Lidl By Lidl (13 November)

The people of Campos have never known anything quite like it. They’ve finally got a supermarket, or at least this is the impression one gets. I confess to not being intimate with the details of supermarkets in Campos and its neighbouring Ses Salines, but one shopper was reported as saying that she wouldn’t any longer need to trek off to Al Campo.

I do rather suspect that there were already other supermarkets, but what there wasn’t, was a Lidl. There now is. And the astonishing thing is that every time a new Lidl store opens in Mallorca, it becomes not just a news event but also an occasion of such magnitude that, as with the opening of Lidl’s Alcúdia store in October last year, it is comparable to days of yore when the train first arrived.

The Campos shop is number thirteen in a series of twenty Lidls that will be dotted about the island. Slowly but surely, little by little, Mallorca is succumbing to a process of Lidlisation; Germanic commercial empire-building. Well, it makes a change to the Chinese emporia I suppose.

Lidl has benefited from relaxations to land rules that have permitted greater commercial property development. While the rest of the economy stumbles along, the supermarkets are booming. With their value for money, they are to be welcomed, though their impact in terms of employment is only quite small; the Campos store apparently received 3,000 CVs for the 30 jobs on offer. Mallorca, as I quoted recently in a different context, that of tourism, is getting itself more, but not so many, McJobs.

Despite feeling that Lidl wasn’t breaking entirely new ground in propelling Campos into the modern shopping era, the excitement surrounding its arrival does remind one of times past when there certainly weren’t such things as supermarkets. I can’t speak for Mallorca, but the supermarket first came to town some time in the mid-60s. It was a Sainsbury and it offered a whole new self-service and time-saving mode of shopping for the upwardly mobile housewife that its previous store hadn’t.

The old Sainsbury was a place of personal service and lengthy queues. It was also a place that was so outmoded that its walls were decorated with enamel dark-green tiling. If it hadn’t been for the cheese, the loose tea and the pound of sausages, it could have been mistaken for a public lavatory.

Back in the day, and prior to the moment the Sainsbury family was good enough to cash in on the new consumerism of the sixties, shopping was distinctly inconvenient but was, courtesy of shops’ quirkiness and even smells, infinitely more inclined to leave an impression than the monotony of the modern-day barn.

Just two of these shops in our local village were Underwoods, the ironmongers, a general store packed to the gunwales with all manner of rubbish and which had an alarming and potentially disastrous smell of paraffin and paint-stripper, and the grocers, that owned by Mr. Cutt.

It was Mr. Cutt’s misfortune to have a garage that backed onto our garden and my sandpit in particular. It was doubly unfortunate that, rather than brick, it was made of far from substantial wood. The temptation for a seven-year-old hooligan with a nicely sharp-edged spade was way too great. Thus started my vendetta with Mr. Cutt, one that was to take in my stories as to our flopsy, who did mysteriously disappear one day, being served up on his meat counter and to the awful things he actually did with his bacon-slicer.

It was probably as well that we moved not long after but also a shame that I had come to be barred from the shop, as that bacon-slicer was always a point of fascination. And the smell of bacon was what hit you as soon as you entered the place. It was the evocative smells that contributed, pre-supermarkets, to what were old curiosity shops.

The point is that in Mallorca you don’t have to ever go into a supermarket. Everything still exists in a way that it did in deepest Surrey in the early 1960s. Some ferreteria are just like Underwoods. Stocked to the rafters, ramshackle and utterly mad. There are delis by the ham loads. And then there are the markets.

Little by little, the Lidls and others take it all away. I’m not complaining. But, inconvenient or not, the individual shops retain the character, the quirkiness and the smells that transport you back decades. Just for one day perhaps, forget the supermarket and do these individual shops in the local towns. But if you see any rabbit … .

I’ve Had A Lidl Time

The traffic was unusually heavy. There were balloons and bunting. A grand occasion. Somewhere new was opening. The day that Lidl came to Alcúdia.

It must have been like this when the railway first came to town. Victorian women in Sunday-best bonnets and Victorian gentlemen with top hats and stout canes, an image courtesy of period dramas. Flags hanging along the platform and small children holding their ears against the noise of the steam-engine.

They were holding their ears against the honking of horns by drivers attempting to exit from car parks: Lidl’s one side of the main road, conveniently right opposite the longer-established one by the Magic roundabout. The art of traffic planning. It was of course nothing like the arrival of the train, except in there being a mêlée of people (and cars) and in there being the curiosity of a populace, thrilled by the appearance of modernity and some shiny new commerce to confirm that Alcúdia had indeed been connected to the outside world.

Since the colonisation by hotels, there have been only sporadic new arrivals – a civic building here, a swimming-pool there and even the occasional newer hotel. But Lidl is something different, not least because its time has been so long in the expectation and anticipation. Every year for donkey’s years the karting was going to disappear and Lidl was going to rise from the tarmac and tyre-enclosed track. So long and so certain had been the coming of Lidl that maps had even started to show it, before it had been approved let alone built.

After years of is it or isn’t it, suddenly this summer the ground was being cleared. Telecommunications engineers were among the first on the scene. Discussion in bars centred on the construction itself, the pillars and beams, the prefab sprouting of slab exteriors, the apparent absence of any notice on the wire fence around the building site which might have made clear that it was indeed to be a Lidl. Everyone knew that it was going to be, or thought they knew, but there were competing theories: a hotel or a supermarket from a different chain.

As it did become clear, so then the discussion turned to when. When would it open? “I’ve heard November.” “No, I’ve heard January.” “Can’t be. It’ll be sooner.” Lidls rise up very quickly, and as its shape became more and more apparent and more and more obviously Lidl-esque, the chatter increased in its excitement. “Lidl is coming. Lidl is coming.” Only over at Eroski, with four supermarkets in the town, was the excitement probably less palpable.

What finally clinched it was the re-classification of land, the land on which Lidl now stands. No sooner re-classified, no sooner built upon. Lidl has appeared, if not overnight, then over not so many nights. And the grand opening was well heralded. “Nueva apertura” flyer-newspapers filled letter boxes or were stuffed into the persianas of the houses without a “buzón”. Mallorcans are never ones to miss out on an inauguration, especially if it requires giving the place the once over of approval or affords the opportunity for a social gathering.

“It’ll be ok,” someone said. “How do you mean, ok?” “Although it’s German, Lidl that is, the land’s owned locally.” “So if the land hadn’t been, then it wouldn’t have been ok. For the locals, that is.” “Probably not.” “That’s ridiculous.” Except it isn’t, when you consider that it is not unheard of for a Mallorcan restaurant to be vetoed if the chef isn’t from the right part of Mallorca.

So it was as well for the grand opening that the locals could attend, confident in the knowledge that beneath every German supermarket there is some corner of a former karting track that is forever Alcúdia. The wait had been long, more than just a little time. It was like the arrival of the railway and it was maybe the best next thing. Lidl has been some years in the coming, but the railway has been over 70 years in the building. And it’s not still not arrived.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Mother Of Development: Muro, Ullal and land policy

The ongoing farce that is the Muro golf development shows no sign of pulling its trousers up from around its ankles and closing or keeping open, once and for all, the bedroom doors through which the two sides chase each other – the developers sniggering as they lay another trap and rile the environment ministry which would most likely prefer to take a horse-whip to the unfaithful miscreants.

The bee-eating bird has flown or has, at any rate, completed its procreation, and the developers have once more sent in the diggers. They’re over there! Where? Over there! In march the agents of the ministry, brandishing an order to stop them. It’s an area of bird protection. On no it isn’t. Oh yes it is. Though the developers dispute the protection area order, they have skulked off, for the time being, leaving the ‘dozers dozing in the summer heat. The government has “paralysed”, for the time being, the clearance work. (Incidentally, given that the bee population is threatened and that its demise would represent an ecological catastrophe, why are we so concerned with this damn bee-eating bird? Let it fly off and nose-bag some worms. But I digress.)

The way in which the developers promptly resumed their developing once the bee-eater had finished its was like a bunch of naughty schoolboys, blowing raspberries at the back of the class while the teacher’s back was turned. Right then, who did that? Not us, sir. Oh yes, it was. And of course it was. The developers have been despatched to the head’s study for six of the best, or would be were anyone sure that they had done anything wrong. They say they haven’t. Perhaps they had thought that the August hiatus would have meant they could plough up great tracts of finca without anyone noticing because they’re all on holiday.

The whole thing is a farce, in the same way as much other land conversion is farcical in that necessity rarely appears to be the mother of development. As I have asked many times, has anyone ever actually made the business case for the course being needed? Environmental issues notwithstanding, the biggest beef of opponents is that the course represents private business interests over all others. It’s the same beef being given a good larding where the projected Ullal development in Puerto Pollensa is concerned. Are the houses and apartments really necessary? Maybe they are. Or maybe they are just a case of private interest prevailing. No one has much objected to Lidl’s supermarket rising up from the asphalt of what was Karting Magic in Puerto Alcúdia, but is it really necessary? Eroski would say not, and are apparently going to close at least one of their supermarkets. All good in terms of competition, but is it the right sort of land conversion?

Ullal, Lidl and others all fall under a general land plan for Mallorca, one overseen by the Council of Mallorca which could, one supposes, still block Ullal, though it seems unlikely as it has, in effect, released the land. The golf development, on the other hand, isn’t a facet of this land plan as it is an issue for the regional government. Which all begs the question as to who is overseeing developments and as to whether there exists sensible, joined-up policy. And talking of sensible, the demolition of the Don Pedro hotel, which is covered by the land plan and which has been approved by the Council (which refers to the hotel’s “infamous invasion” of beach), is supposed, along with the demolition of the Rocamar in Puerto Soller, to lead, in return, to a new hotel being built. Where? In Cala San Vicente? In Puerto Pollensa? In Soller? No. In Sa Rapita. On the southside of the island. Go figure.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.