Join Together

Starting on Saturday, Alcúdia will be celebrating its annual Sant Jaume fiesta, the events climaxing on Saturday 25 July, the day of Sant Jaume, with the fireworks that bring the fiesta to its close. There is a further dimension to this year's fiesta. Indeed there is a double celebration. It is eighty years since the town hall building was opened and thirty years since local democracy took off following the period of Franco's dictatorship. To mark these anniversaries, there will be an act of commemoration during the fiesta week and the presentation of a book that looks at the building of "la Sala", the town hall.

These two anniversaries - of 1929 and 1979, half a century apart - are in themselves significant as they top and tail, as it were, the period of descent into turmoil, Franco and finally the restoration of the monarchy and the establishment of democracy. Though overshadowed by who and what was to come, in 1929 Spain was governed by another dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. He presided over the inauguration of the building, praising its "sumptuous construction". He was accompanied by Jaime, one of the sons of King Alfonso XIII. It was an ironic pairing, and whether Jaime knew anything of the compliments lavished on la Sala by Primo de Rivera is doubtful; he was a deaf mute. By the time of the inauguration, 10 September 1929, Primo de Rivera was on his last dictatorial legs. He had assumed the dictatorship in 1923, thanks to the support of Alfonso, but the king was reaching the point of wanting to sack him. A few months later in early 1930, the army failed to back the dictator: he resigned and died in March of that year; the Republic was declared the following year; the monarchy abolished and the path to Civil War created.

Primo de Rivera is sometimes considered a bit of an irrelevancy. He was far from that. Franco learned from his regime and was thus ruthless in crushing unions and Catalanism in a way that his predecessor had not been. Primo de Rivera had also headed a period of economic advance, much of it based on extravagant public spending, which partly contributed to the collapse in the peseta and to his demise. But that spending was what brought about not only la Sala but also significant other works in Alcúdia. Much restoration and construction in the town dates to the period of the first dictatorship.

La Sala was not to be the location of an actual "ayuntamiento" ("ajuntament" in Catalan) of Alcúdia until 1979. That was when the first democratically selected mayor, Pere Adrover, came to office - fifty years after the building which houses the town hall's meetings had been praised by a former dictator for its sumptuousness and for being "extremely artistic". The words "ayuntamiento" and "ajuntament" come from the Castilian and Catalan verbs ayuntar and ajuntar, meaning to join. It took half a century for them to truly join together in la Sala.

Information on the Sant Jaume fiesta and also the Sant Jaume and Santa Margalida fiestas in Sa Pobla is on the WHAT'S ON BLOG - http://www.wotzupnorth.blogspot.com.


Swine flu
How's your swine flu doing? Want some? Then come to Mallorca. Only kidding. Not that the German newspaper "Bild" seems to be kidding. It is saying that around ten cases of swine flu in Germany have their origins in Mallorca, specifically in the Playa de Palma area. The local health authorities on the island are flatly denying that it has been contracted in Mallorca. Officially, there are, to date, six cases that have been reported in Mallorca and two more in Ibiza and one in Menorca.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Jackson Five, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYx3BR2aJA4. Today's title - who, er, yes?

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