Closest Thing To Heaven: No more – Cala San Vicente

On 11 June last year (It Doesn’t Add Up), I wrote a piece about Cala San Vicente. It started with a quote from someone who was staying at La Moraleja, the charming, high-class hotel as you come into the Cala. “It’s paradise.” “Well, there’s nowhere quite like it.” “Is there?”

Amidst all the pining for the close to the pinewalk Sis Pins in Puerto Pollensa before it reopened, it was easy to overlook the fact that there was another, grander hotel that was closed. Easy to overlook because it’s in the Cala, as indeed it sometimes seems easy to overlook the Cala, full stop. La Moraleja. Paradise it may be. Nowhere else like it, very possibly. But it’s not there, as in it’s not open. The gates are firmly closed and locked. It’s very sad. And it makes three, the number of hotels now not open in the Cala. The Mayol has been shut for … for how long; can’t remember. The Simar is into its second year of closure. And now the Moraleja.

It seems almost an annual thing for me to have to bemoan the fate that has befallen Cala San Vicente. It is such an awful shame. One restaurant owner said yesterday that there is “mucha cree-sis” in CSV. The truth is that there was mucha cree-sis before the cree-sis took hold. The place has been going down the pan for years. But why? Ok, apart from the fact that there’s nothing much to do there, other than relax, lie on Molins cove beach, snorkel, have a drink or a meal, it is still, just about, a little piece of heaven. And it’s not that no one’s interested. Curiously, when I was in the Alcúdia tourist office the other day, not one but two sets of people went to the desk to ask for information as to how to get there. From Alcúdia. People want to go there, and so they should. But the bus schedule isn’t great. You really need a car or take a taxi. The Cala is end-of-the-line Pollensa tourism, backwaters Pollensa.

Several years ago, a colossal error was made. It was when the Don Pedro went all-inclusive. It could be argued that a place out of the way, like the Cala, is more suited to all-inclusive than bustling resorts with everything immediately to hand. But it wasn’t suited, because it changed the nature of the small resort and also began to undermine the businesses there. Elitist this may sound, but the appeal of the Cala was its very sleepiness and its quaint, quasi-colonial exclusivity, one that La Moraleja has, or had, in abundance. Its appeal was also to be found in the semi-mystical reverence in which the place is held by Mallorcans, the consequence of a reputation, part-Bohemian, part-intellectual as an oasis for artists and free thinkers.

It still has an air of exclusivity, granted, for example. by the eponymous Cala San Vicente hotel, and the refinement of the Molins hotel. But the fault, the fault-line if you like, in Cala San Vicente is that it wasn’t somehow ring-fenced and preserved in its own time warp of days of the Raj in back-of-beyond Pollensa. And that it wasn’t spared the development that has taken away some of its character.

The building of the apartments by Molins cove was the last straw for some and became the subject of a rallying cry from the environmentalists. The apartments, I think, look ok, so long as you approve of the trend towards somewhat anonymous and formulaic neutral-coloured blockettes of apartments. No, in themselves they are far from offensive; just that they really aren’t in the right place.

The nostalgia of the Cala, for me, remains the vision looking down to Molins cove and to Bar Mallorca and to what was once a dustbowl behind it. When the resort still had a shambolic appearance, one of a grand old dame, shuffling around under a wide-brimmed straw hat, taking a gin on the verandah or a sangria and fish supper in one of the still unpretentious restaurants, it had its barmy exclusivity. It’s gone I’m afraid, and it ain’t coming back. But one might hope that the Moraleja will return. If anyone still cares.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

It Doesn’t Add Up

“It’s paradise.” “Well, there’s nowhere quite like it.” “Is there?”

He was a gentleman in his seventies, a copy of “The Telegraph” in his hands. He was sitting in a straight-backed, pink-patterned chair in the reception. I looked around, and nodded. It had never really occurred to me that there was nowhere quite like it – the hotel, that is. “Like your own home. Your own villa.” Not my home or my villa, but maybe his. I bade him good day and drove down to the front. Unusually, it was easy to park in front of Niu. Unusually, it was easy to park anywhere in the Cala.

There is a disconnect between the garden-ornamentalism and old-world elegance of La Moraleja, and the on-top-of-each-other contrast between the homely manners of Niu and the kid-splashing, kid-noisy Don Pedro just over the fence. If Niu has had a reception makeover to a one-time feel of antiquity, the Moraleja has a continuing colonial splendour.

Nothing seems to quite add up in the Cala. The new ubiquity of greys and neutrals that appears to have been taken as a template from some bible of contemporary architectural conformity has spawned the aluminium and non-colour of the Windsurf; steel chatters and clatters as they wash down the tables and the austere pipework of the chairs. And so also the silver, white and monotones of the Riusech edifice. Glance out at the Cala Barques – or is it Clara? – and there is the familiar turquoise and fade to green; then look back at this black and white image, this greyscale building, and wonder at the enormity of the absence of blues or yellows that might complement the visual environment.

At Marinas, an ageing couple are on the terrace with solitary beers; someone is at the bar. It’s “muy flojo” and Tomas is nowhere to be seen. Then glance across at the empty pool area of the abandoned Simar. Maybe it was just imagination, but the pool seemed to have been given over to algae. Back on the street, a body-builder struts by with flippers and a wetsuit and calls out in Polish to someone by the doors to the Don Pedro.

The doors to the eponymous Cala San Vicente are closed, as though they don’t anticipate anyone. They are wooden barriers that fail to invite, but it’s probably just to keep in the air-conditioning. A sexagenarian lady is wearing a white jump-suit and matching, sharp-cornered, white-framed glasses. She has the eager expression of one used to racing rally cars; she bears an attitude of female rakishness, a Dick or Davina Dastardly hugging the wheel tightly. Perhaps she has been male-monikered. “Dicky, old stick”, you could imagine. But she is a lady. As with the Telegraph reader of the Moraleja – ex-City I’d be bound – here are ladies and gentlemen. Not a “luv” or a “mate” to be heard. Here is a certain civility among the decline and fall; a Nero-esque blindness to the invisible flames of the encroaching Vandalism. The piano music is perhaps too loud; it is trying too hard to scale its descant of cocking-a-snook refinement. The Moraleja wouldn’t have that. Just silence save for the birdsong and the breeze rustling the bracts of the bougainvillaea and the sheets of an English broadsheet.

The Poli pizza place is still neglected, but Cafe Art has stumbled back into some resemblance of life across from the incongruous Irishness. And then tumble down to the lower level and the Oriola, the repository of ancientness, shows an equal incongruity; a young man and woman with a laptop on the terrace. There is a conspicuous absence of the usual; the musty smell inside is not there.

And you then wonder what happened to that law which revoked the previous law about the extension to building works. The controversial development by the Molins cove is being worked on still; only another four days now, you guess. But they were meant to have stopped, weren’t they? The indeterminacy of politics. So it is also with a banner by the car park. Bedraggled, tossed by the winds, who is it for? PP? PSOE? Doesn’t really matter, days past the elections. In front of the Molins hotel, unusually, it would have been easy to park. There is no-one in reception, not even a tubercular straw-hatter arriving for what would probably be his last visit. The Mayol is now looking a ruin, and you stop and stare out at that view to the horse promontory, then to the half-built apartments and up to the Pinos hostel with its old-time sign of a Western movie. Back and forth – the gentility of the Moraleja, the decibels of the Don Pedro, the dereliction of the Mayol, the whites and greys of expensive real estate. Cala San Vicente – nothing quite adds up.