Luis Salvador And The First Tourists

Luis Salvador María José Juan Bautista Domingo Raniero Fernando Carlos Zenobio Antonio. A name for each month of the year. Or a name for each member of a football team plus a sub. Are these the names of a football team? Actually not. They are, were, the names of an Austrian archduke. A Habsburg. One of Mallorca’s most famous adopted sons.

It is an unpalatable truth for the patrimonially obsessed Mallorcans that the most notable figures in the island’s history tend not to be Mallorcan. To a Frenchwoman, George Sand, you can add her Polish beau, Chopin, and the noble Luis Salvador. Unlike Sand and Chopin, whose contributions to Mallorcan culture are vastly overstated, Luis Salvador remains one of the most important figures in the island’s history. Together with the remarkable and mystical mediaeval polymath Ramon Llull and the missionary Fra Juníper, who were both Mallorcan, the archduke forms a triumvirate of Mallorcan greats.

For Brits, however, and much like both Llull and Juníper, he is a largely obscure figure who is most likely to be known, if at all, as a street name.

The Germans, however, will know all about him. It was his opus “Die Balearen”, a colossal travelogue and regional and ethnological survey, that endeared him to the people of the islands and to a succession of German visitors. Luis is credited with having introduced tourism to Mallorca; he went on to become honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (the Mallorca Tourism Board).

Luis was not your typical royal wastrel. He attracted to the island not a cast list of late nineteenth century scoundrels but a diverse group of artists, poets and scientists who joined him at the Miramar finca in Valldemossa. Appropriately enough, given his association to him by Mallorcan fame, the finca included the monastery founded by Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century.

The interdisciplinary range of these first tourists to the island, as they are sometimes referred to, helped to forge Luis’s ambitions to being a polymath in his own right and in a style similar to Llull. It was a combination of the arts and sciences that formed the basis for his interest in Mallorca and which went into the compiling of the astonishing “Die Balearen”.

Luis, much though he was captivated by Mallorca and the islands, extended the scope of his inquiries into natural and social sciences and took off around the Mediterranean in his boats, Nixe I and Nixe II.

Nixe III is currently retracing Luis’s travels in the Med. It set sail for the first time last year, departing from the yacht club in Puerto Pollensa; its five-year mission to boldly go where an archduke had gone before and to draw comparisons with what he discovered in examining the diversity of the Mediterranean and also in questioning whether there is such a thing as a Mediterranean culture.

This summer Nixe III has journeyed from Venice to Montenegro and to Lipari and the Aeolian islands which were also visited last year. The head of the Nixe team is himself from Pollensa. A doctor in the social sciences, Juan Ramis is journeying with a German expert on the archduke and a specialist in environmental studies.

The scientific nature of the expeditions is in keeping with the way in which Luis conducted his enquiries. And one of his greatest contributions was the fact that, travel writer that he was, he was an objective observer. This is what was said of his approach: “He observed everything with an absent, distant gaze and a contemplative attitude … (he) never lapsed into the speculative, subjective introspection of romanticism. Instead he personally examined reality in the most direct manner possible.”

I quote this because it is a strong statement of how a critical eye and an inquisitive mind can produce, as it did, some of the best travel writing that has ever been committed to print. Luis showed, and it should be a lesson to those who fall into the trap of adopting the indulgent and romanticised styles that one commonly encounters in describing Mallorca, that objectivity and knowledge plus a love of a place are what count.

And there is a twist to the tale of Luis. In Ramon Llull’s “Blanquerna”, often said to be the first European novel, the knight of the story turned out to be an emperor. He was in fact Rudolf of Habsburg, from whom Luis was descended. Nixe III might be said to be continuing a story of Mallorca itself that goes back to the thirteenth century.

Follow the journeys of Nixe III at http://www.nixe3.com which I acknowledge for the quote in this article.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Travellin’ Light

More inspired by “The Sunday Times”. I was reminded of a recent email correspondence on Sunday morning. A.A. Gill was lauding a new television series by Jonathan Meades. In that correspondence, I had, by coincidence, lumped Gill and Meades together as the finest examples of travel writers with whom I am acquainted. That Gill sees fit to praise Meades suggests that there is at least one side of a possibly mutual admiration duality.

 

The point I had made about the two authors was that, when they are writing ostensibly travel pieces, it is not necessarily obvious that “travel” is their theme. Both have an eye for the surreal and bizarre, and in Meades’ case the bizarre is heightened by a fascination with low-life. But they also bring together in their writing a range of the arts, humanities and science. Travel writing is literary polymer, a combination of language, culture, art, music, society, people, history, politics, food and drink, geography, geology, topography, agriculture, archaeology, architecture, town planning, engineering, natural history, botany and meteorology – to name but some. Above all, and Gill and Meades are masters of the art, it is a process of observation and of de- and then re-construction of the familiar with imagery composed of influences often far removed from the subject. (And just to explain, even when one is not directly familiar with, for instance, a particular landscape or building, one is nevertheless familiar with the notion of landscapes and buildings.) Gill’s role as a TV critic can inform his descriptions with the everyday of soaps and reality shows. A background as an architectural journalist guides Meades in the performance of such re-buildings of images. Both also, naturally enough given their preferences for the bizarre, have a penchant for seeking out the odd, and it is the odd that can give rise to the richest of written picture-painting.

 

Travel writing, and it is obvious to say so, needs to paint pictures without the aid of pictures. But it is the superficiality or the depth of this painting that distinguishes the mundane from the lively. Much good travel writing also draws on the novel – the story telling of a Bryson or a Theroux, for example. And these authors share with Gill and Meades the essential quality of ferocious wit. There may be an apparent excess of cynicism, sarcasm and satire about the output, but these are all vital in presenting a view of a subject that runs contrary to the blandness of much travel writing. And it is wrong to assume that such styles do not at the same time embrace affection. It is often a very affection for the subject that enables the alternative “take”, be it sarcastic or surrealistic.  

 

Where am I going with all this? To Mallorca naturally enough. And that is because much of what one ever encounters about Mallorca in the written form is stripped of any depth, of any challenging imagery, of any alternativism. It is writing that suffers from prejudice in that the writer is too blinded by what he or she believes should be the accepted norm or by his or her own attachment in order to attempt to paint pictures that are more than just light, first touches of the brush on the canvas. To return to the notion of familiarity, one is familiar with mountains or with seascapes, even if one has no first-hand experience of the Tramuntana or the bay of Pollensa. To simply apply standard adjectives or metaphors to either is far from sufficient, but that is what one usually gets – the default setting of limited imagination, creativity and personal thesauri. There is a form of fascism when it comes to Mallorca which has it that if the words “beautiful” and “lovely” are not repeated in every paragraph, then the author is being unfairly critical. And such fascism occurs not just in travel writing but in pretty much any writing about the island. 

 

Gill or Meades on Mallorca. Now that would be something.