Eyesight To The Blind: Youth drinking culture

On the same night as Alcúdia was celebrating the harmless Miss Drag parade, something else was being celebrated - something rather less harmless.

For some years, Puerto Alcúdia has been the location for a vast gathering of island youth, coming together at the end of the school year. In itself this may seem harmless enough, but the event has got completely out of control. It has become a massive botellón (street drinking party), accompanied by fights, vandalism, robberies; one played out on the beach and around what is the main "local" night area, that of the Magic Centre.

Organised with the aid of Facebook and other social networking sites, the "party" is not all bad news. It does, after all, bring to Alcúdia a fair amount of business. But it degenerates as the night goes on. Arrests and injuries follow.

With ages ranging from 14 to 18, the Alcúdia school-end bash gives lie, once more, to the absurd argument that Mallorcan and Spanish youth have a respect for alcohol and do not engage in the level of anti-social behaviour that their British counterparts do. This is a view perpetrated by some visitors but also by some Brits who live locally and who either haven't a clue what life is really like outside their make-believe, expattery "paradise" worlds or who would rather not know, preferring to justify their existences in the "paradise" worlds by ignoring what goes on or by pulling the ah, but it's all so much better here, it's just a small minority and the UK is so much worse line. Sorry, but it's only partially true. One reason why things seem much worse in the UK is that there are an awful lot more people to make them worse.

Perhaps the main difference, though, is that - for the holidaymaker or resident - trouble from events like the botellón is easily enough avoided. They tend to be confined to certain areas, while rarely do they give rise to the more British desire to have a go at anyone who might be in the vicinity. Random attacks on people in the streets are not unknown (a gay couple were attacked in Alcúdia recently, for example), but to over-emphasise them would be quite wrong; the streets are generally safe, so long as certain places are avoided at certain times.

Violence there is, and there were of course two deaths early in the season last year, but it isn't extreme and is just as likely, more likely perhaps, to occur within the confines of certain hotels and to be solely the action of holidaymakers (and not just the British). However, the drink (and drugs) element, among local youth, cannot be brushed aside as though it were not an issue, as it most certainly is. One wishes, once and for all, that some would remove their tinted-the-turquoise-of-sea Raybans and see local society for what it really is. But they won't, because they need justification and also a need to lambast a home country for societal ills that they pretend do not exist in Mallorca. They are blind. Deliberately and delusionally.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.