On The Road Again: Road and building works

It will come as a surprise to you, I realise, but there are some things I don't know about. And there are some things that are so terminally dull that I have absolutely zero desire to find out about them. In the normal course of journalistic events, I might be prepared to research, but when it comes to the science of surfacing roads, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to disappoint you.

This said, I do seem to recall that when there was some disgruntlement with road surfacing occurring in Palma that wasn't taking place in winter, the argument went that the work needed to be done when the weather was warm, or indeed stinking hot. Is there some scientific sense to this argument? Quite possibly there is, and as I haven't a clue what I'm talking about when it comes to road surfacing I'm not about to say it's rubbish, except to wonder why some road surfacing is therefore done when it isn't stinking hot.

All this leads me, or would do, had I been able to get along the roads leading to them, to Alcanada and Barcarès in Alcúdia. I was able to get into the bustling heartland of Alcanada the other day, but only by taking a detour through the narrow and twisty lanes that pass for roads that aren't the main road, which was being resurfaced. Fortunately, Alcanada is that far off the beaten track that it has only one hotel and a couple of apartments complexes, which means only the occasional coach. Unfortunately, I encountered it. On the narrow and twisty lanes.

Despite recalling the it-must-be-hot-to-resurface-roads propaganda, it did occur to me to wonder why they were doing this just as the summer really hots up and more tourists arrive. I wondered the same thing when I found the road to Barcarès blocked by the huge leviathans that are road-resurfacing machines. Unlike Alcanada, there isn't really an alternative route, so I gave up. It can wait for another day, or year.

Much work in tourist areas is verboten during the tourist season, except, it would appear, road works. Building work is meant to cease. But it doesn't always cease. Special dispensation can be granted to extend it to mid-June. This was, for example, the town hall's fallback position in Puerto Pollensa when for a time it looked as though work on the church square and roads off might indeed stretch well into the season.

Now beyond mid-June, the poor people of Portocolom have discovered that building works, with the attendant noise and mess, are continuing. Despite being verboten, the town hall has seen fit to stop only one of some ten separate works.

Along the coast from Portocolom, in Porto Cristo they are about to prove that whereas putting things up in summer might be outlawed pulling them down isn't. The Balearics Supreme Court has decreed, in its infinite wisdom and once and for all, that the Riuet bridge must be demolished. As in, well, any time now. The "indignados" of Porto Cristo, many of its population, have had a day out to Palma in order to protest outside the court building. Demolition is a bridge too far. The bridge over the river why (now).

Demolishing the bridge now is about as absurd as having closed it for the summer. It was after all built in the first place in order to counter the traffic chaos in Porto Cristo, so now they've decided to add to it even further. One suspects that members of the Supreme Court have weekend holiday homes elsewhere, such as in Andratx or Soller, i.e. about as far from Porto Cristo as you can get in Mallorca.

Though knocking the bridge down now is plainly daft, I do have some sympathy for building things up in summer, so long of course as it's nowhere near my backyard. Suspending work for six months at a stretch seems like an incredibly inefficient thing to do, to say nothing of the complications it can cause in terms of employment and financing.

But the suspension of works encapsulates, as do road works in summer, the dilemma of tourist areas in Mallorca - that of attempting to reconcile tourism with the normal course of infrastructure development and construction. Tourists, quite naturally, have no wish to listen to drilling or to watch a bridge falling down, but much of this work is done because of tourism. It is the endless quandary; that of balancing the needs of the temporary visitor with the requirements of working towns. It is the latter that the tourist is perhaps too often unaware of; that where they stay are towns, just like the ones they live in.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.