable truth for the patrimonially obsessed Mallorcans that the most notable figures in the island’s history tend not to be Mallorcan. To a Frenchwoman, George Sand, you can add her Polish beau, Chopin, and the noble Luis Salvador. Unlike Sand and Chopin, whose contributions to Mallorcan culture are vastly overstated, Luis Salvador remains one of the most important figures in the island’s history. Together with the remarkable and mystical mediaeval polymath Ramon Llull and the missionary Fra Juníper, who were both Mallorcan, the archduke forms a triumvirate of Mallorcan greats.

For Brits, however, and much like both Llull and Juníper, he is a largely obscure figure who is most likely to be known, if at all, as a street name.

The Germans, however, will know all about him. It was his opus “Die Balearen”, a colossal travelogue and regional and ethnological survey, that endeared him to the people of the islands and to a succession of German visitors. Luis is credited with having introduced tourism to Mallorca; he went on to become honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorca Tourism Board).

Luis was not your typical royal wastrel. He attracted to the island not a cast list of late nineteenth century scoundrels but a diverse group of artists, poets and scientists who joined him at the Miramar finca in Valldemossa. Appropriately enough, given his association to him by Mallorcan fame, the finca included the monastery founded by Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century.

The interdisciplinary range of these first tourists to the island, as they are sometimes referred to, helped to forge Luis’s ambitions to being a polymath in his own right and in a style similar to Llull. It was a combination of the arts and sciences that formed the basis for his interest in Mallorca and which went into the compiling of the astonishing “Die Balearen”.

Luis, much though he was captivated by Mallorca and the islands, extended the scope of his inquiries into natural and social sciences and took off around the Mediterranean in his boats, Nixe I and Nixe II.

Nixe III is currently retracing Luis’s travels in the Med. It set sail for the first time last year, departing from the yacht club in Puerto Pollensa; its five-year mission to boldly go where an archduke had gone before and to draw comparisons with what he discovered in examining the diversity of the Mediterranean and also in questioning whether there is such a thing as a Mediterranean culture.

This summer Nixe III has journeyed from Venice to Montenegro and to Lipari and the Aeolian islands which were also visited last year. The head of the Nixe team is himself from Pollensa. A doctor in the social sciences, Juan Ramis is journeying with a German expert on the archduke and a specialist in environmental studies.

The scientific nature of the expeditions is in keeping with the way in which Luis conducted his enquiries. And one of his greatest contributions was the fact that, travel writer that he was, he was an objective observer. This is what was said of his approach: “He observed everything with an absent, distant gaze and a contemplative attitude … (he) never lapsed into the speculative, subjective introspection of romanticism. Instead he personally examined reality in the most direct manner possible.”

I quote this because it is a strong statement of how a critical eye and an inquisitive mind can produce, as it did, some of the best travel writing that has ever been committed to print. Luis showed, and it should be a lesson to those who fall into the trap of adopting the indulgent and romanticised styles that one commonly encounters in describing Mallorca, that objectivity and knowledge plus a love of a place are what count.

And there is a twist to the tale of Luis. In Ramon Llull’s “Blanquerna”, often said to be the first European novel, the knight of the story turned out to be an emperor. He was in fact Rudolf of Habsburg, from whom Luis was descended. Nixe III might be said to be continuing a story of Mallorca itself that goes back to the thirteenth century.

Follow the journeys of Nixe III at http://www.nixe3.com which I acknowledge for the quote in this article.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Mapping Mallorca’s Imagination

Cartographic precociousness has left its impression on me. When a child, I drew a map of our village. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time – it wouldn’t have, as I wasn’t cognizant of such politico-arcanum – that I had created a socio-geographic representation. The higher land of the village, to its southerly side, was more than just topographically elevated. It was the domain of the grand, the villa, the church, the upper-class landowning caste.

This affluent scarp on the Surrey landscape towered over the commercial centre of the village, the High Street in other words, and the modern estate of engineers and teachers, an agglomeration of the aspirational lower to middle class with its pretensions to the acquisitiveness of late 1950s and early 1960s new consumerism.

To the northerly end, and on the wrong side of the tracks, thanks to the Aldershot to Waterloo line that sliced through the village, was the council estate, a post-war south London spillover and a place of cars jacked up on bricks and the occasional gypsy encampment.

My map showed all this. Importantly, it wasn’t simply a representation, it was a social document, one that was the basis for stories, most of them outrageous fibs of course, that I invented for the people of my village.

Maps, as maps used to be, were acts of faith. You trusted in their accuracy, as you had no way of verifying them. You could see a map, but you couldn’t see the truth of it for yourself. Maps were virtual reality before the term was invented. More than this, because maps were shorn of intimacy, they were templates for invention and imagination. They hid stories and histories.

The map, therefore, has served a dual purpose, that of practicality and that of interpretation. The imagination that was released by maps has, however, become dulled. A trend towards three-dimensionalism hastened the emergence of technologies such as exist today, the most extreme removal of imagination being the obscenity of Google Street View.

Such intimacy, such real reality makes archaic some of the most fabulous creations of the cartographer. It would be impossible for Beck to diagrammatically show the London Underground nowadays. He would be considered an idiot. Yet he achieved what should have been an impossibility – functionalism made from the abstract. And in so doing, his map added power to one of London’s most enduring stories, that of the mystery of its old tube stations and lines.

Technology has not, however, replaced the map. It has digitalised it, put it onto mobile phones, zoomed into it and out of it, but the map remains, even in its basic, non-intimate state.

The tourist coming to Mallorca is confronted with map after map after map. It is the single most useful piece of information the tourist can have. Some may indeed app a map, but most don’t. They seek the utility of something that never folds properly and that flaps in a breeze. Utility is the key, so much so that a tour operator rep once told me that he and colleagues used to have to clean up transfer coaches on which adverts that had surrounded maps handed out to the newly arrived had been discarded. The tourists would tear the ads off and keep the map. Why? Who knows.

For tourists who don’t vandalise their maps, utility is served by being able to locate Bar Brit and its steak and chips and Sky TV on the corner of Calle Ikis and Calle E-griega. An advert without a means of locating an establishment for the unknowledgeable tourist isn’t a great deal of use, yet many businesses persist in using media that fail to impart such knowledge.

The local maps, of the resorts and towns, and the maps of Mallorca are almost exclusively only used in a functional way. The other purpose of the map, the interpretation, is rarely deployed you would think. Yet take a look at a map of Mallorca and you see all manner of strangeness. The name places themselves are strange. They should conjure up enquiry, but how many do actually enquire? What is it with, say, Biniali or Bunyola or the innuendo of Búger? What are their stories?

Maps should map the imagination. A map of Mallorca should be a map of Mallorca’s imagination.

You may remember a time when maps would be put up on walls and pins would be placed on them to denote this or that. You can still stick a pin in a map. Shut your eyes, and when you’ve stuck the pin in, off you go. To wherever it might be and to whatever story the place on your map is hiding.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

In Jason Moore’s Shoes

I had Jason Moore’s shoes in the boot of my car. Oh, yes, you might be thinking. And how exactly did the shoes of the editor of “The Bulletin” come to be there? Why might I have had the shoes? Were they being held as ransom? I confess this did occur to me.

There is a very innocent explanation. The shoes had been left in a wardrobe at the end of a weekend break in a hotel not that far from me. Could I do a favour and pick them up? No sooner asked … .

The shoes weren’t left in a wardrobe of any old hotel. They were in a wardrobe of an all-inclusive hotel. Hang on, no, it is any old hotel. Like many. Like many an all-inclusive. But it was quite good. And the cost for a family of four was also good. Very good in fact. Jason said so.

There is something more significant to the saga of the shoes than the shoes themselves. The greater significance lies with putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Those of a tourist with a family of four.

The debate about all-inclusives that has been called for by business associations will never be more than a repetition of all that has ever been said about all-inclusives and never more than a statement of entrenched opinion. These organisations could never put themselves in tourists’ shoes and accept that all-inclusives might actually represent value for money.

It is the repetition of arguments that makes you despair. When you get someone, i.e. the head of PIMEM, trotting out the ancient reference to all-inclusives being suitable only to “South American countries”, you do have to wonder. Is this supposed to be some great revelation? Because it most certainly isn’t. This line of argument is about as old as all-inclusives in Mallorca themselves.

Actually, this isn’t quite true. And nor is the South America, Central America, Caribbean is where all-inclusives came from argument. Want to know where the all-inclusive concept was born? I’ll give you a clue. Island, begins with an “M”. Resort, begins with an “A”. Still don’t know? Mallorca. Alcúdia. 1950.

To be fair, the current-day all-inclusive is far removed from the first Club Med tents, but to hear the arguments, you would think that this current-day all-inclusive is somehow new. The first serious all-inclusives in Mallorca emerged in the 1990s. The arguments have been around ever since. Just that they have become louder as the volume of all-inclusive has increased.

A peculiarity of the all-inclusive is that it took so long for the concept to really take off. It did indeed take the lack of infrastructure in under-developed parts of the world to truly forge the concept, but once the Caribbean and elsewhere showed it to be successful, it was only a matter of time for it to be transported back to where it originally came from. To the by-now developed tourism world. Mallorca.

Mallorca is an all-inclusive victim of its own success. A mass tourism market, ripe for the flogging of a “different” product by the tour operators. A mature market whose life cycle required energising.

Just think for a moment. What would have happened had Gerard Blitz started opening up all-inclusive hotels in the 1950s and not gone off with his tents to islands elsewhere? A very, very different economy would have been created in Mallorca. It didn’t happen, partly because no one thought to make it happen and also because there was an unchallenged and seemingly natural symbiosis between hotel and outside bar and restaurant.

It has now happened. Or rather, it started to happen some fifteen years ago, and the current-day consequences could have been predicted. And now, PIMEM want a debate. Sorry to have to tell you, fellas, but you’re too late. Fifteen years too late. You can’t put the all-inclusive genie back. You can walk a mile in your shoes and debate till you’re blue in the face, regurgitate the same old arguments. But you should put yourselves in the shoes of a family of four. The debate is not about all-inclusives per se. It is about tourism in Mallorca. It is about how you live with all-inclusives, because they are not going away.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Accidental Historian

The first golf course in the Balearics was opened in 1934. This may surprise you, though any of you who might have read something I wrote for Alcúdia tourists last summer about this golf course would not be surprised.

The “revelation” of the first golf course comes from “Mallorca Magazin”, the German weekly. This, in turn, is based on a study that has appeared in the “Jornades d’Estudis Locals d’Alcúdia”, a dry and academic tome that is published irregularly but which is a gold mine of fascinating historical information.

I first came across this journal purely by chance. I was whiling away some hours at a printer and found it in a book case. Though all the papers were in Catalan (a pre-requisite for the inclusion of papers in the journal) and were all, in typical academic fashion, highly off-putting in terms of presentation, there was stuff within its covers that demanded a bit of perseverance.

It helps, I guess, to be both a historian by degree and to have had a previous publishing life in which I was fed a diet of heavy academic material. For many, irrespective of the language, the journal would be a complete turn-off. Understandably so. Even in English, much academic publishing might as well be presented in Klingon, for all the sense that it makes.

The copy I found, which remains the only copy I have seen, included a paper on the history of the fiestas of Sant Jaume, the patron saint of Alcúdia. It was one that transported you back to the thirteenth century and to the origins of the fiestas. It was a story that was completely new to me.

The story of the golf course was also new to me. Again, it was something I came across by accident. The article I was writing was in fact an interview with someone who has a far longer association with Alcúdia and Mallorca than I do, Graham Philips, estate agent of the parish. During the course of the interview, Graham explained that there was once a golf course in Alcúdia (and not the present one in Alcanada). It was short-lived. The Civil War led to its being converted into a landing-strip for airplanes.

Unexpected as the story was, I asked around to try and find any other recollections of the golf course. There was as much surprise as I had felt when told about it. Someone though spoke to an old man, and he confirmed the story. He could recall the planes that flew in and out of what is today the residential and tourist area that combines Alcúdia’s Bellevue and Magic districts.

The golf course history comes apparently from the sixth edition of the journal. The seventh will include something on the British squadron in Alcúdia (and Pollensa) in 1924 and something else on the application of “the model of tourist enclavement” in Alcanada in 1933. Both are potentially interesting and of far wider interest than the narrow audience that an academic publication appeals to. As with the history of the golf course, the development of a tourist area in Alcúdia’s Alcanada area is precisely the sort of thing that grabs tourists’ interest.

One of the problems with the portrayal of Mallorca’s history, and it is a problem that is compounded by the historical information that is put out by the tourism agency and town halls, is that it tends to all be pretty ancient. In Alcúdia, the default historical information is that of the founding of Pollentia by the Romans and the Moorish occupation and the consequent naming of Alcúdia from the Arabic. It’s not without interest, but it isn’t that relevant to most tourists who are turned on far more by recent history, such as the development of Alcúdia and the island as a tourist destination.

There is a wealth of historical information – documents, photos – that sits in archives in the town halls. Alcúdia’s journal is not unique. Most towns have these studies and they come under the umbrella of the university. Yet it rarely comes to light, and when it does is in forms, the largely impenetrable language of academia and in Catalan alone, that simply do not translate to an audience which is hungry to hear about it.

And when you come across it, it is usually by chance. There’s another example; the time I found the original 1936 article from “The Railway Magazine” about the planned extension of the railway to Alcúdia (which of course has still not been built). But this, the railway, is another subject with the potential to fascinate.

The point is that, for all the desire for tourism attracted by Mallorca’s history and culture, far too little attention is paid to what really can excite or to what can be more understandable to a tourist market – that to do with tourists’ own experiences: of tourism. This more recent history, that of tourism development and the changes brought about by tourism, exists in archives and in people’s memories.

It really needs to be made available.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Fade Away

How long ago was it? Forty years. More maybe. No one ever seems to be able to say for certain. It’s their age catching up with them. Memory playing tricks, disappearing or revolving in circles of confusion. Let’s say it was around 1970, shall we. Exactitude isn’t necessary.

Back then, towards the far end of Playa de Muro, an area sometimes misleadingly referred to as Alcúdia Pins which is further on, was all but uninhabited. What lay by the sea was sand, dunes’ scrub, reeds and grass from Albufera. Not far away a hotel was being put up. It was to be the Esperanza. The story goes that the hotel was named after the daughter of the man whose family owned much of the land that stretched from what became Alcúdia’s Bellevue and Mile area down to the forest that separates current-day Playa de Muro from Can Picafort.

There were plenty of stones and bricks that went into the building of the hotel. So many that there were a lot spare. They went much of the way to the building of two houses, one a bungalow, the other a grander affair on two levels. There was an absence of utilities and no road as such. A machete was a useful tool to hack away at the scrub and grass.

The two houses took shape and became the first of an urbanization. The bungalow had to be all but re-built some years later; there were no proper foundations. The house was that much more solid. It was, still is just about, the seaside home of a couple from the hinterland. Not rich people. Straightforward, regular Mallorcans, but they were not stand-offish. They might once have been where foreigners were concerned, but they have known many over all these years and have become friends, such as with the German woman who owned the bungalow but who died a couple of years ago.

I hadn’t seen the old man for quite some time. In summer it was usual for him to be there, tending the garden. His wife, rather shaky, pottered around inside or stood on the roof terrace and shouted at neighbours, as was her preferred form of communication. It was never unfriendly, just that, in a far from untypical Mallorcan manner, volume outweighed content. The conversation, such as it was, tended to revolve around the not infrequent “desastres” involving “clientes”, those who rented two flats in the house.

I saw the old man the other day. It was a bit of a shock. He has gone downhill quite suddenly. I asked him how he was, but didn’t tarry long. I didn’t want to embarrass him. I could see how he was, and the words of another German neighbour, one who has had a chalet there for almost as long as the original two, came into my mind. “He was crying. He said that he knew that he was dying.”

There had been tears when the German woman had passed away. The old lady, the wife of the old man, had taken my arm as we had gone to spread the word. Standing in the road, heads shaking, kind words being spoken. She, the old lady, was grateful for the gifts, such as the geranium pots. They would remind her of her long-time German friend.

The old man said that his wife was well, but I know she isn’t. She doesn’t come to the house now. She doesn’t go with her husband for their little trip to the sea. They would do this on most occasions when they came to the house in winter. He would drive to the beach’s edge and might forage for some bits of wood. She would hobble to the wooden sand-break, stare at the sea and then shout a bit.

And afterwards they would go to the house where there were no winter clients to be “un desastre”, just the overwhelmingly musty smell and the icebox interior before the fire started to crackle and the rooms would fill with the sweet essence of woodsmoke. Incongruous amidst the antique and dark furniture that cluttered up their flat was a flat-screen telly chirping in generally incomprehensible Mallorquín.

The old man had come with a nephew, a cheery fellow who once chatted with me in the street and explained his prostate problem and, more alarmingly, his erectile dysfunction. I didn’t exactly know him that well. So much for stand-offishness. You wonder, at times, why the Mallorcans have this reputation. The old man and he, even the summer before last, used to go together for their Sunday morning swim in the sea. The nephew was his usual happy self, unlike the old man who lowered himself uneasily into the passenger seat of the car he used to drive.

He’s fading away, as is his wife. The German neighbour has already faded away. And their fading will end a chapter of Playa de Muro’s history. Because they are its history in this particular part of the resort. They were the first, the pioneers if you like, they who tamed the wild east of Alcúdia all those years ago. It seems almost appropriate. The resort is not dying of course, but has it, like other parts of Mallorca that developed from little or nothing at around the same time, run out of the vigour, the life that took it so far? The resort is now no youngster. It has matured, along with the industry that created it. Life cycles are real enough. For resorts, for industries. And for people.

I don’t know if I’ll see him again.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Columbus Improbability: Felanitx

Want to give your town’s tourism a bit of a boost? Easy. All you do is ally yourself to some old weird beard who helped to eradicate a distant tribe of loin-cloth-wearing and peace-loving foreigners: Christopher Columbus, the Kenny Rogers of the fifteenth century, all white chin furniture and islands of the gulf stream.

The mayor of Felanitx wants to make Columbus an “illustrious son” of the town and to attract all-year American tourists in search of their roots at a new theme park with Taino indians (not that they’d be real ones), labouring in building a governor’s residence and dying of smallpox. But let’s overlook Columbus’s genocidist credentials. He wasn’t in truth much good at wiping out a race – there are more efficient ways than the ones he and his successors deployed – much as he wasn’t much good at discovering America.

It may come as a surprise to learn that Columbus didn’t discover Manhattan or Disney World. What he did stumble across, while thinking he was on the way to China, were some islands, one of which is today carved down the centre on maps, the right bit of which is the Allinclusivan Republic, sometimes known as “Dominican” to a bar-owning fraternity of Mallorca intent on wreaking winter-home-from-home, all-inclusive revenge on this part of the Caribbean in retaliation to that of the non-Saint Miguel-buying all-inclusive hoi polloi of the resorts.

Of course, any schoolboy could tell you that it was Columbus who discovered America, although this is increasingly unlikely given the nature of history teaching, which is probably as well given that it isn’t strictly true. But the same schoolboy might just also be able to tell you that Columbus came from Genoa in Italy. Which is true, at least it is generally thought to be. Not, however, that some would agree, such as the mayor of Felanitx.

There is a Mallorcan historian called Gabriel Verd Martorell. For years now he has been banging on about Columbus being a felanitxer. The town does have form when it comes to the great Columbus claim; its resort, Porto Colom, claims Columbus for itself. Porto Colom equals Port Columbus. What Martorell reckons is that an Aragonese noble, Charles, exiled to Mallorca by his father, shacked up with a Margarita Colón (Colón, Colom, it’s all the same) and out popped Chris – in 1460, nine years after what is normally taken as the year of his birth in Genoa.

Charles was the brother of Fernando, also of Aragon, who married Isabel of Castile and thus – through their union as Catholic Kings – created the modern Spain. It was Fernando and Isabel who, after some years of being pestered, finally gave in to Columbus’s desire to go and find China in the opposite direction from that to which it was normally approached.

The mystery of Martorell’s theory is that no one at the time, back in the royal court of the late fifteenth century, seemed to cotton on to the fact that Columbus was indeed Fernando’s nephew. At least this is what most, in fact all history books would have us believe. Until, that is, Sr. Martorell came along to imply that Fernando knew all along but obviously wasn’t telling, and that it was Columbus’s nobility that allowed the king and queen to grant him the most unusual title of viceroy – which they did -when he set off for wherever it was he was going to.

Of course, Martorell might be right, though a professor at the university in Palma considers his version of the Columbus story to be highly improbable. But Mayor Tauler of Felanitx believes him and can see a decent tourist opportunity when it presents itself. The only problem might be convincing all those tourists, especially the American ones, who might otherwise be Genoa-bound.

Columbus is the most famous Spaniard who wasn’t actually Spanish. It’s for this reason that there is such an industry which wants to find proof that he was as well as an offshoot industry which would like to confer Catalan status on the discoverer as a way of cocking a snook at Spanish pretensions. Politically and touristically there is much riding on the Columbus engima. Over to you, Felanitx.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

How We Got Here: Mallorca and literature

Before the unexpected scorched earth policy a few days ago abruptly interrupted my train of thought, I had been reflecting – as you do while lying on the beach – on Great Works. My companion, literary-wise, was Jonathan Meades, a favourite of mine, as some of you will know, as he has been name-checked here more than once. Though not for the faint-hearted or for one disinclined to drag a dictionary and thesaurus to the beach, I had come across an old essay by Meades in which it was possible to decipher the names of great authors in the English language. It was these, the manufacturers of Great Works, which began to make me wonder.

Mallorca, and don’t we just keep being reminded of it, proclaims a prodigious cultural heritage, one exaggerated often enough that we might start to believe it to be so. The poetry of the island might be said to support a literary culture, but it is parochial, a tradition continued via the pompous poetic introductions to most local fiesta brochures. And one says pompous, assuming anyone other than a local can understand them. Mallorcan poetry does not cross linguistic barriers. Indeed within the island’s whole literary oeuvre, few names, let alone their works, have crossed into anything like a wider consciousness. And of these, one, Ramon Llull, was born almost 800 years ago. With one or two exceptions, such as Llorenç Villalonga who probably does deserve wider recognition for his twentieth-century novel on the decline of the Mallorcan nobility, one great author every millennium or so doesn’t exactly constitute a rich tradition.

The literary heritage, and indeed other aspects of the arts culture of Mallorca, owes as much to non-Mallorcans as it does to those native to the island. But even here, it is a heritage by association as much as it is by work that is Mallorcan by content, if at all. As a refuge for the arty, the island, certain parts of it at any rate, is a matter of record, yet Mallorca has not lent itself to Great Works. And it was this absence that started to make me wonder.

Perhaps the two best known foreign literary figures with a clear Mallorcan identity are Robert Graves and George Sand. Graves, though he lived on the island on and off for nigh on sixty years, was too busy paving the way for Derek Jacobi to find international acclaim as Claudius to attempt a Mallorcan Great Work. Sand, holed up with Chopin in the shivering, tubercular hell of Valldemossa, gifted the world a winter in Mallorca, a book slavishly read by inquisitive Germans and largely ignored by everyone else. It is the very paucity of writing that has given rise to prominence being given to a minor thriller-ette by Agatha Christie and the absurd notion of invoking her as a promotional tool for Pollensa.

Into this barrenness has emerged pop literature. One hesitates to describe it as a movement; it is more of a crawl, with just a hint of the opportunist, a nod in the direction of Peter Mayle here, Ruth Rendell there, TV rights and a production unit somewhere else. If it has a cultural veneer, it is one polished to reflect the superficiality that can too easily be assigned to Mallorca. This is but one problem with the island and any pretence to the Great Work. The lack of depth is analogous with the lack of history. The joke with the cultural heritage is that Mallorca doesn’t have a history, outside of its own insularity. In European terms it hardly merits a footnote. Nothing of note has ever happened in Mallorca or to it. Jaume I, you might argue, but he was a part of a process that climaxed in Granada 263 years later. The Civil War, you might say. Well, you might, but so you could about anywhere in Spain. Other than aspects of the period that would rather be forgotten, such as the Guernica-bombing Condor Legion being based in Puerto Pollensa, Mallorca’s Civil War was not out of the ordinary, while Great Workers – Hemingway, Orwell – have done the subject of the war rather well.

But hang on. Go back a bit. Insularity. Mallorca may not have the potential for romanticised violence as other Mediterranean islands – Sicily and the Mafia, Corsica and its terrorism – but what it does have is an obstinate remoteness. Historical events may not lend themselves to a Great Work, but historical context most certainly does, and moulded into this context are the poets, artists, the polymath Llull, the families and the landed tradition.

Great Works are also great stories, of which the Spanish language has spawned translated crossovers with worldwide appreciation – Cervantes, Marquez for example. Villalonga wrote in both Spanish and Catalan; there is no reason why his epic “Bearn” should not be better known (it is available in English). Just as there is no reason why Mallorca shouldn’t lend itself to current-day Great Works, in Catalan, Spanish or English. It is the nature of a land apart that holds the key, a land that today finds itself caught in the conflict of internalising, as symbolised by those fiesta poems, and a Europe, Spain even, it once had little to do with. That’s the Great Work. Just one. How it got here.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Strange Town: The strange case of Porto Cristo’s name

The question as to the correct usage of local place names is rarely a case of being correct or incorrect, simply (simply!?) a case of Catalan versus Castellano. Hence, one has Port de Pollença versus Puerto (de) Pollensa and Port d’Alcúdia versus Puerto (de) Alcúdia. Oh, that the usage should be this straightforward. Consider, if you will, the case of a resort on the east coast of Mallorca. It is commonly called Porto Cristo. Indeed, this is how pretty much everyone knows it. However, the correct name of the resort has been open to debate for years, and still is.

“The Diario” yesterday pointed out that there are five possibilities: Porto Cristo, Portocristo (all one word), Port de Manacor, Cala Manacor or Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme. You can also toss in a hyphenated Porto-Cristo, if you are inclined to do so.

Apparently, the original name was the Colònia mouthful one, so we should probably be grateful that there aren’t many batting for it to be reinstated. This took its name, one assumes, from the church in Manacor, so was the “colony” of the church. The port or cala of Manacor are obvious, or will be to those who know that Porto Cristo is Manacor’s resort, in the same way that Puerto Pollensa is Pollensa’s. So why isn’t it Port de Manacor (or Puerto de Manacor, if you prefer the Spanish)? For some reason it just fell out of common use, but this doesn’t explain how it came to be Porto Cristo.

There are other “portos” in Mallorca, and it is a word that has confused me. It is neither a Spanish nor a Catalan word. I have assumed that it came either from Portuguese or Italian. According to a professor at the university in Palma, Portocristo – one word – is an imitation of other portos on the island and is a “false” adaptation from the language of the Mozarabés, the Christians who lived among the Muslims during their reign in Spain (there are now only some 2000 families said to be Mozarabés).

None of this, however, gives an answer as to how the name came to be adopted, other than one arrived at for religious reasons, and gives rise to the confusion as to what the place really should be called and to competing linguistic, cultural and political opinions as to what it should be. Twelve years ago, the matter received adjudication – in the Balearics Supreme Court, believe it or not. And it reckoned that it should be Porto Cristo, with two words and not Portocristo. Notwithstanding the court’s decision, the confusion still exists, as does the debate.

More toplessness
The arguments over women removing their tops on beaches seem pretty daft, but they risk becoming an absurd diversion when there are matters of rather greater importance to be considered. As alluded to yesterday, they can be seen within the context of a far wider clash between conservative, Catholic Spain and today’s liberalism. There is another organisation which is strident in its calls for women to cover up. This is a far-right group called “Hazte Oír” (which translates as make yourself heard). It has handed in a petition to the Balearic Government, calling for there to be a ban. The petition does not seem to be that strong; it’s nothing on the scale of the petition that led to the bullfighting ban in Catalonia: some 700 families support the proposal, according to the report in “Ultima Hora”.

If you go to its website (and it is quite an impressive one), you will find a whole load on the usual suspects of subjects, abortion for example, and there is a headline for something termed “Playas Familiares 2010”. In this, exactly the same words as used by the family policy institute can be read. These bodies, one has to conclude, are all part of the same thing – a movement of the Catholic far right. The toplessness argument is petty, but there is something altogether more serious lurking.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Back In Time: The Jolly Roger

The history of the resorts holds an enduring fascination. It is a history that has never been written. I’m starting.

I spent an hour and a half with Jan from the Jolly Roger the other evening. I could have spent several more hours, and may yet do. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the Jolly Roger has an iconic status in the history of Alcúdia’s tourism. It was the second British-run bar to emerge in the early 1970s, and has survived up to today under the same ownership.

The story of the Jolly Roger is astonishing. But even richer than the tales that Jan can relate are the documents and photos. Some of the latter are appearing on the bar’s Facebook page; I recommend that you take a look. The photographic history is highly evocative, as are the documents. But these documents are arguably even more revealing. For an historian by degree, as I am, they are a goldmine. Jan lent me a couple that I have photographed. She said I could keep them. I won’t. They all need to be preserved – together.

Among these documents are clippings from old newspapers, including the “Bulletin”. One of them dates from June 1975. It is a report on the problems at Bellevue, or the Bellavista Residential Complex as it was being called then. These problems surrounded financing and bankruptcies. The headline announced that the “Alcúdia complex could face 168 million pesetas auction”. (168 million pesetas would have been one million pounds; an exchange rate of 168 pesetas to the pound was established after the pound’s devaluation in 1967.)

The financial and ownership wrangles at Bellevue were to continue for years. It was not until 1983 that the complex became properly operational. 1983 was a highly significant year for the Jolly Roger – in different ways.

Another clipping comes from “The Sunday Mirror”. There is also a letter from the journalist, David Duffy, who wrote the article in the paper. Both were to do with an investigation that the paper was conducting into the sale of villas and provision of utilities to villas in the area by the Jolly Roger. These villas, close to the Lago Menor and to what was originally the Hotel Lago Menor (now the Lagomonte), had, in the main, been acquired as retirement homes by British pensioners, such as the five thousand pound “bungalow” owned by octogenarians Harry and Alice Spring who spent their days at the house but their nights at “an apartment some way from the estate”, lent to them as it had water and lighting.

What one has here is not just a historical record of one bar, not just of the early days of Alcúdia tourism but also background into the whole phenomenon of home ownership in Mallorca, of the move to the dream home in the sun. The story of the Jolly Roger is set to appear in the newspaper thing that is due to come out this month. It will deal with the bar, but the story, and I had not expected it, is far wider than just the bar alone. Fascinating.

And as if to reinforce the history of the Jolly Roger, while I was talking to Jan a lady came in with her son. The son had swum in the bar’s swimming-pool as a boy. The lady had first been a customer in … 1974.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.