Memories Light The Corners Of My Mind

I went for a trip down memory lane earlier today. It was a journey to Can Picafort and Playa de Muro that started over 40 years ago. The memory lane was mainly made of sand. The starting point was a house in Can Picafort opposite an open space on which now stands the Clumba Mar hotel. The lane from the house to the sea was uninterrupted by other buildings; there was a clear view and a clear walk to the beach; the lane was of sand. There was open space then; open space and forest and dunes. Can Picafort comprised but a handful of houses, shops and bars, but one hotel that was genuinely a hotel (what is now the Miramar). One of the bars was on the beach which extended back further than is now the case before the dunes were flattened. That bar was demolished and they built the Hotel Sol. The marina was a harbour with the occasional rowing-boat and fishing-boats.

Then there was a second house in a clearing in the forest in Playa de Muro, the forest that used to extend all along the coastline and which is now but a fraction of what it once was. This second house, dating from 1968, was the first in the urbanisation. There was a street of sorts, made of sand; it ceased to be of sand only a few years ago around the same time that the telephone cables were installed. Permissions for this second house were applied for in Palma as there were no local town halls then. This second house was a kind of pilot house for subsequent development; the building materials came from a hotel, a hotel on land owned by the family who had claim to the terrain from Playa de Muro up to Alcúdia. The hotel was the Esperanza, named after a girl from that extended family. This second house has now been finally finished; at one point it eventually had proper foundations laid as originally it had been built on sand.

The two houses tell a story of different generations of one family, a story getting on for half-a-century old that began in one of Can Picafort’s few houses before the roads were criss-crossed, before the frontline wrecked the dune zone, before the nearly half-a-century of hotels were constructed; a story also of the cutting-down of the forest in Playa de Muro and the building that now leaves but about half-a-dozen plots without a house, an apartment block or hotel, a story of the eventual completion of infrastructure to enable basic communication which only a few short years later has been superseded by broadband.

The two houses tell a story not so much of the changing face of Can Picafort and Playa de Muro but of their total development. And now the politicians talk about the recuperation of the coastlines.  


QUIZ
Yesterday - The Cure, “Friday, I’m In Love”. Today’s title? Fabulous song from a film.

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