Our Man In … : Resorts’ delegates

Puerto Alcúdia has now got itself a delegate. Lucky old Puerto Alcúdia. The post-election re-organisation at Alcúdia town hall has deemed a delegate to be necessary, when previously it hadn’t been. Does the port need a delegate? Maybe it does, but it has done well enough up until now without one.

Having delegates for towns’ coastal resorts hasn’t exactly been a great success elsewhere. They have been viewed as being toothless or simply lackeys of the mayor. This was the case in Can Picafort, for example, while in Puerto Pollensa the ex-delegate was considered, not to put too fine a point on it, to be a joke. The lack of respect that Francisca Ramon commanded came to a head when she addressed demonstrators in June last year. The volley of abuse that came back made it clear that she was thought to be “stupid”.

The delegates for the resorts are at least a recognition by town halls that their resorts do have specific needs. Unfortunately, what has happened is that the very existence of delegates has raised expectations that they might actually do something, when they are hamstrung by having no real authority or responsibility. In Puerto Pollensa the call has long been made for responsibility and also for a separate budget.

The logic of such a call is that the resorts should become their own administrative units. Because of the specific needs, there would be some sense to this, but any sense soon evaporates when you consider the added bureaucracy, costs and potential for duplication.

Were the electoral system to be such that councillors were voted in on the basis of wards, then there would automatically be voices for different parts of a municipality, but this is not how it works. The creation of delegates for the main resorts reflects the absence of such a mechanism, but it is also discriminatory. In Alcúdia, for example, what about Barcarès, Alcanada and Bonaire? Don’t they count?

The lack of geographical representation exacerbates discontent, such as that in Santa Margalida. Son Serra de Marina lies some seven kilometres away from Can Picafort and even further away from the town. Residents have complained that the village has been all but abandoned, and there have been examples – inadequate police presence, the deplorable state of the sports centre – which don’t help to refute their complaints.

At a more general level, there is an issue as to what councillors are responsible for. Depending on its size of population, each town hall is obliged to take care of certain services. These obligations are not mirrored by what councillors are charged with.

Up to a point this is reasonable enough. The towns have a wider responsibility for general welfare than those stipulated by law. There is no legal requirement, for instance, to take responsibility for tourism, but it would be distinctly odd if they didn’t.

Responsibilities such as those for public works and maintenance are clear enough, but some are less so, while the way in which these other responsibilities are jumbled together to form an individual councillor’s portfolio leads you to wonder what process is ever used for arriving at what can seem contradictory.

In Muro, for instance, there is a councillor in charge of education and culture and the town’s music band. Another looks after environment, youth activities, radio and television (what television!?) and transport. Yet another oversees sport, the police and traffic, and relations with the church. Go through this little lot, and there isn’t always a pattern. Is radio and television not culture? Might sport be a youth activity?Would traffic and transport not have some common ground? Indeed, what is meant by transport anyway? School buses? Public transport is not a responsibility of small authorities such as Muro.

It is not as if the responsibilities mirror those higher up the political administration food chain. Regional government has combined agriculture with environment. In Muro agriculture is lumped in with tourism. In Alcudia there is still responsibility for language policy, the regional government having scrapped a specific directorate for it. But what is most evident from the Muro portfolios is what isn’t evident. Unless the mayor has taken on personal responsibility for just about everything the town is really meant to look after – services, building works, finance etc. – and has a particularly hard-working governing commission, then no one appears to be in charge.

You are left with an impression, therefore, that town halls find things for councillors to do. Some are important, some aren’t. But where they all fall down is in the fact that their chief generators of income and employment, the resorts, get, at best, a delegate and not a councillor with real clout.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

In Praise Of Naffness

If you are going to build a new gallery and arts centre, where would you put it? On a shortlist of towns in England, you would probably not have Margate at the top of it. Yet this is where the Turner Contemporary has pitched up.

The fact that Joseph Mallord William Turner spent a couple of years at school in Margate has been enough to have the town honoured by his heritage. There is something of the clutching of straw paint brushes when it comes to the connections between ancients of the arts and where they once had a garret or watered for the season. The Turner connection is like the clutching of author’s pen that has been dallied with in Puerto Pollensa. Simply because Agatha Christie stayed there and wrote a thrillerette has been enough to suggest the old trout as the “face” of the resort, an idea that mercifully seems to have been forgotten about. More spectacularly spurious has of course been Chopin, despite his short-lived, tubercular vituperation of Valldemossa.

I confess that it is many years since I have been to Margate. But I can remind myself as to what it was like at the time that I did go there. In Paul Theroux’s at-times savage “The Kingdom By The Sea”, written in the early 1980s, he said of Margate that it “had never been fashionable; it had never even been nice”. Like many an English seaside town which has always been either totally or partially naff, Margate was always one of the finer examples.

This is not, however, to seek to defame Margate or naffness as a whole. Quite the opposite.

Naffness comes in different forms. In general, it can be considered as lacking in taste or as unfashionable, uncool or unlovely. Mallorca, for years, cultivated a reputation for naffness. If you wanted a synonym for the touristic naff, then you sought no further than the M-island word: Madge-orca. Yet, it was also always the obverse; it was fashionable, cool and lovely: My-orca.

Nevertheless, the prevailing image was summed up by Madge-orca. At some point, however, it was as if the island suddenly developed a Turner Contemporary and My-orca assumed a position of cool dominance. Yet nothing fundamentally changed. To put the transformation down purely to marketing would be too simple, and the curiosity as to quite how it happened remains, because Mallorca remains an island of contradiction.

While Margate may now acquire for itself a makeover of artiness, it will retain its essential naffness, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t or indeed should seek to dispense with it. The reason why it shouldn’t is that naffness is engrained into its very being. Its culture, like other English seaside towns, is what gives it its appeal.

Mallorca, despite its own makeover, retains its enclaves of naffness. They are the contradiction with the sophistication and tradition that reside elsewhere. We all know where they are to be found. Alcúdia’s Mile, parts of Magalluf, Arenal and elsewhere. They are all museum pieces to an extent, but such a description disguises their enduring vitality, and their naffness is one that is due, in no small part, to an importing of culture, akin to but not the same as that which has long found expression in a seaside town. While Mallorca seeks to proclaim a distant cultural heritage, it also has a more modern one, that of Del Boy import-export, with bars that reverberate with the endless exclamations of “you plonker, Rodney” or with the Schlagermusik of the Biergarten.

And to deny this would be a huge mistake. Calling somewhere naff may sound derogatory, but, and this may come as a surprise, naff is what a lot of people like. The unfashionableness of old-style entertainment, the lack of taste of the karaoke or the pub, the sheer silliness of being on holiday are what you get from some resorts. And this is just how people want them to be.

Mallorca might wish to go further in turning itself into one giant Turner Contemporary and one Turner Contemporary alone, but it shouldn’t. The contradiction of the island should remain, and thank goodness for this, for otherwise it would be a case of forgetting what put Madge into Majorca rather than the Mallord into Mallorca.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Anywhere In The World: Mallorcan identity

The failure of the Playa de Palma regeneration plan has brought with it much soul-searching and navel-gazing. One of those who has been scrutinising her belly has been the president of the Council of Mallorca, Francina Armengol. While she believed that much of the plan was “excellent”, she also felt that it had to be one which maintained a Mallorcan identity and was not therefore one that could have been a project anywhere in the world.

While the consortium overseeing the plan disputed her suggestion that it would not have had at least a “Mediterranean” flavour, the very mention of a Mallorcan identity highlights an issue which dogs much of the thinking surrounding Mallorca’s tourism and its future. It is an issue for which there is clear blue water in the seas off the Playa de Palma and a clear line in the sand of the beach itself – those between the idealists and the pragmatists. It is an issue also that means little to most of Mallorca’s tourists for whom Mallorca means, at best, a largely undefined and nebulous concept of Spain or for whom it means nothing other than a place of sun and beach – anywhere in the world, if you like.

What is this identity to which Armengol refers? If it is architectural, then it should not be beyond the wit of architects to conceive a resort in a Mallorcan style, whatever this actually is. But the architects have not always had a sympathetic Mallorcan design to the forefront of their plans when coming up with much recent construction of whatever sort – housing, hotels or commercial. Anywhere in the world? Yes, it might well be.

In the sixties, Mallorca and Spain willingly took the shilling of foreign exchange that was necessary to propel the country out of backwardness. It came in the form of mass tourism and of course at a cost. The rag-bag construction of many resorts that followed destroyed whatever identity there might once have been. Playa de Palma, much of Calvia and other resorts, such as Alcúdia and Can Picafort, were built for purpose rather than for the comfort of a mythical Mallorcan identity, one that hardly impinged upon the thought processes of planners and even less on those of tourists who were off to sunny Spain; it mattered not the slightest that they were going to an island off the mainland. And for most tourists, nothing has really changed.

A couple of years ago I wrote a series of articles on “Spanishness” as it applies to Mallorca. The starting-point for doing so was the type of question it is not uncommon to come across on the internet; the type which goes along the lines of is such-or-such a resort “Spanish”. And note that it is “Spanish”; it is never “Mallorcan”.

The question is hard to answer as it is most unlikely that the ones asking the question really have a conception themselves as to what “Spanish” entails, let alone Mallorcan. Few resorts can lay claim to Spanishness; they could indeed be anywhere in the world. There are exceptions, but even these are questionable. Take Puerto Pollensa for example. It hasn’t suffered the same brutalism as other resorts and has maintained, so it is said, some of that Mallorcan identity. But what actually is it? Its most talked-about visual feature is the pinewalk. Are we saying that a Mallorcan identity can be symbolised by a pine tree? Perhaps we are.

In the same way as tourists might struggle to describe a Mallorcan identity, so also, I would suggest, would the idealists such as Sra. Armengol. My guess is that what she and others have in mind is the re-creation of the “pueblos” by the sea. But it is only a guess, because it is not elucidated.

Less unclear is the idealist retreat into other aspects of this identity. Gastronomy, for instance. In an ideal Mallorcan tourism world, all tourists would be tucking into tumbet or arroz brut. But they don’t. Not in the major resorts at any rate. Take a walk along Alcúdia’s Mile and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything that isn’t pizza or grill. International. Anywhere in the world.

The pragmatic alternative is the one that has grown up since the ’60s. Errors there most certainly were when the resorts were put together, but resorts, fundamentally, are places built for purpose and which have to be fit for purpose to serve their masters from overseas. Identity, even were it to be defined, is secondary, as it always has been. There is a standardisation in resorts, one that conforms to a more internationalist identity. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding more recent architectual abominations, a revision for resorts, given current-day appreciation of greater design sympathy, need not preclude something that is more discernibly Mallorcan or Spanish. Which is why Playa de Palma is likely to be a huge missed opportunity and which is why it should have spawned regeneration in other resorts. Or am I just being idealistic?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The October Paradox

October is a paradoxical month. Lacking quite the same “fall” as Britain or the same striking changes in colours of the landscape, it is easy – when the sun shines on a Mallorcan October – to believe that it is still summer. But its heat has a ghostly presence. The increasing dampness makes it morbidly vaporous: nature’s equivalent of the spectres escaping from a butane-fired burner or from a paraffin heater of distant memory. If heat can be allocated a colour, that of a Mallorcan October is a pinky-blue.

October is a month of apparitions on the beach, the ghosts of summer fading into the memory. If September is the sad month, one of the winding-down of summer, it is, nevertheless, and from the middle of the month certainly, far enough away from the season’s end for a period the length of a school summer holiday to still stretch ahead and console us with the knowledge that summer has life left in it. But in October, there is the incongruity of the dawn and twilight of finality. There is nothing beyond October.

Before the season proper starts in May, April is the month of the phoney season, the warm-up for what is to come. October is the warm-down. It is the month of the forsaking season, the giving-up month, in more than one sense. It is the giving-up on summer and, for some, the giving-up on everything – the abandonment month. The final weekend sees the clocks going back, but there is no turning the clock back on a business fading as surely as the sun does. Ever more for sale and for rent signs appear. These signs conspire, together with the gradual covering-up of glass frontages with whitewash or newspaper and the wrapping-up in plastic of lamps and lights, in making the resorts slowly wither away for another year, taking some businesses with them – for all time.

The remains, as October proceeds and gradually imposes its cruel decomposition, are skeletal resorts. They are shaking bones and skulls with rictus grins which mock tourists with a sinisterness of closure as ominous as the gathering clouds that bring the fierce storms of late summer. And on All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day at the start of November, the days of the dead represent the final passing of summer into its afterlife and the resorts into their clichéd state of the ghost town.

October is the cruel month, but not completely. Though its storms can bring turmoil, it can also bring tranquility. The end of the season comes ever closer, the days are counted down. A growing sense or anticipation of relaxation takes hold. It can be a cruel month, but it can also be sublime through the elated spirits of knowing that the sentence of summer’s hard labour has been served. Sublime also in a stillness, when the storms don’t blow. If the landscape doesn’t alter that greatly, the seascape can. Hovering above the calmness of a bay, let’s say Pollensa’s, is a haze that is the product of the vapour of October warmth. It forms an eerie range of colorific monotones, a blanket and shroud of greys and silvers for the sea and hills. If it is appropriately deathly, it is benignly so, the kindly smothering of our last few days. It has the comfort of strangeness.

For this is what October is. A strange month that is between states. From life to no life. And from summer to winter, because of the strange division of the Mallorcan seasons into two semesters, one that denies October its right to be what it is – autumn. The paradox month; not really one thing and not really another.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.