Many Rivers To Cross?

BEING SPANISH - PART FIVE (LANDSCAPES)

As you fly into Mallorca and look down to the ground, what do you see? A regular flight path into Palma Airport takes you along the north coast, and you can see the blue of the Med, the white caps of waves and the twists of the length of beach that is that of Alcúdia Bay. The plane makes a right turn over Playa de Muro and tracks down the centre of the island and into Palma. You may just glimpse mountains and be aware of the windmills shortly before landing. Otherwise, a general view is one of brownness and yellowness, patches of green and of no great order. Welcome to Mallorca and welcome to its topography.

If you were a first-time visitor to the island, what might you expect in terms of landscape? Indeed, might you expect anything? But we're back in "being Spanish" territory, and coming from a green and pleasant land, the tourist is unlikely to expect the same aerial perspective of hedged fields, woodlands and the alterations through colour of crop rotation of coming into, say, Gatwick. He probably expects a deal of barrenness; it would accord with sun and more sun. And for the most part, that is what he gets, or at least it is also a fertile barrenness of the clay colours of potato and vegetable market gardening. If England is overwhelmingly green, then Mallorca is overwhelmingly a study through a variety of ochres.

Ask a tourist what, having landed, he might anticipate as some sort of emblematic statement of the local landscape, and he may well choose the palm tree, the arboreal go-to of the picture postcard, fronds artistically intruding as a foreground in a top corner of the frame with the shimmering azure of sky and sea and a whiteness of sand filling its background. And of course he will find the palm tree in abundance. Spanish, he will think. Which is true, but unfortunately isn't. Palms are neither natives of Mallorca nor of Spain, with one exception, the palmito. The anticipation of an exotica of sub-tropical arboriculture is misguided. The discovery is one of apparent northern European migration, for it is the pine tree that lords itself over the tree kingdom of Mallorca. If this is a disappointment, there is a consolation in the fact of the pine species - the aleppo. But even this is not unique to Spain or Mallorca; it is the Mediterranean wing of the pine party.

Travelling from Palma to the north of the island, the initial sense is of normalcy, granted by motorway, the blue and white of road signs, the familiarity of make of car and the reassurance of a McDonald's arch. But the name Al Campo smacks of a different commercial landscape, and then to the left one begins to become aware of a chain of mountains and a perhaps unexpected natural landscape. Mention Spain, mention Mallorca, and the novice holidaymaker would be unlikely to conjure up an image of a mountain range; mountains, hills don't belong in the same set of picture postcards alongside that of the blissful beach idyll. Yet arrive in Pollensa or Alcúdia, and it is mountains that enclose you. Some are startling, most dramatically the Puig María that appears as an isolated aberration of monstrousness looming over the old town of Pollensa, or the grey peaks above Puerto Pollensa which lend the resort a chill of mystery. But how might these qualify as "Spanish"?

As you move around the area, to Alcúdia, to Pollensa, to Manresa or to Cala San Vicente, there is one word that starts to form - rugged. This is not a word from the being Spanish lexicon, or at least many would presume it not to be. Being Spanish, in landscape terms, is meant to be vibrant and exotic; it is a type of anthropomorphism for the natural world, the imagined transposition of the flame colours of the flamenco dance onto the land itself. But here is rugged. It is scrub, dust, scraps of forest, hill and artisan, the latter most evident in demarcation by dry-stone walls both in towns and in the country. It is semi-moor or Peak District. How can this be Spanish?

Yet there are of course colours that comfort you. On that same journey from Palma at different times of the year are the oleander that adorn the central reservation or the blossoms of almond trees. And then there are the bougainvillaeas of streets and gardens and the omnipresence of the orange tree. None of them uniquely Spanish, but they conform to the perception of vista by vibrancy, to a four-colour separation of the mind's eye rather than the black-and-white print of hill and wasteland.

But there is one thing you might have expected to see. It's something lurking from the days of knowing smatterings of Spanish by Western. Wrong country admittedly, but still Spanish. Rio Grande. River. Take off from Palma and look once again at the island below. What you will not see are rivers. For in the limestone and porous fabric of the island, most of the water goes underground. It's not a comment on being Spanish, but it is on being Mallorcan - island with no rivers.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Beth Orton "Someone's Daughter" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIoC_Ya6WRo). Today's title - there was no question mark; it was covered by UB40 but who was it originally?

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