Show Me Round Your Snow Peaked Mountains

Snow. The recent snowfalls were, for Mallorca and for November, relatively heavy; they even inspired the BBC to announce that people were ski-ing on the island. Well yes, but don’t get any thoughts about Mallorca becoming a ski destination.

The surprise is perhaps that people express surprise that there is snow here. Among those who have never visited Mallorca, that is understandable but for those who have it is far less so. What after all are those bloody great big mounds forming a spine along the west of the island? The highest of the mountains - the Puig Mayor - is 1,445 metres.

It rarely snows that much and some winters hardly at all - last winter for instance. But it is far from uncommon to see whiteness on the tops of the Tramuntana range. Typically it does not snow below around 500 metres, but it can and does, though at sea level it is pretty freakish.

That surprise might be expressed does, I fancy, put the position of Mallorca’s mountains into perspective. Though summer visitors do indeed take trips into the mountains, were one to ask a selection of them to place the following in order of what they associate with Mallorca, see where mountains and mountain scenery would come - sun, sea, beaches, bars, mountains. I don’t think fifth would be far from inaccurate.

This all links back to what I have been saying about winter tourism and especially the marketing of the common perception of Mallorca as part of that winter tourism (or indeed marketing that seeks to alter that perception). The mountains do not form a part of that common perception, in my opinion. To try and market them as an aspect of winter tourism could probably only be as a supplementary item. The Tramuntana range is no Sierra Nevada. I have a brochure for the local equivalent of Air Miles. Among the offers in Spain, being marketed to a Spanish audience, are some mountain destinations - spas and hotels in Cantabria and above Valencia. Mallorca?


QUIZ
Yesterday - Dire Straits. Today’s title - a line from? Very famous group.

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