Going To Waste (25 November)

Between the two town halls of Alcúdia and Sa Pobla, the company Tirme, which provides rubbish-treatment services on Mallorca, is owed in the region of 4.6 million euros. The amount is divided roughly evenly between the two administrations, a difference lying with how much interest they both owe (Alcúdia more than Sa Pobla).

This is not the first time that Tirme has gone in pursuit of outstanding debts from town halls. At the end of May, Inca got a demand for not far off two million. Just one strange aspect of the non-payments is that they relate to the period from 2008, in the case of Alcúdia, and from 2009 where Sa Pobla is concerned. How many other town halls are similarly in debt to Tirme? And if there are others, but even if not, how does a company operate when it is not being paid such vast sums?

Alcúdia and Sa Pobla are both negotiating payment terms, and the respective administrations are of course blaming the previous administrations. Which seems fair enough, but, just as one wonders how Tirme copes with not being paid, one wonders how it is that town halls can apparently just not bother paying. Sa Pobla is also in for about 1.35 million to three other service providers, including the rubbish collectors.

One gets the impression that the whole business world in Mallorca – that which has anything to do with the town halls or other public bodies – is surviving on the promise that they might one day actually get paid. But promises don’t amount to a great deal and they certainly don’t amount to cash flow or reassurances to lenders, if they are applicable.

Tirme, though, isn’t quite like other businesses. Most would find 4.6 million plus the couple of million from Inca and whatever else might be outstanding rather too much debt to bear. Tirme doesn’t. Or doesn’t appear to. This may be because of who owns it – Endesa, Iberdrola, Urbaser and FCC. Tirme is also a monopoly, and its concession for waste treatment lasts until 2041.

Tirme’s monopoly position is understandable in that its operations do demand heavy investment, so it has every right to be able to expect to have a period in which it can make a return on its investment. But not everyone is happy with this monopoly nor with how Tirme prioritises its investment and its operations.

A key part of Tirme’s remit is recycling. Mention the R word and you can be sure that one organisation will prick its ears up: GOB, the environmental pressure group. In August, GOB issued a statement attacking Tirme for what it claimed was the company’s concentration on incineration as opposed to recycling. GOB maintained that recycling plants were operating well below capacity, while the ovens were going full pelt in optimising as swiftly as possible the investment on incinerators at the Son Reus plant in Palma. Moreover, reckoned GOB, the incineration was allowing for the generation of electricity that was being commercialised.

GOB has accused Tirme of engaging in misleading marketing where its operations are concerned and has accused the Council of Mallorca, which, and truly bizarrely, has managed to extract a reduction in the cost of waste treatment for 2012 of slightly less than two centimos, of complicity.

But then, the story of waste management and treatment is far from straightforward; you wouldn’t expect it to be, because nothing ever is in Mallorca.

In January this year, the anti-corruption prosecutors embarked upon the so-called “Operación Cloaca”. This had to with allegations of false accounting centred on waste management operations sanctioned by the Council of Mallorca. Of those detained at the time, and I would make it perfectly clear that Tirme was not implicated in the Cloaca investigation, was an executive with FCC-Lumsa, one of the companies with a concession for recycling collection; FCC, which is a shareholder in Tirme.

Cloaca highlighted the dual system of waste collection (door to door as well as from green points) which had resulted in effect in payment for recycling doubling. Cloaca also revealed that town halls had been pressurised by an individual at the Council of Mallorca into adopting this dual system.

What Cloaca also highlighted was the sheer complexity of arrangements for waste management on Mallorca. Perhaps town halls simply don’t understand what it is they are meant to be paying for. Now, though, Alcúdia and Sa Pobla accept that they have to pay Tirme. But you wonder how many other town halls owe the company and whether the reason for non-payment has been more than just an inability to pay.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Mayoral Wonga

How much should a mayor be paid do you suppose? To answer the question you have to know what he or she does exactly, which admittedly isn’t easy to get a handle on. A mayor does a lot of signing of things, puts in any number of appearances around and about, shakes a fair number of hands, chairs a few meetings, gets his or her photo taken pretty much every day.

There is a bit more to it than this and the mayor, more or less, is responsible for however many lives there are on his or her manor. It might be said, therefore, that a mayor should command a decent pay packet.

The question as to the mayoral salary has become an issue in Sa Pobla. Here the new mayor, Gabriel Serra, admitted a while back that the town hall was to, all intents and purposes, bust. Against this background and a further admission that the town hall will invest in no building works at all other than to perform urgent maintenance, the opposition’s claim in early July that the mayor was going to be trousering nearly 4,400 euros a month did cause a slight rumpus. Assuming this entails 14 monthly payments, as is the wont locally, then Serra was due to be on over 60 grand a year.

Sa Pobla, it might be noted, is a smaller municipality than its neighbour Alcúdia, a tourism town where the town hall and therefore the mayor’s remit is somewhat greater than a place that exists for little more than agriculture. The lady mayor of Alcúdia, Coloma Terrasa, will receive a salary the same as her predecessor – 2,100 euros net per month. On the face of it, there is something of a discrepancy with what Serra was said to have been going to be earning.

Said to be, because Serra has published his pay slip. It shows he’s getting 2,137 euros net, quite a deal less than the opposition had claimed, and pretty much identical to the salary of Alcúdia’s mayor. How the amount has come down by 50%, assuming it was ever intended to be nearly 4,400, one doesn’t quite know, but down it has indeed come.

In Pollensa the mayor is getting 2,914 euros a month gross, which puts his take-home at roughly the same as Serra’s. So the mayors of the three towns are now all making the same as each other; gross salaries, amended to take account of the two extra months in the year, of something over 40 grand.

Is this a fair amount? Is it too much, or is it too low? Who knows?

A full-time post in public service, and in the cases of Alcúdia, Pollensa and Sa Pobla, this means running towns with 19,000, 17,000 and 13,000 people respectively, should be reasonably well paid, especially if it is the only source of income. But this isn’t necessarily the case of course. Many a town hall official, mayor or otherwise, tends to have business interests as well. A prime example was Muro’s one-time mayor, Miguel Ramis. His interests? Well, there was the small matter of the Grupotel chain that he founded.

Ultimately, whether a mayor is worth his or her salary cheque depends on how well he or she performs, and performance can mean whatever you want it to, especially when the mayoral office is a political appointment and can count on the support of the relevant party (or parties) to ensure that performance is spun as being effective.

Yet the town halls are in financial crisis, not solely due to current economic hard times. Their tardiness in making payments to suppliers is the stuff of legend, and pre-dates economic crisis. But this should surely be a key measure of how well a town hall is being run or not. Alcúdia and Pollensa, for example, have been shown to typically take up to six months to make payments; you will hear of examples where payment has been much later (if at all).

It is when companies are faced with cash-flow crises of their own, thanks in no small part to being unpaid by municipalities, that one can understand there being some disquiet as to salaries that are paid to mayors, and not just to mayors. Full-time officials other than a mayor can expect to receive 1,800 euros per month net. And then you have the costs of town halls’ personnel, which have gone through the roof since the start of the century.

A mayor can in theory be held to account. But widespread concerns exist as to a lack of transparency at town halls. Mayors, and other officials, should be made to show that they earn their money. It’s a performance age, but performance as a measure has been slow to catch on in Mallorcan local government. The town halls and the mayors need to publish what they are doing, when and why they are doing whatever it is they are doing, and what they expect the results to be. Then at least we might be able to judge whether they are worth the money. And you never know, maybe this might show that they are worth more.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Free For All: Mallorca and the arts

If you caught Kenny Garrett and his quartet in Sa Pobla earlier this week or will be rocking up at Pollensa’s Sant Domingo cloister to get a bit of the Chamber Orchestra of the National Theatre of Prague tomorrow, then I hope you have made and will make the most of them. Both the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival and the Pollensa International Music Festival could become dodos of Mallorca’s arts world. Extinct.

The Pollensa festival very nearly didn’t happen this year. It did thanks to a sofa-thon at the tourism ministry. Carlos Delgado had his people scrambling around on the ministry settees, hunting for any loose euros that had fallen down the backs, and they came up with a couple of hundred thousand in the nick of time. The mountain of coins duly deposited in the Sant Domingo cloister, the sound of their jangling competed with an ominous bass, the noise of the ministry saying we’ve helped you out this time, but don’t expect us to in future.

The ministry will announce next week which events have passed a test that will guarantee funding from a reserve pot that isn’t exactly overflowing. 600 grand is up for grabs for various arts festivals, but not all might qualify. As important is what happens to them down the line. For some the end of the line may well have been reached, and this includes the Sa Pobla Jazz and Pollensa festivals.

Arts funding is often at the bottom of the public spending food chain, though in Mallorca it has seemed to occupy a rather higher level. In part, this has been because the arts are seen as a “good thing” rather than there being any real attempt to quantify benefits. But this is the nature of the beast. Arts contribute to a general welfare, a general quality of life; they shouldn’t always be the target of bean-counters. The attitude has not been wrong, far from it, but current circumstances have exposed the vulnerable sustainability of the arts, Mallorcan style.

Certain judgements do occasionally have to be made. In the case of the Sa Pobla Jazz Festival, it hasn’t simply been a case of putting on some free concerts. There are also the workshops that take place each year, so there is a music educational element to the festival as well. But to come to the free concerts, for whose benefit really are they?

The concerts attract a “nice” Jazz Club crowd (of the type satirised by John Thomson’s Louis Balfour character in “The Fast Show”), but they also attract the locals. Nothing wrong with this, the concerts are after all taking place in their town. However, a thing with jazz is that it is an acquired taste. Some of it can be a dreadful racket. Jazz is most certainly not Mallorcan folk music or the direness of the “orchestras” that get dragged onto the stages of Mallorca’s fiestas and churn out kitsch cabaret versions of sixties’ tunes; the sort of act that might once have been on the under card at Bournemouth’s Winter Gardens below Norman Vaughan, the Rockin’ Berries and Mrs. Mills. They’re rubbish, but the Mallorcan oldsters seem to like them.

Put a McCoy Tyner thumping a piano, a Kenny Garrett wailing on a sax in front of an old Sa Pobla farmer who has pitched up with his missus along with their picnic of potato fritters, trempó and vino, and what exactly does the old farmer make of them? Not a lot probably, but it’s free.

I might be doing old Sa Pobla farmers a disservice. Perhaps they are all avid jazz enthusiasts who have vast collections of Blue Note and ECM discs stashed in an outhouse, but I somewhat doubt it.

Free bring free, and free having been free for several years in Sa Pobla creates an expectation that free it will always be. Free is wonderful, and the provision of free entertainment in Mallorca has been laudable. It has enhanced the general quality of life. It would be sad for it to no longer be free, but the alternative has to be considered.

The problem is that charging probably wouldn’t cover costs. It doesn’t in Pollensa. You can fork out up to 45 euros for a concert during the music festival, but the festival still needs huge amounts of state funding. The Sant Domingo cloister is not exactly Wembley Stadium; it’s tiny in terms of what it can generate through ticket sales.

We are, I’m afraid, going to have to accept that some of the cherished and sometimes superb free arts in Mallorca are likely to disappear. Unless, that is, they sell their soul to the corporate shilling of sponsorship. Were it available.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Lead Us Not Into Temptation

What every girl dreams. If she lives in Santa Margalida. At the weekend, Francisca Oliver Fornés was chosen to be La Beata, the saint Catalina Thomàs. Requirements for being selected include having participated as an attendant in previous Beata ceremonies, being church-going, single and eighteen. To be nominated as La Beata is quite some honour. The fiesta in September is often referred to as Mallorca’s most traditional, La Beata herself acting out the refusal to be tempted by the devil.

Single, eighteen, not necessarily church-going and not necessarily inclined to turn down temptation. The contrast between a weekend ceremony to select the current-day embodiment of a saint and a weekend ceremony of unsaintliness is stark. At a similar time to Francisca’s selection, the Districte 54 party in Sa Pobla was rumbling. The mayor of Sa Pobla has been forced to apologise to the people of the town. Mess, noise, lack of respect, excessive drinking. What on earth had he expected?

The mayor had wanted the party reinstated as part of the town’s fiestas. It was largely his doing that it took place this year. It was he who had criticised the previous administration for not staging it last year. It was he who said that it brought economic benefits and a load of people from across the island.

He was not wrong in respect of the numbers attending. But the numbers, as with other fiesta parties, are swelled by those who, thanks to social networks, know full well that there’s to be a botellón. The street-drinking parties are happening everywhere. Organised through Facebook and what have you, they are creating attendances at the parties so large that villages and towns cannot cope. They are being overwhelmed by people, by drunkenness and violence. I ask again: what on earth had the mayor expected?

Districte 54, more than most of the parties, is a magnet for trouble. It’s why it was banned last year. Nevertheless, the town decided to go ahead with it again, with the result that the police had to respond to numerous complaints and the medical services were needed to treat those who were totally off their faces.

Mayor Serra says that there will not be a repetition; that if the party happens again, it won’t take place slap bang in the centre of the town. It might find a convenient finca somewhere in the countryside, which is what they have done in Maria de la Salut, and the parties there pass off without much incident.

Whether it happens again or not, the trouble at Districte 54 is further evidence of the degree to which the fiesta parties have grown in size to the point at which they are out of control. The wishes of town halls to limit street drinking botellóns, as in Pollensa, are not being met because the social networks enable people to find ways around whatever controls might be put in place. The town halls seem to have failed utterly to comprehend how modern communications work.

The traditional Mallorcan fiesta has broken down and has been taken over by DJs and cheap booze. And this breakdown in tradition isn’t simply one that can be styled as being down to the generation gap. There is a division also within generations. Which is what Francisca represents. While she was being named Santa Margalida’s Beata, the Santa Margalida herself was being defiled in Sa Pobla; Districte 54 was part of the Santa Margalida festivities.

The coincidence of this is one thing; the contrast another. Over one weekend in July, two separate happenings highlighted the way in which Mallorcan youth has split. The requirement for a Beata aspirant to demonstrate her good Catholic credentials seems almost quaint now. The church has lost much meaning for and support among the younger generation.

If you had to choose between the two, you would opt for Districte 54 and its attendant troubles as being more representative of Mallorcan youth than Francisca and La Beata. And if you do opt so, it kills, once and for all, the myth of Mallorcan (and Spanish) youth being unlike their British counterparts. You might recall that some while ago a report established that the level of alcohol intake among Spanish teenagers was as high if not higher and the frequency of drinking greater than that of British kids.

Of course, you can’t and shouldn’t tar every Mallorcan teenager and young person with the same alcoholic or violent brush, just as you shouldn’t the British youth, but what can be said with some certainty is that a societal shift isn’t underway; it has already happened. Temptation has been taken. And no amount of saintliness will put the devil back in the box.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

All Night Long: Fiesta parties

So there will, after all, be a party on the final night of Pollensa’s Patrona festivities. Public pressure helped to ensure this, the last town hall meeting having been packed by those in favour of it. The mayor had been criticised for not having consulted in seeking to ditch the event.

Here we go again. If it’s Pollensa, it must be a case of the town hall not consulting. There are some things it should consult about, such as the pedestrianisation plan for Puerto Pollensa that was scrapped primarily because it had failed to consult, but there is surely a limit to what it is obliged to consult about. Or perhaps, in the case of fiestas, the people’s parties if you like, there should be an obligation. There again, they didn’t consult the people of Puerto Pollensa about what has turned out to be a programme for Virgen del Carmen that is like little more than a village fete.

The night party is going ahead, but economic constraints will mean that it will finish earlier than previously, at 2.30 in the morning of 2 August. Economic constraints or something else? The deputy mayor, Malena Estrany, hopes that by ending the party a couple of hours earlier there will not be a repeat of the botellón street party and unseemliness that has been associated with the event. There remains the suspicion that cost was a secondary factor in the town hall’s wish to call the event off, and that the botellón was the primary factor.

But now, having backtracked, the town hall would wish us to believe that lopping two hours off the party will help to stop a grand old booze-up. Are they serious? The strangeness of this logic is made even stranger by the town hall’s intention to ask neighbouring towns to check that people being bussed in to the event from the likes of Sa Pobla or Alcúdia aren’t carrying drink.

This presumably means the local police in these towns being called on to search and confiscate. A question arises whether they have any right to do so. Drinking alcohol in the street may be against local laws, drinking on a bus may also be, but carrying drink? Moreover, drink can be obtained in other ways. The botellón isn’t always just a bunch of people turning up at random with a carrier-bag with a couple of cheap bottles of vino.

Elsewhere in Mallorca, one party has been scrapped precisely because of the problems that a botellón can create. In Pòrtol, following incidents last weekend, a DJ party for this coming Saturday is to be dropped and probably replaced by a dance orchestra.

But also this coming Saturday, a party which had been dropped last year and which had acquired greater notoriety than the Patrona party is to make a re-appearance. Sa Pobla is organising the Districte 54 event as part of its Santa Margalida festivities. This was banned last year on safety grounds and because of complaints about noise and the state that the town got into thanks to its accompanying botellón.

Districte 54 has been one of the biggest of the fiesta night parties. It was first launched in 2003 by the then Partido Popular administration in the town. Who is now the new mayor of Sa Pobla? Biel Serra of the Partido Popular. Last year he criticised the decision to scrap the event, pointing to its economic benefits and to the fact that it brought the whole island to Sa Pobla.

There is more than just a hint of the populist behind the decision to resurrect Districte 54, and Pollensa’s mayor may also have begun to have had second thoughts about how a decision to ban the night party might impact on his popularity, a mere month into his new term of office.

Serra’s belief that Districte 54 has economic benefits contrasts with the economic constraints said to have been influencing the Pollensa decision. Which brings you back to the question as to how well these economic benefits are measured, if at all, and to a further question therefore, which is, despite the costs of staging events, do they actually generate a sufficiently greater revenue?

Local businesses would argue that they do. And this is the nub of the issue with the botellón parties which occur at Patrona or Districte 54. Yes, they can cause unpleasantness but they are really about potentially depriving businesses of revenue; hence the measures that are being introduced to try and limit their impact. People can put up with noise and mess if the tills are turning. And you can bet that those who packed the Pollensa town hall meeting weren’t just revellers.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Potato Heads

Remember Mr. Potato Head? Not Wayne Rooney, but one that has been with us far longer and which now comes with his own head. Mr. Potato Head became self-sufficient, a fully-integrated toy, courtesy of a prosthetic potato, putting an end to the weekly shop being deprived of a King Edward or two, as was once the case. One suspects, though, there is less pleasure to be had than when the eyes or glasses were pressed into a real spud and out squirted some juice. Mr. Potato Head was one of the great toys. Hours of endless amusement. How simple and how much fun.

Toys and potatoes. Where do they come together? Sa Pobla. The town has a museum of toys, and it also has an awful lot of potatoes. It was this dual tradition that once made me think that town fairs should have mascots. For Sa Pobla, it would be Senyor Cap de Patata. They did once have a mascot for an autumn fair in the town, but I never found out if it was indeed a Mr. Potato Head; it certainly ought to have been.

The potato has been a theme of Sa Pobla’s autumn fairs and it was also the theme of the town’s gastronomy event over the weekend just gone. The night of the potato. Spud evening. I read a report which said that “only Sa Pobla, highly regarded for its farming, would have the ability to organise a fair dedicated exclusively to the potato”. The only town with the ability, and the only one bonkers enough to arrange one. Chip batty, though not quite as bonkers as Muro and its pumpkin fair.

The great night (in fact nights) of the potato was a great success. And so you would expect it to be. Twenty-five bars and restaurants dishing out plates of potato-based meals at a minimum of a euro a pop. If you can’t get a successful gastronomy event for a hundred cents, then how can you get one at all?

The thing about gastronomy is that the word suggests rather more than what you get. It hints at fine cuisine. Not that there was anything not fine about the array of dishes available for scoffing in Sa Pobla, just that they weren’t particularly remarkable. You just had to look down the list of the different dishes to get a flavour, so to speak, as to what was on offer. “Frit de patata”, for example. Chips. Rather grander was cod au gratin with potato. Three euros and worth every one for the cod and the cheese.

Still, the bigging up of the Sa Pobla potato came up at an opportune moment. It had briefly become a victim of Cucumbergate, the Germans banning imports on the basis that … . Erm, on what basis? They swiftly unbanned the spud.

The potato night was important also for reaffirming the potato’s place in the hearts of all the people of Sa Pobla. It has taken a bit of a knocking from rice, so much so that last year’s autumn fair was dedicated not, as usual, to the potato but to rice. The great rice and spud war has broken out in Sa Pobla, the former now considered a genuine alternative for cultivation to the potato, and a crop that has grown in significance since its introduction to the edges of Albufera in 1901 to the extent that now some 20 hectares are devoted to it.

The potato farmers have faced problems other than the advance of rice and Germans banning their produce. At the end of March last year, they took to their tractors and blocked the roads in protest against financial help that had been promised by the regional government, but which hadn’t been forthcoming.

Other than just the boost to the local agro-economy, the potato fair does highlight, not for the first time, quite how well publicised, or not, such events are, especially to visitors. With the poor weather around at the weekend, this was one event that could have made a break from moping in a bar, while there were a couple of other fairs – shoes at Lloseta and the fourth annual fair in Biniali, devoted, echoes here of Sa Pobla and its toy museum, to traditional Mallorcan games. This fair was something not just for adults but for kids. Who knew about it? Who would even know where Biniali is?

Potato heads. Not announcing themselves well enough.

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.

Free Radicals: Mallorca’s other politics

An almighty great row kicked off in Sa Pobla at the end of last month. The cause of the row was the presence of one Laura Riera at a meeting organised by a group called Pinyol Vermell in a bar run by the town hall which is also that used for pensioners in Sa Pobla.

Laura Riera and Pinyol Vermell are? Riera left prison in August last year, having spent nine years inside for collaboration with ETA’s Barcelona unit. Pinyol Vermell (literally red stone) is a youth organisation in Sa Pobla, its membership comprising those with an “independence ideology”. The theme of the meeting was one of anti-repression and of inviting the “democratic state” (of Spain) to improve human rights.

Since the meeting on 29 December, there have been calls for the mayor of Sa Pobla, Joan Comes, to resign, which have been rejected. Comes, for his part, was said to be furious when he learnt that Riera was attending the meeting. He has said that Pinyol Vermell has “had a laugh” at the expense of both the town hall, who agreed to let the organisation have the bar, and the town. He has also withdrawn the grant that Pinyol Vermell gets from the town hall.

As for the meeting itself, reports of what took place are sketchy. It would appear that Riera did not discuss her links with ETA; instead she spoke about herself and her experiences of prison. What has made it more sketchy is the fact that a press photographer was not allowed to take photos, the reasons being that Riera didn’t want them being taken and that Pinyol Vermell was concerned that they might be used to imply some relationship between it and ETA. The organisation has, on its website, stated that it condemns ETA violence.

While this is all something of an embarrassment for Sa Pobla, it isn’t really anything more than this. No offence was committed. But there was more to this meeting than the appearance of Riera. Its timing coincided with the end-of-year celebrations for Jaume I, the same celebrations that saw violence on the streets of Palma, provoked by independence activists.

What one has to ask is whether we are witnessing the emergence of radicalism in Mallorca. Pinyol Vermell has its independence ideology; it is one that it shares with other groups in Mallorca, such as the Obra Cultural Balear. But for every ideology of a distinct type, there is another which opposes it.

While researching the background to Pinyol Vermell, I came across a reference to it on the blog for the MSR in the Balearics. And what is the MSR? The letters stand for Movimiento Social Republicano. It was at those celebrations in Palma – to offer a real alternative to the drive towards independence (its words). If you want a flavour of where it comes from, then the fact that it is associated with the British National Party tells you all you need to know.

The MSR seems to have only recently sprung up in Mallorca. As a party it has existed since the start of the century in Spain and defines its politics in terms of the so-called Third Position, i.e. beyond the politics of left or right but usually considered to be neo-fascist. In its declaration on its blog, it says, among other things, that it defends the languages of the Balearics, such as Mallorquín, and Castilian. It is the same position as that espoused by the local leader of the Partido Popular, José Ramón Bauzá.

While he himself is not extreme, Bauzá’s stance on language can be styled as being so. It is also not without danger, as it gives succour to more extreme views, be they of the MSR or those of the independence movement who flatly reject his opposition to Catalan.

There is a sense in which battle lines are being drawn ahead of local elections this spring which promise to be more interesting than normal. Or should this promise be a threat? There is an intensification of more radical opinion, one to which, knowingly or unknowingly, Pinyol Vermell has added. At a time when ETA – and all that it represents not just in terms of terrorism but also separatism – is on its last legs, it was provocative for it to have invited Riera. She may not have spoken about ETA, but her links were sufficient to raise temperatures. Her mere presence can only have added fuel to the views of groups who oppose independence, such as the MSR.

Politics in Mallorca are many things, but extreme is not one of them. Until now. This may be the year when politics get a bit tasty.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Don’t Live Here Anymore: Tourists returning and businesses closing

Activity in the hotels, as in how many guests there are, where they’re from and so on, is a familiar enough “game” that many a bar, restaurant or whatever owner plays, especially during the phoney season (i.e. now) and then in the first days of the real season, from 1 May. Much time is devoted to quizzing receptionists and other hotel staff as to occupancy levels in the anticipation that these levels will mean, or may mean, folding notes being handed over in the bar or restaurant or whatever.

The wrath of Iceland, and therefore the absence of guests, has introduced new games. One is spot the tourist coach and spot how many are on it. A couple of days ago hardly any. But now, hmm, starting to look good again. Or so it can be hoped. A second game is check the arrivals at the airport. Flights from here or there. How many flights. Looking good again now. Just depends how many are on the flights and where they’re going to.

Over the past few days you couldn’t go anywhere without questions being asked as to what is happening with flights from the UK or from Germany. All sorts of half bits of information, misinformation, pessimism, optimism have resulted from the constant quest for some reassurance that there are indeed people coming to Mallorca again.

If you’ve ever wondered as to the sheer dependence on tourism, the reliance on it, then these questions will have convinced you. It’s all that business owners have been able to think about, and any source of information has been clutched at: bodies on a bus, flight boards, rumours as to Thomas Cook this or EasyJet that. Total dependence.

One of the inevitabilities, like night following day, is that a place will suddenly go out of business. Sometimes you wonder why. Other times you can nod wisely and say that it was bound to have happened. This inevitability tends to occur, however, later in the season or once the season has finished. Usually it doesn’t occur before the season has even got under way. However.

Let’s try this little game. You have, from the following information, to identify somewhere that has closed. Suddenly. All locked up. Chef arriving for work and finding there’s no one around. One day there, next day not there. Gone. Finished. Through. Finito.

It’s a sort of no-tourist land, as in there are no hotels nearby. Not that sort of area. Not in one of the resorts. Not even in a town. But by an urbanisation that forms part of a town that isn’t a tourist town, even if it, the town, is near to local tourist towns. Big. Very big. Lots of bits to it. Lots of land being covered by the lots of bits. Needed a lot of work doing to it as well. All the bits, and not just the restaurant. Well known, they who were running it and who had planned this and that. Gone. Not there. Locked up. Finito.

What?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Tapping Up – Water supplies

You’ve just put the shampoo into your hair and the shower suddenly dries up; you’ve set the washing-machine going and then it suddenly stops; you’ve used the loo and when it comes to flushing there is that awful moment of low or no pressure.

Water supplies. There is an argument that the utilities are equally important, but without water … ? Pity the poor people of Campanet who have been long-suffering where it comes to water supply and have recently been subject to as many as three cuts in a week. Think about the impact not only in homes, but also in bars, businesses and schools. They’re worried that there will be inadequate drinking water as the weather warms up.

In Campanet the problem has been with tap supply, and it is one of ancient pipework that badly needs overhauling. The schoolchildren of Campanet can always bring their own water, and it is inexpensive to buy (70 centimos for five litres for example), but it’s still 70 centimos multiplied many times over and above the water rate. And don’t let’s even start on the cost of having a water supply switched on.

Campanet is not the only town that is subject to unannounced cuts to water supplies – far from it; not the only place where something unpleasant is left to lurk under a hastily lowered lid. And wherever one looks, there is an issue with water. In Santa Margalida there is a demand for a report into why the public swimming-pool is losing twenty cubic metres per day, something that adds to accusations in the town of leakages in public money; a different sort, but the pool’s water is ultimately funded by the taxpayer. In Sa Pobla a water-processing plant was established two to three years ago and has proved to be useless. Part of the solution for the town is to use water from desalination plants, notably one near Alcúdia. It has not been that straightforward, owing to the nature of the negotiations, but supply does now seem guaranteed via a mix of desalinated water and that from the island’s network. In Playa de Muro there remains a question as to the quality of drinking water that dates back some years. Nitrates. The local water company in Playa de Muro (Fusosa) is a strange affair. It cannot be contacted by landline telephone after the morning. You have to know the emergency mobile number. The company has only recently established a skeleton website. At least it includes an email address. Public service? It sucks. Against all this wet utility provision, hats off to Alcúdia where there is now the bold initiative to recycle waste water for garden irrigation. It’s something.

There is plenty of water in Mallorca, or rather beneath it. Huge underground reservoirs are what supply much of the island’s water. They benefit from the regular soakings from September to April and even from the mountain snow. Occasionally, when the winters are exceptionally dry, there can be concerns, but nature seems to have a knack of making an adjustment, even if it means rain throughout May and into June. The availability of water isn’t really the issue. It’s what happens with it and what it contains – the product of the limestone on which Mallorca is largely built: the “cal”, as the word has past into British usage, the cal that affects everything – from kettles to boilers to toilets to taps. Hard water. Very hard water.

Water, water everywhere. An island the size of Essex surrounded by the stuff. It hangs in the air, drenches terraces because of the dampness and humidity, infiltrates walls. Everywhere water, except from where you might most want it. Taps for instance.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.