On The Road Again: Road and building works

It will come as a surprise to you, I realise, but there are some things I don’t know about. And there are some things that are so terminally dull that I have absolutely zero desire to find out about them. In the normal course of journalistic events, I might be prepared to research, but when it comes to the science of surfacing roads, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to disappoint you.

This said, I do seem to recall that when there was some disgruntlement with road surfacing occurring in Palma that wasn’t taking place in winter the argument went that the work needed to be done when the weather was warm, or indeed stinking hot. Is there some scientific sense to this argument? Quite possibly there is, and as I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about when it comes to road surfacing I’m not about to say it’s rubbish, except to wonder why some road surfacing is therefore done when it isn’t stinking hot.

All this leads me, or would do, had I been able to get along the roads leading to them, to Alcanada and Barcarès in Alcúdia. I was able to get into the bustling heartland of Alcanada the other day, but only by taking a detour through the narrow and twisty lanes that pass for roads that aren’t the main road, which was being resurfaced. Fortunately, Alcanada is that far off the beaten track that it has only one hotel and a couple of apartments complexes, which means only the occasional coach. Unfortunately, I encountered it. On the narrow and twisty lanes.

Despite recalling the it-must-be-hot-to-resurface-roads propaganda, it did occur to me to wonder why they were doing this just as the summer really hots up and more tourists arrive. I wondered the same thing when I found the road to Barcarès blocked by the huge leviathans that are road-resurfacing machines. Unlike Alcanada, there isn’t really an alternative route, so I gave up. It can wait for another day, or year.

Much work in tourist areas is verboten during the tourist season, except, it would appear, road works. Building work is meant to cease. But it doesn’t always cease. Special dispensation can be granted to extend it to mid-June. This was, for example, the town hall’s fallback position in Puerto Pollensa when for a time it looked as though work on the church square and roads off might indeed stretch well into the season.

Now beyond mid-June, the poor people of Portocolom have discovered that building works, with the attendant noise and mess, are continuing. Despite being verboten, the town hall has seen fit to stop only one of some ten separate works.

Along the coast from Portocolom, in Porto Cristo they are about to prove that whereas putting things up in summer might be outlawed pulling them down isn’t. The Balearics Supreme Court has decreed, in its infinite wisdom and once and for all, that the Riuet bridge must be demolished. As in, well, any time now. The “indignados” of Porto Cristo, many of its population, have had a day out to Palma in order to protest outside the court building. Demolition is a bridge too far. The bridge over the river why (now).

Demolishing the bridge now is about as absurd as having closed it for the summer. It was after all built in the first place in order to counter the traffic chaos in Porto Cristo, so now they’ve decided to add to it even further. One suspects that members of the Supreme Court have weekend holiday homes elsewhere, such as in Andratx or Soller, i.e. about as far from Porto Cristo as you can get in Mallorca.

Though knocking the bridge down now is plainly daft, I do have some sympathy for building things up in summer, so long of course as it’s nowhere near my backyard. Suspending work for six months at a stretch seems like an incredibly inefficient thing to do, to say nothing of the complications it can cause in terms of employment and financing.

But the suspension of works encapsulates, as do road works in summer, the dilemma of tourist areas in Mallorca – that of attempting to reconcile tourism with the normal course of infrastructure development and construction. Tourists, quite naturally, have no wish to listen to drilling or to watch a bridge falling down, but much of this work is done because of tourism. It is the endless quandary; that of balancing the needs of the temporary visitor with the requirements of working towns. It is the latter that the tourist is perhaps too often unaware of; that where they stay are towns, just like the ones they live in.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

A Troubled Bridge Over Water: Porto Cristo

Manacor’s mayor, Antoni Pastor, has bowed to the inevitable. The bridge in Porto Cristo, the “puente del Riuet”, will come a-tumbling down. With its demolition, a chapter will close (though don’t bank on it) that can be traced back to 1968 and the antecedents that led to the bridge’s construction being started in 2003. Pastor, increasingly under personal pressure caused by his being fined for not complying with the order for the town hall to get on with demolishing the bridge, has fought a populist corner to keep something that not everyone in Porto Cristo will be sad to see go.

There have been protests aimed at preventing the bridge’s demolition, and the publicity that these have attracted have deflected attention away from the fact that homeowners were directly affected by waking up one day to find a damn great bridge outside their windows.

These owners have had to endure noise and loss of light. They have had to pay for double glazing to try and shut out noise but have also had to keep windows shut during the summer. They have had to keep lights on all day. They have seen the value of their properties drop by some 90%. They have lived with the permanent fear that an accident might end up with a coach parked in a living-room.

The lawsuits have been many, the compensation has not been that great, the cost of pulling the thing down will run to around 900,000 euros, not much less than what it cost to put it up in the first place.

Manacor town hall, faced with footing the bill, had argued, among other things, that the bridge was not illegal, as has been deemed to be the case by the Balearics Supreme Court. It was built under an agreement between the town hall, the Council of Mallorca and the regional government, and yet it (the town hall) is expected to have to pay for it to come down.

With some justification, the town hall has a right to feel a bit miffed, not just because of the cost but also because of an absence of support from the other authorities, notably the Council of Mallorca. There is some debate as to whether the bridge is or isn’t included in its plan for “carreteras”. In 2009 the then director for the island’s highways announced that it was. In theory, this should have put an end to the whole conflict, but now it would appear that it isn’t included in the plan. The likelihood exists that a new bridge will have to be built.

The saga of the bridge is utter madness. At a combined cost of two million euros, that for building it and then knocking it down, Porto Cristo will not have a bridge, other than an old one that is inadequate for purpose. Until such a time as a new one arises, if it does, there will be congestion, and in the short term there will be chaos as the demolition work will carry on into the tourist season. And if a new bridge is built, it will cost God knows how much and be proceeded by the predictable and lengthy arguments that will themselves attract cost and delay.

What makes the bridge’s demolition all the more absurd and costly is that services – water, sewage, phones and electricity – will all have to be diverted. This alone will amount to a quarter of a million euros. But the absurdity is heightened further when one considers quite why the bridge was built as it was. The result of this was, as should have been obvious, the impact on residences; an impact that led the Supreme Court to order the demolition.

One of the main reasons for the bridge being built was the traffic jams and the difficulties that coaches, heading for the Caves of Drach, had in negotiating the roads. These difficulties will return, making Porto Cristo once more a traffic nightmare in summer.

The homeowners will be pleased and so they should be. The past few years have been intolerable, but in a way, other than just because of the alleviation of traffic problems, the bridge should be allowed to stay. To stay as a monument. A monument to the stupidity that will mean it costs much the same to pull it down as it took to put it up.

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.