The Hills Are Alive: The beach alternative

Matt Rudd is a humorous geezer. Pity, therefore, the unfortunate resort in Mallorca that might take his acerbic fancy. Take Cala San Vicente. Poor old CSV; it can't seem to get anything right. If it's not Poles on the rampage, then it's Rudd slagging it off for having a "seaweedy" beach or one made of concrete. Or having an "enormous coach park, some high-rise apartments (and) a big hotel."

I confess to not being intimate with all the coves in the Cala. Molins is the one I know best; it's ok. Not great but ok. As for the rest. An enormous coach park? Is there? High-rise apartments? Apartments, yes, but high-rise? A big hotel? Well, I suppose the Don Pedro is fairly big, though it won't be if they ever finally get round to demolishing it. But one might also add Niu or La Moraleja, which are not big but are very clever in being utterly charming.

Rudd was writing in "The Sunday Times" at the weekend. The Mallorcan tourism worthies would be apoplectic if they read his piece, or could understand it. The beaches of Mallorca, and not just those of CSV, are not "half as fabulous as everyone says they are"; indeed they're not much cop, according to Rudd. Keep the "Med in the distance"; take to the hills and a villa in the interior is his advice. The worthies may wish alternatives to "sun and beach" holidays, but they don't want "The Sunday Times" telling holidaymakers to give the resorts a wide berth. At least, one assumes not.

The northerly route to CSV had been indicated by means of a "gnarly finger" pointed by a local in an unnamed resort. To the Mallorcans, well some, the Cala is treated with a certain reverence. Or put it this way, a restaurant owner in the Cala once told me that this was the case. A gnarly finger might well indeed be waggled with a recommendation to go north, young man, even if the owner of the digit had not been near the place for years, if he had been there at all. It is a Pollensa backwater that some love and some find hard to comprehend; I myself have vacillated between these two positions.

The criticism of the island's beaches started, however, with a questionable premise - that somehow the beaches have all been cleared of any offending concrete in their vicinity. Rudd says that this "this isn't entirely true". And it isn't, because it hasn't happened. I don't quite know where the idea comes from that it might have. Take a trip to Can Picafort, for example, and you have a perfectly unlovely line of buildings just a short walk from the water's edge. Even the cherished, by some, smaller beach in Puerto Pollensa, the one that peters out at the pinewalk, is backed not just by concrete but also by innumerable passers-by. It is far too small and far too claustrophobic for my liking.

Go to a resort and there are buildings close to the beaches. Inevitably there are. It's why they are resorts. In Puerto Alcúdia, a resort which has a beach once voted the best in the Med, some of the concrete is shielded by trees; little of it feels as if it is on top of you. But if one wants to escape the hotels and apartments, there are always close-by alternatives, such as the coves in Mal Pas. Mallorca is a mix of beaches, just as it is a mix of holidaymakers.

Rudd is a "holiday snob" and admits to being so, belittling the "flabby pink people" of the resorts (oh, my stupid fat white men of this blog years ago). Non-resort is his preference, and away from the coast, he says that the island has been transformed, that it is "gorgeous". But has it really been transformed? The interior is not fundamentally different now to what it has ever been. What is different, what has been transformed, is that there are properties for the type of holidaymaker who reads "The Sunday Times"; the type of holidaymaker who eschews Coronation Street and "pubs serving roast beef" in favour of some octopus on the poolside barbecue of a villa that is out of the reach of the holidaymaker hoi polloi.

Nevertheless, Rudd makes an argument for a type of holiday and indeed holiday accommodation which encapsulates a dichotomy that the tourism worthies cannot reconcile. They want nice middle-class families with spending power to enjoy the "other" island, and not just the sun and beach, but they also devote time and energy in seeking to deny to this tourist the accommodation he or she desires; not the hotels of the resorts, but the private villas or apartments. And they do this by being beholden to the hotel lobby and doing whatever they can to disrupt the holiday-let market. This is not what Rudd intended to write about or indeed has, but inadvertently he has done so. The tourism authorities should read and digest, but they probably wouldn't understand.

** For the full article, go to: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/spain/article7059836.ece

And here is Julie Andrews, alive on some hills far, far away ...



The Sound of Music - Julie Andrews
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