Cruising To Destruction: Posidonia

Nice work if you can get it for electricity companies. They are lining up to get the gig to supply boats coming into port, for which you can read primarily cruise ships coming into Palma. It’s all part of a drive by the European Union to reduce emissions from ships, by which engines would be switched off and energy would be transmitted from land.

The environmental harm caused by cruise ships is something to which I have previously referred. With an increase in the number of ships comes the potential for greater damage, and, as cruising is increasing across the Mediterranean, the EU has moved to try and do something about it.

Cruising has been described as the “bad boy of travel”. A large liner is said to emit higher levels of carbon dioxide than a large, long-haul airplane, though it is commonly argued that ships (of all types) and planes emit the same levels in relative terms. There are, though, other pollutants from a ship’s fuel – sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide.

All forms of transport bring with them costs and benefits. In the case of cruising the environmental costs have been placed at seven times greater than the economic benefits, assuming one accepts that there really are economic benefits, and I have said before that Palma and Mallorca do not benefit as much as is made out.

The equation between environmental costs and economic benefits was one contained in a significant study, the Scarfe Report, into the impact of cruise ships on Victoria in British Columbia. The study, issued earlier this year, is a comprehensive examination of the effects of cruising on a specific community and economy. Scarfe identified, among other things, the costs to health and property values and the costs of marine discharges. The reference in the study to the seven times higher environmental costs wasn’t, however, one that related to Canadian experience; it was to a Mediterranean one, that of the port of Dubrovnik in Croatia.

Citing the Mediterranean has special significance, as shipping has a major effect on marine species that, apart from waters around southern Australia, are only found in the Med – posidonia.

The most evident sign of the existence of posidonia oceanica is in the form of the kiwi fruit-shaped balls that are washed up onto Mallorca’s beaches. The sea grass and underwater meadows it forms around the Balearics are prolific. Off Ibiza, what is reckoned to be the largest and oldest meadow anywhere was discovered in 2006.

The posidonia is important for all sorts of reasons, one of them being that it protects coastlines from erosion, another that it, ironically enough given ships’ emissions, helps to mitigate the effects of CO2. The importance attached to posidonia explains the number of studies that are conducted into its destruction, which, given that it takes long to grow, is, in some instances, close to irreversible.

Official attitudes towards posidonia are contradictory, to say the least. While there is a recognition of its vital role in the local ecology, certain projects, e.g. the extension of the port of Ibiza, have been given the green light despite the official report (in the case of Ibiza) acknowledging the fact that it would harm posidonia meadows. Greenpeace, in a submission to the European Commission in 2009, condemned port infrastructure projects around the Balearics and also condemned Spain for a failure to comply with European law.

Posidonia is affected by all sorts of things. Oil exploration off the Balearics is the latest to be added to the list of destructive influences. The electricity cable from the mainland is another. But shipping is one of the more destructive, and it is so in different ways, such as through anchoring and discharges. A report from 1999 in respect of posidonia around Port-Cros in southern France went so far as to recommend a moratorium on all anchoring for a minimum of five years to allow the sea grass to at least begin to recover from destruction.

The bay of Palma is full of posidonia, as is the bay of Alcúdia into which cruise ships might one day enter. The investment that has been poured into both Palma and Alcúdia has been that of chasing the cruise-ship shilling. But at what cost? Supplying electricity to ships is a recognition that there is a cost, one borne by the environment. There are others, and one might argue that the investment would have been better spent elsewhere. But, for now, electricity is to come to the rescue, and how will they provide for it?

You know, I’ve always thought that those posidonia kiwi-fruit balls might burn quite nicely.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Cruise Tourism Myth (7 November)

By way of a coincidence, a couple of mentions of cruise tourism over the past few days had worked themselves into my consciousness. I referred to one of them yesterday; the other had simply lodged in my memory banks.

The reference I made was to Leo Hickman who has lumped cruise ships in with all-inclusive hotels in branding them one of the worst forms of tourism in that they generate little by way of benefit to local economies. The one I hadn’t referred to, but now do, was to Puerto Alcúdia and a question asked by the restaurant association as to why its new commercial port was not receiving cruise ships.

In Alcúdia there was talk of it becoming a port of call. It was one reason why so much was invested in developing the new terminal and in deepening the waters. To date, it has not become a port of call and it may never become so. The restaurant association would wish otherwise, as it would hope to reap the benefits from stopover passengers.

The benefits. Ah yes, the benefits of cruise tourism to local economies. These are the benefits that Palma (though not exclusively Palma) derives from cruise tourism and which the city anticipates more of as the volume of cruise traffic increases.

But, as we are reminded not infrequently, passengers disembark, wallets bulging, ready to spend wildly, only to find shops closed. At least, this is one of the sticks which are used to beat Palma shopowners into opening submission and which is used to criticise an inert local tourism-related industry that spurns the opportunities from cruise tourists.

Alcúdia’s restaurants presumably believe that they, along with other local businesses, would enjoy untold riches from passengers taking a bit of shore leave. Would they, though?

One of the most important pieces of research into the economic impact of cruise tourism was undertaken by the Policy Research Corporation on behalf of the European Commission. Based on data from October 2008 to September 2009, it looked at, among other things, expenditure by passengers. Of the top 15 ports in Europe, Palma was ranked sixth with around 53 million euros, a figure that rose to 70 million when crew and ship expenditures were added.

The report calculated specific expenditures dependent upon whether passengers disembarked during a stopover (and not all do) and whether they were joining or leaving the ship. The average spend was, respectively, 60 and 95 euros per passenger (the figure being the same whether joining or leaving).

In themselves, the figures seem healthy enough, but you need to dig down into them to understand what they represent. Mostly all the spend by a passenger joining or leaving a ship is on hotel accommodation; the spend of the passenger who disembarks for the day goes primarily towards an excursion of some sort.

The cruise ship functions in its own way. Because stopovers are short, it organises well in advance, as in booking excursions with a select few attractions/activities for which the cruise ship typically extracts a significant commission; and it is said that this can be as high as 50%, which immediately slashes that expenditure which gets into the local economy.

The ship has its arrangements with hotels, with a handful of chosen excursions and perhaps with certain shops or others, and a commission will operate in almost every instance. The benefit, in other words, tends to be spread very thinly. And where the passenger has some “free” time, what can he actually contribute over and above what has pretty much been pre-determined? P&O, for example, lists Pollensa and Formentor as one of its nine shore excursions. In Pollensa there are 30 minutes “to do as you choose … it is the perfect place to have a morning coffee”.

And so that’s about it. A coffee. Very little, and the restaurants of Alcúdia might bear this in mind, is actually spent on food. It’s the same issue as with all-inclusives, as the passenger has generally already paid for his food on the ship. At most he might buy a small snack and the odd drink while on shore, and that’s it.

There is plenty more that could be said about cruise ships and cruise tourism; about the environmental damage caused by ships, and which is greatly understated, or about the fact that little or no direct employment is generated. A benefit does come from cruises, but it is not as great as might be thought, a point made by Professor Paul Wilkinson of Canada’s York University, and a leading researcher into cruise tourism, who has said that “cruise visitors have little potential economic impact”.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Roll Out The Barrel: Mallorca’s Oktoberfests

Drunken tourism. Scandalised though the tourism industry in parts of Mallorca is by buckets of booze and bingeing, it is still more than happy to sanction the intake of industrial quantities of beer in the form of “bierfests”.

October is nearly upon us and so the Oktoberfests have already begun. And there will be not one, not two, but three: Peguera, Arenal and Palma. Drunken tourism is fine, so long as it has lager slopping over the veneer of tradition, albeit a German one.

Palma has joined the beer festival fray for the first time. It will be a gastronomic and cultural event, the town hall maintains, one that contributes to an ayuntamiento policy of leisure activities, 365 days a year, and so to a reduction of the impact of seasonality. Who are they kidding?

Shove the words “gastronomic” and “cultural” into a sentence and, bingo, you afford an event legitimacy in a peculiarly Mallorcan way, one which demands that events fall into on-message line with tourism of a gastronomic or cultural nature. Substitute the two words with drunken, and legitimacy is the last thing you get. But they amount to the same thing. The bierfest exists for one purpose and one purpose alone – to get absolutely slaughtered.

And what’s with this reduction of the impact of seasonality business? The season is still with us, isn’t it? Yes, but this outbreak of the rolling out of the Germanic beer barrel will mean more German tourists rolling in, thus ensuring the season does indeed extend beyond a September sell-by date.

Such optimism is based on a gargantuan German thirst for beer and hunger for schnitzel and wurst (which is what the gastronomy presumably refers to) and also on the fact that Mallorca, rather than either Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg, is the southerly most state of Germany. The Germans are as likely to gravitate to specific gravities in Mallorca as they are in Munich.

Well possibly. One great advantage of the Mallorca bierfests is that they go on beyond the Munich Oktoberfest. The Peguera fest, for example, doesn’t start until a few days after Munich finishes, so it is definitely an Oktoberfest, whereas Munich’s is a September-und-Oktoberfest. Palma’s will last for a good week longer than Munich and Arenal’s appears to go on forever. It’s pretty much a case of being able to drink up in Munich, hop on an Air Berlin beer airbus and shuttle down to Palma in time to get the next round in; the timing of Mallorca’s events allow for an entire month’s worth of unbroken bierfesting.

But are tourists specifically attracted by the bierfests? In Peguera last year, 60% or so of the reservations in its 1,800 square metre tent (and they love to announce how big these tents are; Palma’s is 1,125 square metres in case you’re interested, which you almost certainly aren’t) were from Spanish drinkers. And for the Spaniard, a bierfest is something of a drinking culture shock, presented as he or she would be by a vessel of a size more appropriate for putting flowers in rather than drinking from. Reporting of the Peguera event last year made a point of stressing that it wasn’t possible to drink in a measure less than half a litre; the reporting had the hint of a warning for the average Spaniard schooled on the junior measures of the caña.

But then culture shock for the Spanish there should be, as the Oktoberfest is a cultural experience; Palma town hall says so. It is unlikely, though, that typical Bavarian culture will take hold among the locals. Don’t expect the sale of dirndls to suddenly shoot up or for the local fiestas to dispense with pipers and whistlers and replace them with accordion and tuba players.

The Mallorca Oktoberfests aren’t really to do with culture. They owe far more to an acknowledgement of the importance of the German market and, in the case of both Peguera and Arenal, that there are parts of Mallorca which will be forever and über alles Deutschland. In Palma, there is a further aspect. It’s German culture that is costing the town hall barely a centimo.

One might be inclined to ask why it is that German culture can be exported and that of other countries, Britain for example, isn’t. One might ask, but then one might also ask – “what culture”? The Germans have at least retained some. Moreover, there may be a lot of drinking involved in a bierfest, but when it comes to the real thing of drunken tourism, there is only one nation that does it properly. No prizes for guessing.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Dreams And Illusions: Palma and the Youth Olympics

You can’t keep a good city down. Having so spectacularly failed to even get to the starting-line of the selection procedure for the city of culture in 2016, Palma now fancies getting egg on its face by bidding for the Youth Olympics in 2018. Palma is becoming the Yosser Hughes of publicity-hungry cities. “Giss’ an event. We can do that.” Doesn’t much matter what it is. Anything old thing’ll do.

The Youth Olympics. The first was held in Singapore last year. The budget for this was $75 million. It ended up costing $284 million. A drop in the South China Sea for an island economy that is currently racing along at 18% growth. Mallorca, on the other hand.

Palma’s lady mayor, Aina Calvo, fearing being tailed off in this spring’s race for re-election, has gone into full proactive mode. Here an event candidature, there an event candidature. Here a re-development of the GESA carbuncle, there a sudden discovery of funds to press ahead with the Palacio de Congresos. The threat of the ballot box has a remarkable capacity to put a spring in the step of even the most lethargic of political athletes.

For Aina, the youth games would be a “dream”. President Antich, not slow now in declaring how marvellous this summer’s tourism will be and himself staring down the barrel of the election’s starter gun, has assured anyone inclined to listen that Palma has “all the requirements” to stage the games. It would be “difficult,” says President Frantic, to find an area the size of the islands with so much “sporting quality”. The games would be an “ilusión” for the president, meaning in this sense a “hope” as opposed to an illusion, as well as also being his dream. Trouble is that dreams can turn into nightmares.

There is just one little problem with referring to the “islands”. It was just one that went to screwing up the city of culture nomination. Note the word “city”. While the publicity for that bid waxed lyrically about the islands and their poetry, beauty and all the other guff, it did rather overlook the fact that Ibiza, Menorca, Formentera and indeed the rest of Mallorca were completely irrelevant. In fact invoking the rest of the Balearics represented a gaffe. The same applies with the Youth Olympics. Everything has to be staged within a city, i.e. Palma. Not Alcúdia, not even Magalluf, though a gathering of the world’s youth might fancy Maga rather more than it does Palma.

Still, the good news, sort of, is that Palma would have many of the facilities to stage the Youth Olympics. There is none of the absurd legacy malarkey attached to these games of the type that has turned the future of London’s Olympic stadium into such a farce. Nevertheless, the presidential delegate for sport has pointed out that Palma would need to “optimise” infrastructures that already exist and that central government might have to dip into its empty coffers to stump up for a bit of remodelling here or there, such as to the Son Moix stadium.

Despite the fact that the games would probably end up costing several arms and legs that no one possesses and would probably also usher in investigations into “irregularities” that would keep prosecutors in gainful employment well into the 2020s (never forget the Palma Arena velodrome affair), there might actually be some benefits. Given that Palma couldn’t stage the main Olympics (though God knows this is likely to be the next “dream”), a youth olympics doesn’t sound like a bad alternative. It would certainly fit with the creation of an image of a youthful, cosmopolitan and sporty city and island. In this respect, it makes some sense. And you never know, it might even be beneficial to tourism. Singapore apparently attracted 370,000 spectators, though it’s not clear if these were just all Singaporeans and those living on the island.

The bid for the games and therefore the fulfilment of the “dream” or not does have some way to go. As with the city of culture, a decision as to the candidate city will be taken at national level and then forwarded for the international competition, with the final selection being made in 2014. Palma is likely, therefore, to be just one Spanish city that is in the mix, and Valencia is lurking as a competitor; Valencia, which has proved in the past to be a city that has dashed Palma’s hopes, as was the case with the America’s Cup.

The current political unity behind the bid, that at any rate between Calvo and Antich, gives a solid front, but things may well change in May. One can’t help but feel that this unity is a display of the PSOE socialist party engaging in politicking. Dreams or no dreams, Palma’s Youth Olympics may prove to be simply an illusion.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Flaming Ellipse: Plagiarism in Palma

Palma council has been placed in a highly embarrassing situation. The poster that is being used to promote its Sant Sebastià festivities includes a design that the council now accepts has been plagiarised. The design, which comprises a series of ellipse-shaped rings intertwined and superimposed onto others and coloured in shades of red and yellow to denote flames, bears a very strong resemblance to one created by a designer called David Yerga and which was used to promote the “Falles” fiestas in Valencia last year.

The council set up a competition for the poster design. The winner receives a prize of 3,000 euros, which will now not be forthcoming. Yerga is demanding the same amount as compensation. He has also insisted that the poster be withdrawn and that unless the council complies he will seek legal redress. The council, for its part, has said that it cannot now withdraw the poster and has also said that it was in no position to be able to judge if designs were original works or had potentially violated intellectual property.

Without knowing the ins and outs of the terms of its competition, it might be argued that, as the “client”, the council did have a responsibility to ensure that it was at least protected from any claim. There has been some chatter on the internet about this case to the effect that the council should have been aware of the Valencia design – they’re all “Catalans” after all. This seems a bit harsh, but the council may now wish that there had been greater diligence.

Moving from the specifics of this case, it is not exactly unknown for designs to look similar. Often they are knowingly similar, but not always. As with music, there are always influences. Indeed with music, it might be argued that there is no such thing as originality any longer, just degrees of copying, conscious or not.

In creative endeavour, however, plagiarism, or allegations of it, can be highly destructive. It can kill careers stone dead, and the student who did the Palma design may come to regret what she put forward for the competition. It is also inherently lazy and runs counter to the very notion of creativity in the sense that this means originality (or as near as this can be achieved nowadays).

While borrowing ideas is commonplace, to look to effectively pass off something as one’s own when it isn’t is an abrogation of the creative impulse. It’s why plagiarism is so frowned upon. Call yourself an artist when you nick another’s painting; call yourself a writer when you lift another’s words. It makes no sense. If you are involved in creative endeavour, you want to paint your own pictures, write your own words. What’s the point of doing it if you don’t?

There have been examples of plagiarism in its written format, ones with a Mallorcan context. Take that of the well-known journalist with a leading UK tabloid who used more or less verbatim a description of Puerto Pollensa that came from the home page of puertopollensa.com. What on earth was she thinking of? The conclusion I drew was that she hadn’t actually been to Puerto Pollensa but needed some copy. It would be instructive to know what she was paid.

Resort to the internet, be it for design works, photography or texts may be about working smart, but to take whole tracts of text or take photos and make them appear as your own verges on betrayal. Betrayal of the creative endeavour, of whatever profession may be involved and of the audience. I don’t get it, and no more do I not get it than with grabbing from Wikipedia and other sites and reproducing word for word. If you write, you write. In your own words, not with those of someone else.

In Mallorca, as in Spain and as in the rest of the European Union, there is a clear enough law on copyright. It means that everything you do which is creative, be it written, designed, photographed, whatever, is your property. It may sometimes be difficult to prove, but the law exists nonetheless. But in Mallorca there can at times be a rather lax attitude. It’s one I know only too well, having found my photos or designs reproduced somewhere without permission. It’s an attitude which, when confronted, can receive a shrug of the shoulders or a look of bewilderment that anyone might suggest that something wrong had been done.

David Yerga needs to be congratulated. If a high-profile case of plagiarism can help to convince firstly councils that they need to be rather more thorough with their compliance and secondly a wider public that there is such a thing as copyright, then he will have performed a great service.

Go here to see the two designs:
http://ultimahora.es/mallorca/noticia/noticias/local/cort-admite-el-plagio.html

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Keep The Home Fires Burning

Around this time of the year, in the spirit of the traditions of January’s fiestas, I uphold my own tradition, one that I share with others. It is the tradition of asking why on earth more is not made of these fiestas. I think I might have the answer. They -the great, anonymous “they” of tourism promotion – don’t want to make more of them. They want them for themselves.

This, at least, is the conclusion you have to draw. And as with the fiestas, so also anything else that occurs. Take the Winter in Mallorca programme. I popped into my local, friendly tourist office the other day. Did they have a copy of the January programme? Not as such. None had been delivered, as indeed none had been delivered in December. Notwithstanding the fact that a call to whoever “they” are to ask if some might be delivered seemed not to have been considered, for a tourist office that happens to be open to be overlooked during the distribution run says much for a – how to put it – uncoordinated approach to information dissemination.

And it’s not much better on the internet, a medium which, in these times of spondoolex shortage, offers the advantage of not having to cough up for Mallorca’s overpriced print bills. “Infomallorca.net” was volunteered as a source of information for the Winter in Mallorca programme. Sorry, but it isn’t. One thing it has is a calendar of “touristic agenda”. What does this have? Well, nothing about the fiestas for starters. And nothing about the programme either. Helpfully it does let us know that there are weekly markets in Valldemossa and Ariany. Why? Or rather, why these two and none of the others? Anyone got any sensible suggestions? I’m damned if I can think of any.

“Illesbalears.es” was the other recommendation. I already knew the answer, but double-checked. There is a link, a link to complete gobbledegook. Fat lot of use.

Oh well, let’s forget Winter in Mallorca. It seems as though “they” have, so why should I worry? But there are still the fiestas. Fiestas which are not any old fiestas. Antoni and Sebastià. Sa Pobla, the main centre of Antoni celebrations, and Palma, for Sebastià, to which the whole island descends. Trouble is that no one else much does.

It remains a mystery to me why, given the proximity in time of Antony and Sebastian and their undoubtedly spectacular content, they are not afforded some prominence in encouraging a January tourist. A two-centre fiesta that has the bonus of spreading things about and not being only Palma-centric.

Let’s take Sebastian. Three years ago this fiesta began to take shape as an event with international content. Admittedly this was a rump Electric Light Orchestra sans Jeff Lynne who had to step in to replace Earth Wind & Fire who turned out not to be Earth Wind & Fire and didn’t turn up, but then there were also Echo And The Bunnymen. Following what was a highly successful Sebastian fiesta, Palma council admitted that more needed to be done to attract an international audience for the concerts and the fire spectacular.

So what happened? Nothing. Instead the following year the acts were solidly local. “Ultima Hora” laid into the event big time, criticising the organisation, criticising the organisers for not knowing what the people wanted, criticising the lack of international acts, criticising the lower quality than in previous years. Economic straitened times might well have been the excuse, but another way of looking at it, despite the expression of good international intentions the previous year, was that they couldn’t be bothered. Couldn’t be bothered because, well, it’s our fiesta, isn’t it. Ours as in Mallorcan.

This is what you do have to start to conclude. And it is a conclusion that doesn’t apply solely to Antony and Sebastian, it applies to fiestas as a whole. Yet these are at the heart of all the culture garbage that “they” trot out; they are the one aspect of culture that really does mean something to a visitor. Or would do were they given far greater prominence. But they are not. Even the summer fiestas are essentially add-ons; they do not form a focal point for promotion. And then you have the problem as to whether you can find any information or, where you can, if it is not released at too short a notice.

The fires and demons of Antoni, the bands and fire spectacular of Sebastià. Fabulous events. But we’ll keep them to ourselves, thanks very much. We’ll keep the home fires burning – so long as they stay at home.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Tintin And Destination Palma

I was having a coffee one morning with a group of people, when it dawned on me that one of them bore more than just a passing resemblance to Tintin. It also happened that he was gay. Matthew Parris would have approved.

Parris, rather as he had when recommending that piano wire strung across a road should be used against cyclists, caused a stink when he claimed that evidence of Tintin’s homosexuality was “overwhelming”. The cycling fraternity was appalled by the threat of decapitation, for which Parris subsequently apologised. The Tintin community has been similarly outraged, or at least stirred into great debate, by the suggestion of Tintin’s queerness; there is, for example, a discussion dedicated to the subject on a Tintin website – tintinologist.org.

“Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin.” These dramatic words once used to boom out of an old black-and-white telly, just as Jeff Tracy’s “Thunderbirds Are Go” also used to excite the prospect of daring. Cartoons or puppets, they were the suspension of belief, the animation of fantasy; who cared whether there was a propagandist or prurient sub-text. It was only much later that questions started to occur, such as quite what was the deal with Tintin and Captain Haddock and what exactly did some of the Tracy boys do with themselves all day, especially John.

No one spent time analysing any hidden meaning, innuendo, political or social statements. Tintin was just Tintin, popping up all over the world and sometimes beyond, Captain Haddock and Snowy in tow, both of them out of their heads on whisky. Hergé has been variously branded as a racist, a Nazi sympathiser and an anti-Semite. The only charge that probably sticks is the first, but he has to be seen in the context of the times, not least Belgium’s imperialism in the Congo. He was by no means alone: Thomson comics still had characters encountering “darkies” in the 1960s.

Tintin has endured. His quiff is as recognisable as Elvis’s. He has been translated, filmed, Americanised, put on the stage, honoured by the Dalai Lama; he has opened shops, entered museums, inspired conferences and been exhibited. At the end of October he will come to Palma.

The Tintincat Catalonian association of “tintinaires” will be transporting its annual gathering to Mallorca. Palma, reeling from having been booted out of the City of Culture qualifiers for having fielded unregistered players (or something like that; they screwed up with their documentation), will be able to claim a small bit of compensation. Hergé and not heritage.

Snowys will lap up single or blended malts, Captain Haddocks will don false beards, Thomson and Thompsons will wear bowlers. Tintin in Palma. It should be splendid. I’ll have to find the coffee-drinking Tintin lookalike and take him along, though, on second thoughts, at the risk of raising the same ire as Matthew Parris did, perhaps I shouldn’t.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Invisible Islands: Palma City of Culture

The spoof news site, newsarse.com, once ran an item headlined “Liverpool as European City of Culture is not a joke, insists EU”. A European Union spokesperson was forced to admit that he hadn’t been to Liverpool, but that he had seen the promotional video and had been impressed by the “beaches, the mountains and the open-air amphitheatre”. In EU circles there might be those who wonder if Palma’s candidacy as Spain’s 2016 city of culture isn’t a mistake, as in the second C should stand for a different type of culture. Brussels need not worry though that this is the city of corruption, for who is this politician white knight, brandishing his sword of goodness? Why, it’s José Ramón Bauzá, he of the Partido Popular, the one who is attempting the seemingly impossible – a list of election candidates not in some way implicated in scandal.

Sr. Bauzá’s crusade has caused him the odd local difficulty, such as not being invited to the end of summer blowout in Sa Pobla, home town of Jaume Font, one of the more notable absentees from the list of electoral runners and riders. But he is deflecting the snub and in statesman-like fashion, one befitting a politician who can see himself in charge of the presidential drinks cabinet as from next spring, has announced his support for Palma’s candidature.

There are thirteen Spanish cities heading for the first audition in front of a panel of cultural Cowells. Most of them you will have heard of, but Alcalá de Henares and Cuenca might be new to you. Being unknown is not a hindrance to becoming a city of culture. No one had ever heard of Pecs in Hungary, and when they had, mistook it for somewhere built on steroids. It’s one of this year’s culture cities and a fine one too, by all accounts.

The criteria for selection are suitably open to interpretation, a city is “not chosen solely for what it is, but mainly for what it plans to do for a year that has to be exceptional”. A specific programme has yet to be put together, but the “philosophy” behind the Palma bid plays up to criteria of cultural diversity and links with European culture as well as the city’s own culture. It goes rather further than just Palma. The slogan is “Palma de Mallorca y las Islas Invisibles”. The campaign, or so it would seem, is one based on making “visible the invisible” Balearic islands. Or something like that. The islands, so goes the philosophy, are places of “poetry and creativity, of nature and humanity, of inter-religiosity, of spirituality and responsibility”. Blimey, and there we were thinking it was just about grabbing a few more tourists.

Being a city of culture can bring benefits. The European Union identifies these as regeneration, giving new vitality to cultural life, raising international profile, enhancing image and, of course, boosting tourism. Palma doesn’t necessarily need regeneration; it’s not a Glasgow, a city that derived enormous benefit in transforming itself from the social and physical wreck that it once was. Nevertheless, the candidature should be adding impulse in getting a move on in finding some dosh for the faltering new Palacio de Congresos. But the city has been keen to up its profile. This is not the first attempt at putting itself more on the international map, as with the failure to attract the America’s Cup. And then there is tourism. Liverpool, spoof or no spoof, doubled the number of visitors during its 2008 stint, and Palma has beaches and mountains as well.

Palma, despite or perhaps because of all the philosophy tosh, does tick most of the cultural city boxes. However, it faces stiff opposition from the likes of Oviedo, a city already associated with culture, being the venue for the annual Prince of Asturias awards, San Sebastian in the heart of Basque Country, a potential political winner in the making, and even Alcalá de Henares, with its historic centre and university a World Heritage Site.

It would be good for Palma to get the gig. Of course it would be. Having the right political support is important in getting through the selection process, so Bauzá’s announcement is not just a touch of opportunism. If he can get politicians to behave themselves for once, his role might be absolutely vital.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Open All Hours

A familiar – very familiar – gripe about Palma is that it is normally shut. Great hordes of tourists would otherwise descend on the Mallorcan capital, handing over large amounts of folding notes in a binge of around-the-clock eating, drinking and shopping. Well, that’s the rather hopeful theory. The practice is quite different. Especially at weekends.

Whether a less rigid application of opening hours, or more aptly closing hours, would make much difference to tourism is something of a moot point. Nevertheless, the intrusion of siesta shutting and non-opening after Saturday lunchtime do both seem somewhat anachronistic to visitors, in particular those now conditioned to liberal opening hours, e.g. the British.

One thing that the tourism minister mentioned in the interview I referred to yesterday was that there needs to be a change in terms of attitudes towards working hours and practices. There does, she argues, need to be greater flexibility, and she is absolutely right. And Palma needs such a change more than anywhere, but one could also lump in the major resorts as well.

With this in mind, there was a not uninteresting piece in “The Diario” yesterday which looked at the development of 24-hour Palma. It may have gone unnoticed by many, but the capital is shifting towards the type of model familiar to those who visit or live in capitals and major cities elsewhere. Over the past ten years, so the article explains, there has been a growth in the number of establishments which are open all hours or nearly all hours (closing only for a couple of hours to clean up). These include restaurants, pharmacies and bakeries. They may not include shops, but something has been stirring, and it might also be illuminating to note that one of the more popular places is one serving burgers and tex-mex (they’d love that news in certain parts of the island, e.g. Puerto Pollensa – or possibly not).

The obstacles to more liberal hours of working and opening are obvious enough, and they come from the unions, church, some political parties as well as from entrenched attitudes that place service fairly well down the list of reasons to actually be in business. It is curious that when fiesta comes to town, along with the hordes, some places will choose to close. But more than this, is the attitude towards time. If a shop or bar announces that it will open at a certain time, then that is precisely what it should do. If an appointment is made, it should be for a particular time and not some vague “mediodía” or whenever, which often means that it is not met. The minister also referred to productivity. I’m not sure this word was being used correctly, but it was still appropriate to mention it; the loss of productivity because of the time malaise is incalculable.

An argument that has been trotted out over the past couple of years of “crisis” is that businesses should be prepared to be open much longer. It is an argument that I have sympathy with. The counter-view is that it costs too much, in terms of staff and energy, to do so, expenses that businesses can ill afford. It is also an argument one can sympathise with. But fundamentally, it boils down to attitude and to a greater focus on the customer and on service. It may be taking time for the message to get across, but in parts of Palma at least, it is.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

On The Street Where You Live

Courtesy of “The Diario”, here’s a strange little story, though it isn’t all that strange for Mallorca. It concerns a street in Palma that used to be called Capitán Salom. That was its name until June of this year when it was changed to Alfons el Magnànim, who apparently was the king of Mallorca from 1396 to 1458 (an explanation that appears under the new street sign). That sign has been defaced and the old name has been written in above the new one.

The change in name has to do with the law on historic memory, the one that is concerned with eliminating references to and symbols of the Franco era. Capitán Salom was, presumably, associated with Franco. Palma town hall had identified a number of streets that needed a name change, in accordance with this law. 

One day in June, along came the town hall workers and put up a new sign, that of Alfons. It was then that things started to get interesting. The residents say that they were not notified as to the change, though the town hall and the post office say otherwise. But since June, there have been problems with post, letters being returned no known address (for Capitán Salom), cheques for payments being returned, and so on. The paper spoke to a number of businesses, and they all say the same thing – that they had not been told of the name change and that they were all suffering because of non-receipt of mail. Moreover, if one googles these two street names, it is the captain’s that comes up, meaning all that information is out of date. So who’s right? The businesses and residents of the street or the town hall and the post office?

The answer is probably that neither is right and neither is wrong. The greater issue lies with the law itself. It is one thing for the government to wish to eradicate Francoist symbols, quite another when it is likely to cause practical problems, and the Capitán Salom case would appear to be one such practical problem. Perhaps the Captain was a well-known Franco thug. Then, well, one could understand the name change. But if he was just any other Franco follower, does it really matter? How many people might know who he was, in any event? It’s a street name, not a statue to the glorious nationalist revolution and the repression of republicans and others.

But they do this sort of thing – changing street names – even when there is no law on historic memory to influence the change; it’s just done, as has been the case in Can Picafort – a street name disappears to be replaced by one of a street a couple of streets down, which in turn is replaced by another one. Or that is how it seems, because street maps don’t keep up with the changes and were wrong in the first place. Even the one being issued by Can Picafort tourist office was out of date for a year or so. And how well town hall and post office communicate is anyone’s guess. 

The postal service can be somewhat haphazard, but it’s not altogether surprising. Post codes are subject to change (which occurred when parts of Alcúdia were re-coded), while not everyone knows what their code is. It should be very simple. Unlike the complicated post-code system of the UK, in Mallorca there is a five-digit code per town or per area of a town. It should be simple, but isn’t, because of a lack of clarity and communication. There’s an example. Playa de Muro’s post code is? Well, maybe it’s the same as for Muro town, maybe it has its own, or maybe it’s the same as for Can Picafort because the local post office for Playa de Muro, though it is in Playa de Muro, actually falls under Can Picafort. 

Confusion reigns, post doesn’t always get delivered, and then, on top of everything else, they go and change the street names. Fortunately, not everywhere has a Capitán Salom or even an Alfons el Magnànim.