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.