You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet: Complaints

You would have thought that the complaints would have stopped. Having seen the back of the old mayor, the source of much of the discontent, the businesses of Puerto Pollensa still aren’t content. New town hall boss, same as the old town hall boss. Or something like that.

There is always something to complain about in Puerto Pollensa. Over the past few months we have had streets being dug up and the renewal of utilities in the square dragging on longer than they should have, the beach management fiasco and now we have overflowing litter bins, lack of parking and a twice-weekly mini-market.

To make matters worse, or so it is being said, the port is being allowed to go to the dogs (and usually to their output) and is coming in a poor second, third or fourth behind other resorts in the north of the island. While this jockeying for the minor places suggests that comparisons are being made with Muro and Can Picafort, it is really only a comparison with the immediate neighbour Alcúdia, for years looked down upon as though it were something unpleasant on the sole of a well-heeled Pollensan shoe. It’s a bit hard to continue to do so when you’ve just stepped in something unpleasant left under a pine tree on Puerto Pollensa’s walk of pines.

The comparison with Alcúdia is worth entertaining not because of what might be considered the neighbour having assumed the lofty position of number one in the northerly rankings but because of the nature of the complaining. Puerto Pollensa does this, complaining, very much better than anywhere else. It has more moaners per square metre than any place in Mallorca.

Complaint has perpetuated complaint to the point where the complaining has become almost institutionalised and complaining for the sake of complaining. This is not to let the town hall off the hook, especially not the previous administration, but the new one has yet to complete its first hundred days in office. The new administration should be given a break.

The latest bout of complaining needs some analysis. The lack of parking is an old chestnut. Notwithstanding some talk of an area on the edge of the resort being made available for parking, quite how the town hall is supposed to suddenly magic up whole parking lots is something of a mystery. The additional mini-markets were in fact requested by local restaurants as a way of creating some ambience, even if shops aren’t too enamoured of them. The overflowing litter bins? Well, maybe there is a point with this, but the mayor, somewhat mischievously avoiding the criticism, has said that these are evidence of a flourishing resort with hotels also overflowing.

The businesses to the fore in this current round of complaining have dragged in the president of Acotur, the tourist businesses’ association. He has been a busy chap, and his busyness needs to be considered by those who might feel that Alcúdia is a total paragon of tourism resort virtue and who might also overlook the fact that Alcúdia is two distinct resorts – the port and the Mile.

He met recently with Alcúdia’s lady mayor along with businesses around the Mile. The complaints here are of a different order to those in Puerto Pollensa: all-inclusives, the proliferation of lookies and illegal street selling, robberies and lack of maintenance. The main thing to come out of the meeting with the mayor was that the bridge along the Mile will be painted for the first time in a generation.

While the complaints were different to those in Puerto Pollensa, there is a further difference to the complaining: Alcúdia’s isn’t organised. It’s not as if there haven’t been things to complain about, but there is nothing like the well-oiled propaganda machine that exists in Pollensa and which regularly fills column inches in the local press.

The greatest single problem for businesses in Alcúdia, especially for those around the Mile, is that of all-inclusives; it is a far greater problem than any of those experienced in Puerto Pollensa. But even a proposed day of action in September when businesses would close in protest at the impact of all-inclusive probably won’t happen because of the absence of organisation and the presence of self-interest and indifference.

The latest complaining in Puerto Pollensa smacks more of casting around for something to blame on behalf of some businesses which might not be benefiting from the mayor’s overflowing hotels. It might also be better to keep the complaining powder dry. With the town halls in such dire financial situations, the complaining will be matched by the despairing and a general wailing and gnashing of businesses’ teeth. You ain’t heard nothing yet.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The New Model Fiesta

The rumours had been circulating, and for once they proved to have substance. Puerto Pollensa’s summer fiesta of Virgen del Carmen will have neither a firework display nor a beach party. The fireworks that finish off Pollensa town’s Patrona fiesta in August are a likely further victim of the financial crisis at Pollensa town hall. What else? Will Cala San Vicente, treated as a sideshow anyway, have any sort of a fiesta this summer?

It comes as no great surprise, other than that it has taken till this year for reality to bite. The funding shortages have been there for ages. They existed B.C. (before crisis), but no one thought to do much about them, ever reliant on government funds or taking on extra debt that town halls are now forbidden from doing.

In 2009, cuts to fiesta budgets did start to come in. In Pollensa, for instance, there was supposed to have been a reduction of up to 25%. If there indeed was, and the main targets were said at the time to be the autumn and wine fairs rather than the fiestas, then it wasn’t necessarily obvious.

If there are to be cuts to the fiestas, and there have to be, then what should their priorities be, who should pay for them and who indeed should organise them? Is a firework display, for instance, a priority? It depends on how much it costs, and getting to that information isn’t always straightforward.

One town, Felanitx, cut its budget for fireworks by 2,000 euros in 2009, so that it cost 3,000 euros. My guess is that displays in resorts such as Can Picafort and Puerto Pollensa require a far larger wedge. Upwards probably of 10,000 euros. More possibly.

In itself, this doesn’t sound like a lot. In the context of this year’s budget for fiestas in Puerto Pollensa of 30,000 euros, then it is. But note that it is fiestas and not fiesta. The budget was for both Virgen del Carmen, now stripped of its fireworks and beach party, and the Feria del Mar and Sant Pere fiesta just gone. Yet, the main fiesta is Virgen del Carmen. Sant Pere may not cost a lot by comparison, but why didn’t they just scrap it? Why have two fiestas three weeks apart? And on the religious angle, Sant Pere, or rather his image, gets dragged out during the Virgen celebrations, so what’s the point of the earlier event?

The argument goes that the fiestas bring in tourists. I’m not convinced that they do, except those which occur out of season. There may be some tourists who book holidays expressly with the fiestas in mind, but how many is some? I’m sure no one has bothered to find out. But as there is so much entertainment being laid on, then maybe those who enjoy it, whether specifically attracted by fiestas or not, should contribute to the cost.

I don’t have a good suggestion as to how you would create a mechanism for doing so, but assuming one could be dreamt up and let’s say you have five thousand tourists knocking around, charge them all two euros a pop and bingo, there’s the cost of your fireworks covered. And while you’re at it, what about charging people from other towns? They don’t pay the local taxes.

If not tourists paying, then what about the private sector? In the town of Dos Hermanas in the province of Sevilla, business has come to the rescue of the fiesta firework display. Put such a suggestion to businesses in Puerto Pollensa, and it would probably go down like a lead balloon, given the poor relations with the town hall and gripes about services for which taxes are paid, but the involvement of the private sector is common enough in other countries. In the USA, for example, the money for fireworks at fairs typically comes not from local authorities but from fundraising and from business.

And then there is the issue of who organises the fiestas. There has been talk of local people in Puerto Pollensa trying to stage the missing ingredients to the Virgen fiesta. In Inca, they have already looked to involve the locals in fiesta organisation. As a general principle, were the local citizenship charged with doing the organising, were it given a grant by the town hall (lower obviously than what it would otherwise spend), then this would not only give the local population greater “ownership” of the fiestas, it would also bring about a mix of private-public funding.

Perhaps we have to accept that the fiestas got too lavish for their own good and that a return to a more basic fiesta becomes the norm; DJs playing dance music isn’t exactly traditional. Or perhaps we should now expect a different model for the fiestas, and one that isn’t dependent upon the public purse.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Tender Trap

Trains don’t have tenders as such any longer. What they do have are tenders of a different type; public ones to arrive at which firm gets the contract for this or that. Or to not arrive at. The tender for the train now arriving at Sa Pobla station has been delayed. We are sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused.

The trains operated by SFM (Serveis Ferroviaris de Mallorca) and the railway stations on the lines to Sa Pobla and Manacor from Palma are not being cleaned. The contract ran out at the end of June. The new tendering process has not been completed; indeed it seems to have all but run out of steam. As a consequence, the trains and stations are gathering litter and at Inca station the loos are shut because there is no hygiene service.

How is it that there can be such a break in continuity of service? Did someone fail to notice that a new contract was due? The answer is probably down to a failure of bureaucracy.

Though the rail service in Mallorca is pretty reasonable and inexpensive, there is something distinctly not right with it. Apart from the collapse of the extension to Alcúdia from Sa Pobla, it took ten months to get the line between Manacor and Sineu up and running again following an accident which occurred in May last year, and then you have the situation regarding the re-development of the old line between Manacor and Artà. When will it be completed? Will it be completed?

The new track and other facilities were due to have been completed some time between May and September this year. They won’t be. They might be completed by the end of next year. Or they might not be. There is, and you might have guessed it, an issue with financing. However, that there is this issue with financing is a slight surprise.

When the Alcúdia extension was scrapped, funding from Madrid was meant to have been transferred to the Manacor-Artà line. If it was, then where is it? Or was there always going to be a shortfall on the budget that has now gone up to 150 million euros? Construction firms involved in the project are being left unpaid, indicative of a general malaise in the island’s public sector of non-payment of suppliers, and one that President Bauzà is meant to be tackling.

Coming back to the breakdown in the tendering process for SFM’s cleaning service, this highlights an issue as to how well or not the bureaucracy works in making the process happen smoothly. Putting out to tender makes contracts more transparent, but it doesn’t always go to plan and indeed you wonder why it is really necessary.

As ever, we can rely on events in Puerto Pollensa to shed some light on the strange world of tendering in a Mallorcan style. Firstly, an example of when there is no tender. This occurred with the granting of a contract (later rescinded) to a firm charged with coming up with a general transport plan for the resort. The firm which was awarded it just so happened to have a family connection with the then town hall delegate for Puerto Pollensa. Something seemed a bit fishy, or so thought a number of people, especially as the firm in question had not previously undertaken such a project.

So much for transparency, something that the new mayor is planning to address. And being transparent and being seen to do the right thing was probably behind the mayor’s demand that Sail and Surf should cease operations, only for him to say a couple of days later they could continue.

The story of Sail and Surf is bizarre. The sailing school has been in Puerto Pollensa for 40 years. What happened was that the school wanted a reduction in what it paid to the town hall. It was agreed that there would be a reduction, but, and despite having an annual concession with a four-year extension, the town hall reckoned that this demanded a new contract and therefore a new tender process.

Why such an established business should need to go through the rigmarole was anyone’s guess. But the rigmarole was started and then got lost. As a result, the school started up again this year, someone found that everything wasn’t quite in order, and the mayor, as I say, probably needing to be seen to be acting correctly, said the school had to stop. Then they could carry on, and an emergency tender notice for the “lot” that Sail and Surf has was posted onto the town hall’s website. And the result of all this will be?

Not getting round to a new tendering process, not doing it all, or doing it but then forgetting that it was being done, when it was pointless doing it at all. The tender traps of Mallorca.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Something’s A Bit Fishy: La Gola

They were trawling dead fish out of La Gola again. Hundreds of young sea bass suffocated in the water of the canal, creating a fine old take-away for the seagulls which came from miles around to feast.

This is the small La Gola lagoon in Puerto Pollensa. Together with its accompanying park, it is referred to, by politicians who rush to make such environmentally righteous statements, as the green heartbeat of the resort. Or something like this. It’s tosh, whatever it is. I have previously used La Gola to denote an item of expenditure, one of questionable sense. “It’ll cost you a lagola, mate.” 800 grand, give or take the odd thousand; what it cost to do whatever it was they did. They being the collective of the town hall and regional government. (There is another cost quoted in respect of La Gola; one substantially greater – four million.)

To be fair, some parts of the park look reasonable enough. The problem has been, ever since it was officially opened and before this, keeping it in order. Out of order, it has been a haven for graffiti-ists, botellón-ists and all manner of other ists. Amidst the periodic disorder, they built a visitors’ centre. It’s not completely useless, as it does give information about bird and wildlife in other parts of the island, e.g. the Tramuntana mountains. But whether twitchers or others flock pilgrim-like in great numbers to it in order to avail themselves of its wisdom, I really couldn’t say.

It is the case, though, that La Gola and the wetlands of Albufereta and the now newly-reopened Can Cullerassa finca, a few kilometres along the coast, are important in attracting the keen birdwatcher. La Gola has recently been visited by an obscure heron, one that caused great excitement among the feathered-friend-fancying fraternity.

The appearance of the heron might be considered evidence of the green heartbeat actually beating. On the other hand, it might not be, and the sea bass would probably be inclined to agree that it wasn’t. The fish were fried, it would appear, because no one has got round to properly dredging the canal. Clogged up, sea water can’t get in adequately.

La Gola is something of a metaphor for what occurs elsewhere in Mallorca, one that relates to a division of responsibilities that the relevant bodies seem either unaware of or unable or unwilling to do anything about.

Pollensa town hall, the usual suspect when anything goes wrong in Puerto Pollensa, will doubtless get it in the neck over the sea bass and for the general upkeep of the pond, but, for once, it isn’t the town hall’s fault. The water, indeed the whole park, come under the auspices of the regional government’s environment ministry. The town hall is meant to keep the park up to scratch, which is a sore point among the locals, but as for the water: not its job.

Ultimately, it’s probably the responsibility of the national Costas authority, a division of the central environment ministry, but which devolves responsibility back to its Balearics wing. This, as with other regional Costas wings, devotes its energies primarily to knocking things down, such as buildings on beaches, rather than keeping things shipshape.

The division of responsibilities in the La Gola case should be clear enough, but the environment ministry is being charged, by locals in the port, with not giving sufficient priority to its maintenance or to removing sand that is dragged in from the sea. It could well be that, governmental coffers having been silted up, it has to give priorities elsewhere.

A lesson of La Gola is that they went in, like some invading force in Iraq, all environmental guns blazing but failed to consider the longer-term consequences, such as maintaining it once all the money had been spent or seeing the need for the sappers to be set to work re-trenching the canal. It may just have been bad luck. Money running out and all that.

Meanwhile, the division of responsibilities means that the town hall will be mistakenly considered the guilty party by many, while the real culprits are hiding away in a bunker in Palma.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Fight ‘Em On The Beaches

Puerto Pollensa is not going down without a fight. You wouldn’t expect anything else. The bell is due to sound on the end of the four-year bout and, punch-drunk, they’re still at it.

If it’s May, it is time for the quadrennial elections and also for the annual kerfuffle surrounding Puerto Pollensa’s beaches. All you need to know by way of background to this is that each year the town hall manages not to get the contract sorted out for the umbrellas and sunbeds in time for the season. True to form, it has happened again this year.

In an act of altruism, the neighbourhood association in the port has taken on the task. But not everyone has been happy, including the company that is meant to be getting the contract, while it would not be a matter of town hall affairs in the port were Pepe Garcia and the Alternativa not to have its say.

Garcia, who is standing for mayor, suggested that there might be some financial shenanigans. From a report I read, it seemed as though he was levelling this charge at the neighbourhood association, a most unwise thing to do given that he would hope its members might support him.

The association seemed to read it as I had and said it would consider whether it had been defamed. Garcia insisted that he hadn’t meant the association but the town hall, but he may suffer a loss of votes because of the misunderstanding. Which goes to prove that beaches, and their management, are not something to be trifled with. Nor are their local politics and local turf wars.

Other towns have their issues with the management of beaches. I shall not identify the town or the beach, but the following example is indicative of the potentially lucrative business of being awarded with the concessions for beach management and of how the “system” can operate.

One particular lot on the beach in question had, the relevant town hall’s inspectorate was to discover midway through the summer, too many sunbeds and umbrellas. The company with the concession was duly fined. Was it unhappy? Not really; too many sunbeds and a consequent fine were part of the “system”.

When the tenders were put out for the lots on the beach, excessive bids were lodged as a means of securing the concession. The town hall was more than happy with this; of course it was. The winning bidder then went ahead and put out more sunbeds than it should have. More revenue for the town hall coffers; this time through a fine. The concessionaire was still not unhappy. Yes, it had paid more than it should have done and yes, it was fined, but it was still making money. More in fact than it should have been making. One imagines the fines and the excessive bid were taken into account in the business plan.

It wasn’t as though the town hall ordered the removal of the offending sunbeds. No, they were allowed to stay. And why do you think that was?

This “game” demonstrates how the process of beach management can and does operate. In this particular instance, however, there was a twist to the story, because local people, fed up with the sheer volume of sunbeds, took action. It should be remembered that beaches are public spaces. They belong to the Spanish state, and ordinary members of the public are entitled to use them without the space being over-invaded by money-making ventures.

What then happened was that the town hall itself faced a fine for allowing the situation to come to pass. Our old friends the Costas authority may usually trample across dunes in heavy boots looking for illegal buildings, but it does also have the final say-so when it comes to what goes on on the beaches.

As a result, the concessionaire was presented with a situation that hadn’t been bargained for; the government’s fine to the town hall being passed on. But even more was to come. A concessionaire, and there was more than one, suffered from having its sunbeds slashed. Over 500 were wrecked, and the cost of repair was put at 40 grand.

Which all goes to show that management of the beaches and sunbeds is far from being as gentile a past-time as building sandcastles. What’s been happening in Puerto Pollensa is positively serene compared with what can happen elsewhere. Fights on beaches, and kicking sand in faces.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Cappuccino Kid

The Capuchin monks have to take the credit, if credit is indeed due. There is no real historical basis for saying that the order, or one of its members, first mixed a particular type of coffee. It wouldn’t, in any event, have been possible for a monk to have done so, back in the seventeenth century. The espresso machine wasn’t around then. The religious origins of cappuccino are probably an urban, suburban even myth.

In the sixties, sixties Britain that is, vogue cuisine and beverages, and their pretentious naffness, were no better summed up, scoffed and imbibed than by Black Forest gateau and Blue Nun. They were the de rigueur selections of an upwardly-mobile, former working-class, flirting with the new fad of a restaurant meal. A trip to the steak house above a barn of a car showroom was my introduction to the sophistication of dining out. It really was a case of prawn cocktail, steak and chips and gateau. The permission of a small glass of Blue Nun should have been enough to have put me off alcohol for life. Oddly enough, it didn’t.

There was another beverage. Coffee. The cappuccino, though, didn’t inveigle itself into the drinking consciousness of the nouveau-estate dwellers so much as it did into the mouths of the regulars at the coffee bars. Coffee, and cappuccino especially, was the added caffeine rush to the amphetamine-fuelled energy of the Mods. Cappuccino rode a Vespa, its engine noise the clack that put the clack into Clacton.

The Saturday afternoon coffee at the coffee bar in the Army & Navy store. The Campari Boy, who looked much older than his sixteen years and who had developed the taste of a bitters with soda, was also the cappuccino king (or, more appropriately, queen) and spooned froth from his cup as he quoted from “A Clockwork Orange”. He, we, would sometimes head off to Woking for the early-evening, so-called 3-D cinematic experience and then to a dingy club that blew our minds by being the place that first introduced us to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”.

And in Woking, a few years later, there was a face who was to become the unknowing leader of a south-west Surrey scene which, finally more constructive than engaging in the mindless vandalism of dreary suburbia, now less inclined to squaddie-baiting in Camberley or, if you really didn’t value your life, Aldershot across the border into Hampshire, spawned Graham Parker, The Members and The Jam.

Paul Weller. The Cappuccino Kid. Cappuccino didn’t come from monks, it wasn’t from the Alex-minded queerism of Campari Boy, one that finally burst out with unashamed androgyny once Bowie had stardusted his own version of “A Clockwork Orange”; it flowed from an estate in Woking, the home of the homilist for the Mods. Cappuccino rode a Vespa.

Somewhere along the way, cappuccino acquired a chic, one removed from the insouciant coolness of an ace face in a mohair suit. Weller himself delved into the pretensions of the cappuccino life. The first outing of the Cappuccino Kid with The Style Council was unintentionally reflective of a wine-bar Thatcherism and was swiftly eschewed in favour of Red Wedge and the acerbic anger that had characterised The Jam. The onward march of cappuccino-ism, however, led to the faux-sophistication of Starbucks and Costa. And has led to the Café Cappuccino.

Puerto Pollensa now boasts a Cappuccino. Four euros, fifty. That’s all it costs for a cappuccino at Cappuccino. That’s the price for chic nowadays. There are few more appropriate symbols of how Mallorca has changed. What was a coffee-bar phenomenon of a new consumerist age of the 60s and 70s, a time of the first tourists descending en masse in Mallorca in search of cheap beer and spirits rather than a coffee, has now become a motif for the island’s coffee-table presentation and presumptions.

Just as the Mods adopted the espresso machine as an accessory to the suits and the Fred Perrys in cultivating an image, so cappuccino is now an accessory for the image-conscious tourist or resident; oh to be seen at a Cappuccino, even if it costs four, fifty for the privilege. And the image extends into its own musical symbolism. Cappuccino has its discs of “cool”, a bossa nova style mixed with understated jazz. Stan Getz for the neo-Mods of Mallorca who have been shown the alternative to the greasy spoon and the Grease tribute shows of a rival, greaser fraternity.

I can’t think of cappuccino without thinking of Campari Boy and the Cappuccino Kid. Of a bitters and soda and the bitter attacks on the drudgery of suburban life. It should now taste different somehow, a cappuccino drunk under a bright sky, the froth a smooth Mallorcan antidote to both British and coffee bitterness. The music should seem altogether more relaxing. But then Weller’s words, when he was winding up The Jam, have the potential to well up and catch in the throat. “The bitterest pill is hard to swallow.” Which is not to decry nor to criticise; cappuccino chic is the new vogue. Just to remember the days when cappuccino rode a Vespa.

* Café Cappuccino is at Sis Pins hotel in Puerto Pollensa.

 

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

I Know My Place: Magalluf

It was some time since I had been to Magalluf. Coming in along the coast from Palmanova, was to realise that it still has the power to, depending upon your perspective, inspire and overwhelm because of the towers of hotels and the claustrophobic tight roads with bars that seem to topple from the pavements, or to horrify, for much the same reasons.

Depends upon your perspective. This about sums it up. How you look upon Magalluf, how you look upon other resorts. The first time I went to Magalluf, I thought the place was mad, a modern bedlam that made no sense. The most powerful initial image I had was turning a corner and seeing Benny Hill in front of me. You still expect Fred Scuttle to appear at the doors, offering a salute and wearing a lascivious grin as scantily-clad 18 to 30-ers (the female variety) hare towards the beach in speeded-up motion. Like the rest of Magalluf, Benny Hill, if only by name, is completely and compulsively crackers.

But of course, Magalluf makes perfect sense. As with other resorts, its sense is one of being fit for purpose, this purpose being the one it has chosen for itself. It knows its place in the order of things. Yet, it is this order which deals it a death by a thousand cuts and criticisms, many of them delivered by those who barely know the place or who don’t know it all, and occasionally by what is unfortunately highlighted by the media.

Who among you remembers the sketch on “The Frost Report”? The one with John Cleese and the two Ronnies. “I look down on him.” “I look up to him.” “I know my place.” If Mallorca’s resorts were comedians from a 60s’ review show, then somewhere like Puerto Pollensa would be Cleese. Magalluf would be Ronnie Corbett. Alcúdia would probably be Ronnie Barker, essentially lower middle-class but with aspirations towards something greater.

But even this metaphor is inaccurate. It makes an assumption not only about the resorts but also about the people who go to them or indeed live in them. Just because you’re Ronnie Corbett and are endlessly saying “Sorry” doesn’t mean you are barred from Puerto Pollensa. A cat can look at a queen and all that. But there are plenty of cats knocking around the bins of Pollensa, and rather more queens in Magalluf. Probably. So, that’s another metaphor that doesn’t really work.

A metaphor, or more a simile really, is that Magalluf is like Blackpool. Unfortunately, for the ones who would make this comparison, so too is Alcúdia. Or at least, this is how the criticism goes. It is one of a kind of collective presumption of prejudice, a conspiratorial knowingness of condemnation. Oh well, we all know what Magalluf is like, when of course we don’t. We think we do, and it is Blackpool.

For all the Blackpool shorthand, strangely enough, neither Magalluf nor Alcúdia is like Blackpool. And what, pray, is meant to be wrong with Blackpool anyway? No, Magalluf is like Magalluf, even if Alcúdia is sometimes reckoned to be like Magalluf, but never the other way round. You see, that Ronnie Barker place in the scheme of things is not so completely inaccurate.

Recent events in Magalluf merely conspire to confirm what is believed. But stuff happens. What conclusions do we, for example, draw about Pollensa from the fact that an octogenarian allegedly deliberately drove over his wife or that another eighty-year-old, a female, was attacked in her home? I’m not sure that we draw any. With Magalluf, though, it’s a different matter.

The resorts of Mallorca are highly diverse. Their differences add to an overall diversity on the island, of landscapes, towns and of people. But one feels there is a desire to somehow standardise Mallorca and to do so along some idealistic lines. Where does Magalluf feature, for instance, in a coffee-table-style advertising for Mallorca? It doesn’t. And it doesn’t for the very good reason that it doesn’t conform to an image. Yet, by neglecting it, a major aspect of the island’s diversity, and its tourism, is shunted into the background, shunned even. It is a neglect that says to Magalluf, and it is not alone, that you should know your place.

Well, it does know its place. It’s there on the coast in Calvia, resplendent in its hotelmania, gloriously bar crazy. It may be nuts, but all power to it for being so.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Going Swimmingly: Mallorca’s pools

What is it with swimming-pools? Not swimming-pools and the mercifully only occasional outbreak of cryptosporidium or swimming-pools of all-inclusives and the legends that are the stories of defecatory deposits which are left in them. No, not these, but swimming-pools of the local authority variety.

The Rebecca Adlington gold award, were there such a thing, would long ago have been claimed by Puerto Pollensa’s indoor pool for its services to public amusement. See that roof. It’s on the wrong way round. Well, it isn’t now, but it once was. A splendidly pre-fabricated upside down cake. How about someone paying the electricity bill? Not we, said the pool’s operators, Algaillasport. Endesa were none too amused. Not that we should really care what Endesa think, but when they’re owed 20 grand or so, we know what they are going to think. Finally, an agreement was brokered with the town hall, and the pool did not close once more, as it has been prone to since it first opened.

Joining Puerto Pollensa on the winner’s rostrum and clutching its own medal, we now have Alcúdia’s swimming-pool. For five years since it opened, relationships between the operator, Gesport Balear, and the town hall haven’t always gone swimmingly. Now, they’ve got a bad case of cramp in the deep end and are foundering. And why? It’ll be electricity again, or the cost of heating the pool to be more accurate. We’re switching off the boiler, say Gesport, unless we get some 300 grand. The town hall isn’t prepared to play water polo and has taken its ball home. No heating, no swimming, unless you’re mad.

Oh that the two northern rival towns were isolated examples of the curious swimming-pool management art of Mallorca, but they are not. Santa Margalida, just down the bay from Alcúdia, has been doing its best to claim the gold medal. Keeping itself closed for a couple of years and then still managing to leak itself. Not to be outdone, Inca came roaring along in the final stretch with its over-budget of 600,000 euros, a vigorous butterfly of profligacy to beat off the more sedate breaststroke of Alcúdia’s lost thousands.

When the plunge was taken to improve the island’s health and build proper swimming-pools in various of Mallorca’s municipalities, there would appear to have been less than sufficient attention paid to how they would actually operate. All very good it may be in theory, but the idea of contracting-out has hardly been a great success; indeed it has been about as unsuccessful as some of the actual building.

And how successful have the pools been in terms of their usage? Doubtless, there are statistics to prove that they have been, as there always are statistics, but they’ve tried hard for them to not be. Alcúdia again …

Not long after it opened, a local British woman, who speaks perfectly serviceable Spanish, went along to the pool and asked for a list of services and prices. It was in Catalan. Did they not have a list in Castilian? She received short shrift for having the temerity to suggest that they might. How long had she been living here and why couldn’t she speak Catalan? Yep, you can use the swimming-pool, so long as you pass a language test.

I once suggested to the pool’s director that they could do with letting more people know of its existence. Publicity perhaps. For tourists maybe. I think I was speaking a different language. It was Spanish admittedly. But then when there is publicity, it is of a singularly strange variety. When Puerto Pollensa’s pool announced its re-opening, now that the roof was as a roof should be, i.e. the right way round, there was a poster of splashy-happy kiddies. Nothing wrong in attracting children to the pool, but as it was a summery outdoor scene and the indoor pool was re-opening in March, the message didn’t quite fit. Nor did it with the fact that the municipal pools are, oddly enough, meant for swimming and not cavorting around on giant rubber ducks.

No, if you want fun in water, you can go in the sea or to a waterpark. Leave the municipal pools to the geriatric speedo set with their goggles and their morning’s twenty lengths. Yes, you can have fun at a waterpark, so long as you don’t try and take your own water in, to one particular waterpark at any rate. Enjoy being searched and having your bottle taken off you. I pointed out to the waterpark’s director that the internet was incandescent with rage at the practice, as indeed were real-life tourists in the vicinity. Has it stopped? Will it have stopped this summer? It damn well should have.

Swimming and Mallorca should be somehow synonymous, but they are not because ways are found to prevent this being so. Best perhaps to forget the pools and just head to the sea. But then there are always the jellyfish. Still, no one has to worry about switching the boiler on or getting the roof on the right way.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Where A Hole Don’t Belong

Something distinctly odd has occurred in Puerto Pollensa. The town hall has sent some chaps along to talk to the residents and to get their views as to where it should make some holes. Having spent the entire period of its current administration digging a hole for itself, the town hall has sought to repair the damage by digging some more holes, but filling them with the opinions of the locals. Spring and elections are in the air, so is the rarity of consultation.

So anyway, these holes. Where to put them, that’s the question. And what, you may well ask, will go into these holes? Rubbish. Rubbish containers. In an act of catch-up, Pollensa is following the lead of its neighbour Alcúdia, where there exists a town hall which does resemble one that knows what it is doing, and making less unsightly the unsightly. But things are never straightforward. “Oi, mate, you can’t put a hole here. You’ll have to put it over there. You can’t put a hole where a hole don’t belong.”

All good consultative stuff, but Pollensa town hall would not be Pollensa town hall if it weren’t putting holes where holes certainly don’t belong and full of stuff that belongs as far away as possible from the town. The remains of the beetle-stricken palm trees. Still not having quite cottoned on to the fact that these remains should be taken away and shoved in some ruddy great ovens, the town hall is re-enacting the Somme by digging trenches and presiding over the burial of fallen palms. Ashes to ashes. Well no, because it hasn’t burnt them. Though some it did, in the fields, which it shouldn’t have done.

There is now a part of Pollensa which has been declared a biological contamination site. The agit-propagandists of Pollensa who have been taking the town hall to task over its efforts to stem the spread of the beetle had already started referring to Puerto Pollensa as “ground zero”. The town hall seems to be taking them at their word and has created its own. Here’s something new and innovative for this season’s tourists. Spray them with decontaminant as they enter and leave the resort, or issue them with space suits and tell them to stay indoors with the shutters firmly shut. Do not, under any circumstance, venture out! Curfews are in place!

But getting back to the other holes, the ones for the rubbish, the great works to create these holes and various other ones that are needed to upgrade water supplies and what have you are now about underway. With the usual great sense of timing, edging towards the season, holes, any number of them, will appear. I read the news today, 4,000 holes in Puerto Pollensa.

“How long are all these holes going to take, mate?” “Hmm, can’t say. Three, four months.” “Er, won’t this take us into the tourist season?” “Emm, could do.” “But aren’t you supposed to stop building work when the season starts?” “Er, are we?”

Great stuff, let’s hope that come 1 May, the hole-makers will down tools, swap their workmen bibs for waiters’ white and black, and leave all the holes where the holes don’t belong. Great for tourists. Mind you, not that it will matter, because they’ll all be shut away in their space suits and drinking overpriced coffees through straws.

There is quite some discussion down Puerto Pollensa way as to what actually these holes are going to produce in the resort’s church (aka market) square. The town hall had shown the plans, again in an act of hitherto-unknown communication, but there was one thing missing. It didn’t say what one particular hole will be for, or what it should be in an ideal world of fantasy.

It will be mayor Cerdà’s gift. His very own “Clochemerle”. Le Pissoir Cerdà. The pièce de résistance of all the satire that his town hall has ushered forth. What does any small town need? Of course, a public urinal. Right in the middle of the square. This’ll put one up the noses of those in Alcúdia who reckon it’s an altogether better-run authority. Alcúdia won’t have one of its own. But as with Clochemerle, jealous “alcudiencs” will arrive one night and blow it up. Riots will ensue, great passions will be aroused, until… . Until there is an almighty great thunderstorm that will cool everyone down. And then we’ll know why all the holes. Rain.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pollensa’s Plague: Its town hall

A couple of days after last June’s demonstration against the alleged neglect of Puerto Pollensa by the town hall, a restaurant owner who had been on the march said to me that Pollensa was the worst town hall in Mallorca. It was a theme that was revisited when I spoke the other day to someone from the port who has been active in attempting to get improvements from the “ayuntamiento” for some years. Despite my suggestion that Muro town hall, with one ex-mayor now banged up for 12 months for vote-rigging and another disqualified from office for ten years, might deserve some prominence in the dishonourable roll call of local authorities, he insisted that Pollensa remains the leader.

The current administration in Pollensa has, since being elected and appointed in 2007, stumbled from one crisis to another, largely to do with its management (such as it has been) of Puerto Pollensa. So great is the divide between the port and the town hall that when a crisis comes along for which it (the town hall) might be deserving of some sympathy, it manages instead to further alienate the port’s residents, to the extent of a “denuncia” being lodged with the Guardia Civil.

An ecological disaster is occurring in Puerto Pollensa. This may sound like an exaggeration, but the impact of the loss of landscape and visual charm can be dubbed thus. Residents and tourists alike want, demand even, the attractiveness of the natural world, but when it is being killed off as rapidly as it is, then one has to wonder as to the harm that may be caused to economic life by the destruction of palm trees.

Puerto Pollensa has been hugely affected by the actions of the “picudo rojo”. The weevil’s appetite for palms is such that in one avenue alone over one hundred palms, all the palms in the avenue, have been infested. The sympathy that the town hall might have had stems from the fact that the control or even the elimination of the weevil is far from straightforward. The mayor has suggested that little can be done. Up to a point he is right, but this acceptance has merely highlighted the fact that the town hall’s own attempts at control have been poor, to the point of incompetence. It has managed to exacerbate the situation and to make Puerto Pollensa the “epicentre” of the beetle “plague” which has now spread to neighbouring towns.

The charges levelled against the town hall’s competence in respect of the palm beetle go back some time. In 2008 the delegate for the port was told that palm trees in the Gotmar area were showing signs of being destroyed. She said there was nothing wrong with them and so nothing was done. Now you have a situation in which the actions of the town hall in trying to stem the problem have resulted in the denuncia made to Seprona, the Guardia’s environmental investigation unit, and the call for the head of the town’s services department, Martí Ochogavia, to be sacked.

What has helped to spread the beetle has been the way in which the town hall, rather than sending infested trees that have been cut down away for incineration (as it should have done), has been packing them in plastic and dumping them in the Llenaire area of the port. This has created a breeding ground for the beetle which has then escaped from what has been punctured plastic. When the town hall decided it would set fire to the cut-down trees – in open fields – this merely gave the beetle a fright and off it flew. It is possible for the weevil to travel up to four kilometres in one go; hence it has spread and colonised trees outside of the port. And there is the potential for even greater damage, one of the beetle skipping species of palms and infesting those not currently at risk, including the “palmito”, the one tree that is native to Mallorca.

Residents in the port hold Ochogavia responsible. And he has form, such as with the accusation that was reported widely some time ago of nepotism in his having granted a relative’s company the contract for street lighting. There is now also a question as to what has happened to the budget, 100,000 euros, that was set aside to tackle the palm beetle. Pollensa’s mayor, Joan Cerdà, has said that there needs to be more financial assistance from the regional government, and has pointed to the cost of arranging for a crane, a gardener and labourers to cope with just one tree. Nevertheless, residents are keen to know how the budget has actually been spent.

The town hall administration, with elections looming, seems to have been stung into action. The new street-cleaning operation, at a cost of 800,000 euros per annum and with a machine dedicated to cleaning Puerto Pollensa’s streets, was unveiled before Christmas. The town hall has also announced two projects in the port – worth 600,000 euros in total – for upgrading waste and water pipes and for placing rubbish containers underground. But this might all be a bit late.

The disaster of the palm beetle is something of a metaphor for a different type of disaster – what the residents of Puerto Pollensa see as the disastrous management of the port by the town hall. For the administration and for Sr. Ochogavia, a plague on both their houses.

* At the “pleno” at Pollensa town hall tonight (27 January), there will be a call for Sr. Ochogavia’s dismissal.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.