A Good Tradition

What do you understand "traditional" to mean? Traditional as it is applied to resorts in Mallorca. There is a thread on the Holiday Truths Majorca forum about this. It's interesting for various reasons, one of which even has to do with the original enquirer's wish to find somewhere "traditional".

But to come to the question. Traditional. Define and discuss. Here is what the Concise Oxford has to say: "traditional: of, based on, or obtained by tradition". Clear as mud, but it is only a dictionary. One has to read into that and create one's own version. Traditional is somewhere that retains a Mallorcan tradition. Er, yes. And that is? Perhaps it is easiest to run through a thesaurus for words that might qualify as being associated with "traditional": quaint, quiet, sleepy, non-commercialised, old. Or perhaps one can reach for the vagueness of "Spanish" or the more exact but still opaque "typical Mallorcan". None of this gets one very far. It could be more fruitful to try a process of imagery, one composed of cottages, of yellow or terracotta walls, of blue shutters and whitewashing, of bougainvillaea and hibiscus, of unhurried and ramshackle bars and restaurants, of a sucking pig slowly being roasted, of old men in the market square talking for hours, of a coffee that takes hours to drink, of religious icons and imposing churches, of summer nights with an accompaniment of the rhythm of the cicada and of pipe music and the dance of the ball de bot.

All of this imagery exists and to varying degrees the resorts maintain it, even if it is often lost amidst the palaces of tourism, the contemporary greyness of residential apartment blocks and the noise of the moto and the karaoke. Maybe to attempt to define "traditional" is an impossible task. Ultimately, it falls to individual perceptions, and so you get some of the suggestions contained in that thread, though how Can Picafort can creep into the list does take some leap of imagination. But maybe not. There is another side to traditional, which resides in the tradition of holiday. To that end, Can Pic, The Mile and other places are traditional; just in a completely different sense of the word.

Locally, there are pockets of tradition. Barcares and Morer Vermell could well satisfy the thesaurus demand for sleepy and quaint; Cala San Vicente might if one could hold only certain images, such as that of Bar Mallorca, the steps and restaurants leading down past Hotel Niu to the cove and the view across Molins bay. But the first two named hardly qualify as resorts, and the Cala, in addition to the hotel and new apartment stock of its frontline, has an interior of tree-lined streets of residences that might be found in a well-heeled part of the Home Counties.

Puerto Alcúdia is not just The Mile, despite what some might think, but the port area has little that could be said to be "traditional". Puerto Pollensa, on the other hand, is a leading contender. It has, if one is being strictly objective, only a minority of elements that might satisfy the definition. But despite the Dakota-isation and Taylor Woodrow-ism, stop for a moment and consider the church square, the Illa d'Or, the cottages of the pinewalk. Here there is some of that tradition. And then there is something intangible, something that makes the defining of "traditional" an exercise of the abstract. There is a feel. It is this, more than anything, that would make Puerto Pollensa the leading contender. But can any resort be said to be traditional? There are only degrees of less overt and less blatant statements of the excesses of mass tourism. "Traditional" is really the preserve of the old towns and of the hinterland.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Saint Etienne, but you can't hear the song only see the video, so I won't bother with the youtube. Today's title - who was this female singer who burned fairly brightly for a while at the end of the '80s?

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