A Different World: Mallorca’s north-south divide

North, south, east or west. Wherever you may live in Mallorca, you will have a view as to where the place you live fits within the general scheme of things. My apologies, by the way, if you live in the middle, but for the purposes of the following, I’m afraid I will need to exclude you. But don’t feel put down, because you are not alone. And if you don’t live in Mallorca, you will still appreciate that location on the four main points of the compass can have meaning.

You may live in London, or you once used to; London and the south that have been damned for always being the focus of attention. It’s the media that’s to blame. Usually. But it has always been thus. Greater density of population, the capital city and the financial centre. And for England, read also Mallorca and Palma.

One needs to define what is meant by the south of Mallorca. In purely geographical terms, “the south” isn’t strictly accurate. The dominance of what is referred to as the Palma-Calvia axis lies to the south-west, but let’s ignore such pedantry.

The dominance is all but total. Everything revolves around the south and Palma in particular. You can judge for yourselves how the hierarchy works beneath Palma. It probably goes, in descending order, something like: Calvia, Manacor, Inca (and see, if you are in the centre, you aren’t neglected), Llucmajor, Marratxi, and then it’s anyone’s guess. If you are unfortunate enough to live right out on the east coast, you will know that, for all intents and purposes, you don’t exist.

The hierarchy reflects the degree of attention afforded different parts of Mallorca. It really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that certain places receive less, far less or even no attention. If no one much lives in these places, if nothing much happens, then what can you expect?

Nevertheless, there are genuine antagonisms, and none more so than the north-south divide. Well, the antagonism is felt by those in the north; I would very much doubt that it is reciprocated. And it is an antagonism that crosses nationalities. The natives are as disaffected by Palma-centricity, far more so in fact, as are incomers from other countries.

I’ll give an example that is not unrepresentative. The lady in my local newsagents in Playa de Muro lives in Alcúdia. Why, she wanted to know, was there no coverage of the Ironman triathlon in Alcúdia at the weekend. It was an international event which attracted some two thousand athletes. The newspapers, the television; they didn’t cover it. Had it taken place in Palma, it would have been a different story. I wasn’t inclined to disagree with her.

The triathlon may not, compared with other international sporting events, register that highly, but for Alcúdia, and for Mallorca, it was a pretty important event. To be fair, it wasn’t totally ignored. There was mention in sports pages, which is where you might expect it to be mentioned, but the point the lady in the newsagents was making was that there would have been considerably more hullabaloo if Palma (or Calvia) had staged the event.

So why the apparent neglect? The charitable defence of the media is that it is all a resourcing issue, and let’s not forget that there are elections looming, with all the coverage they require. Less charitably, one can perceive this as being indicative of a Palma-centric arrogance, aloofness and disinterest in anything outside Palma’s boundaries or those of its westerly neighbour.

It isn’t only in media circles that the divide exists. It is there in politics as well. For all the publicity given to corruption scandals, they don’t have much influence on towns well away from the dominant south. Miguel Llompart, Alcúdia’s mayor and likely to still be its mayor after 22 May despite his association with the discredited Unió Mallorquina, once told me that the scandals were all a Palma thing. They were largely irrelevant to what happened within the town.

And you can understand this, because, and it is the same anywhere, people identify most closely with their own communities. Alcúdia, and you can name any number of places in Mallorca, could be in another world compared with Palma. And as far as Palma is concerned, it is in another world.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

North Wind Blew South

The north-south divide. Always the south, never the north. We make this a truism, because of English experience. It is not true elsewhere, Italy for example. In Spain, the north of Madrid and Barcelona may dominate, but it is not that simple. For instance, the south of Cadiz and Seville was a powerhouse in times gone by. In Mallorca though, it is the south, never the north. Despite historical claims by Alcúdia and Artà, it has always been the south – Palma; Palma and now its satellite municipalities, Calvia most obviously, the place of Magaluf, Santa Ponsa and Palmanova.

Population, commerce, power, each has been and is centred on the south. The north is another world, one that does not even have a motorway going all the way. The divide exists, whether for Mallorcans or others; always the south, never the north. And for the Brits, the divide is a vast chasm, one of neglect and sometimes hostility. But it is not difficult to understand why there might be such hostility. The northern zone comprises somewhat more than one-eighth (roughly) of Mallorca’s British population, of which over a half lives in Palma or Calvia. Yet, away from the greater south region, this still makes it the second most populous British area on the island. Its problem lies not with the number of people but the 50-odd kilometres that separate it from Palma, the gateway to the south and its appendages of Calvia, Marratxi, Llucmajor and Andratx. And it is this separation that rankles, because it has caused and continues to cause a physical and perceptual disenfranchisement from the representation of the British as a whole.

In the artificial expatriate world, representation is largely not a question of politics or the other main “estates”. It is predominantly that of informal networks and of the fourth estate, the press. Where an element of quasi-politics might intrude, it appears not to wish to. Does the British Consul ever visit the north? Maybe he does, but if so he keeps it quiet. Yet it is precisely the absence of established representation that makes a presence via the media that much more important. For without it, there is a lack of connection, a sense of avoidance and of neglect and the fomenting of petty hostility and prejudice.

It falls, or should, to the media to make the connection. But it fails utterly in doing so. It is not entirely its fault. Resources largely determine the breadth of representation, but it is not as though attempts have not been made to form a bridge that stretches for those 50 or so kilometres. They have failed. Why? Resources are one thing. Complacency, lack of interest might be others.

Apart from radio confined by transmission (now a thing of the past anyway), the only “voice”, if you want to call it this, for representation is that provided by the press, namely “The Bulletin”. Long have been the complaints of the paper’s neglect of the north. I have argued in the past that these are not always accurate, that they are mainly a perceptual error, but I may well have been wrong. To take just one edition – yesterday’s. It was replete with messages of goodwill, festive events, a fatuous “year-in” feature alongside news. What was there of the north? A couple of reader messages, a note about a market, and that was about it. There were not even any adverts from what I could see. Nothing. Worse still, is an impression of cliquism and vanity that holds no interest for anyone much north of Al Campo. It is unsurprising that there might be a sense of hostility, while bias of content acts to reinforce underlying prejudices. Take a recent letter to the paper. It referred to the elevation of Alcúdia’s mayor to the post of tourism minister, dismissing his time as leader of a large tourist resort as grounds for such a promotion. The point was valid in that it may well indeed be insufficient qualification for the role, but the interpretation was that it was the very fact that he was from Alcúdia that might not qualify him. Might the same have been said about a mayor of Calvia?

Accusations of press and media bias along geographical lines are hardly unique to Mallorca. The BBC and the British press still suffer from them. But there is a difference, and this lies in my argument about representation in the absence of other forms of this. Within a specific community, that of the British in Mallorca, to exclude, or for the most part exclude, a not insignificant portion of the whole community is not far from being discriminatory.

One has to be realistic and also accept that relative population densities will inevitably skew balance of coverage. So they should; it would be unrepresentative were it to be otherwise. Nevertheless, in Mallorca, one is left feeling that there are two peoples divided not by a common language but by a 50-kilometre barrier.

Oh, and the north wind is blowing south. Cold, cold, like Britain freezing before Christmas. Six degrees during the day. Snow as low as 400 metres.