Where The Streets Have No Shame

The street name is emblematic. It is a tarmacadamed tribute, a remembrance in rows of houses or offices. It is rarely appropriate. The street name is a convenience of geography, town hall bureaucracy or post office identification.

The Mallorcan street name is part-historical, part-meteorological, part-maritime, part-astronomical, part-botanical, part-religious, part-geographical. It is street name in any other place, distinguished by its local relevancies. It is street name, occasionally, that is non-constant. Depending on past fluctuations between the competing bodies politic, the Mallorcan street name has Castilian or Catalan (Mallorquín) nomenclature.

In Pollensa, one of the roads by the Plaça ca les Munnares that leads into Jonquet has two different “names” barely 20 metres apart - Pio and Pius - popes by any other name, or names, or languages. Occasionally, the street name disappears. Up to a couple of years ago, there used to be a road in Can Picafort, Dunes, that was misrepresented in that maps showed it to be a different road. The road name was subsequently eliminated completely.

Roads can be two names in one. The Carretera Artà, which stretches from the Paseo Marítimo in Puerto Alcúdia along the coast, is - at different points - the Avenida Reina Sofia, the Avenida Juan Carlos, the Avenida de S’Albufera, the Avenida Platges de Muro. Or is it? No-one quite knows if these “avenues” refer to the main road (the Carretera) or the side roads that run parallel, or both.

Where the streets have no name might be a better idea. Rarely here is a location defined in terms of its street name. Direction is made by reference to “next to so-and-so hotel”, “near-to-such-and-such” restaurant. Landmarks are used liberally - just by the Magic roundabout, near to the Caprabo supermarket. Rarely, if ever, is a street name used. Ask someone the name of the next street from where they are living, and they will not know.

The Mallorcan street name has its cachet, especially that with an historical connotation. But the streets to which these names are attached rarely do honour to history. Important figures of the Spanish empire are to be found on the streets here. Reis Catòlics remembers Fernando and Isabel, dubbed the Catholic Kings by the Borgia pope Alexander. The deluded discoverer of what he believed to be the western passage to Asia, Cristofol Colom (Columbus) is a frequent beneficiary. But Reis Catòlics in Pollensa is an unremarkable road, Cristofol Colom in Alcúdia just a short lane off the constitution square.

One of the most celebrated Mallorcans is/was Ramón Llull. Born in Palma in the thirteenth century, Llull was variously an author (in Catalan), mystic and - most intriguingly - an early dabbler in what might be described as a form of computing. He was not involved with air-conditioning or refrigeration, yet his side street in Pollensa is home to one such a business. He might be more pleased to learn that this same street houses the Trencadora restaurant, itself a part of the Peter Maffay foundation.

Roger de Lluria was not Mallorcan. He wasn’t even (like Columbus despite the ongoing claims to the contrary) from Spain. He was in fact from Naples, but was an admiral in the Aragonese fleet of the late thirteenth century. Roger’s street, notable (if that’s the word) only for an estate agency at one end, joins the Calle Joan XXIII and the bypass in Puerto Pollensa.

Francesc de Borja Moll is of more recent fame, having died in 1991. He was actually from Menorca, but was a notable figure in Catalan linguistics, having written widely in the language and having compiled a dictionary of the various strands of Catalan (on which he collaborated with Antoni Maria Alcover). Borja Moll’s street in Puerto Alcúdia is pot-holed, has a Guardia Civil office at one end and nothing else. Antoni Maria Alcover runs parallel next to a petrol station. The presence of a school between Borja Moll and Alcover hints at a meaningful monument, though the roads themselves are without note.

And stretching back into antiquity, there was Quinto Cecilio Metelo (deprived of all his o’s in Catalan) who founded the Roman town of Pollentia in 123BC. His street in Alcúdia, vaguely at least close to the site of Pollentia, is a back street of zero consequence or charm. Often littered with broken vehicles, it is more reminiscent of a sink estate.

Where the streets have no name. Perhaps it doesn’t matter, it is so everywhere, and no-one uses the names anyway, but it is a shame where the streets also have no shame.


QUIZ
Yesterday - The Jam “That’s Entertainment”. Today’s title (or rather the original from which it is adapted)? We have had them only quite recently.

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