Mapping Mallorca's Imagination

Cartographic precociousness has left its impression on me. When a child, I drew a map of our village. It hadn't occurred to me at the time - it wouldn't have, as I wasn't cognizant of such politico-arcanum - that I had created a socio-geographic representation. The higher land of the village, to its southerly side, was more than just topographically elevated. It was the domain of the grand, the villa, the church, the upper-class landowning caste.

This affluent scarp on the Surrey landscape towered over the commercial centre of the village, the High Street in other words, and the modern estate of engineers and teachers, an agglomeration of the aspirational lower to middle class with its pretensions to the acquisitiveness of late 1950s and early 1960s new consumerism.

To the northerly end, and on the wrong side of the tracks, thanks to the Aldershot to Waterloo line that sliced through the village, was the council estate, a post-war south London spillover and a place of cars jacked up on bricks and the occasional gypsy encampment.

My map showed all this. Importantly, it wasn't simply a representation, it was a social document, one that was the basis for stories, most of them outrageous fibs of course, that I invented for the people of my village.

Maps, as maps used to be, were acts of faith. You trusted in their accuracy, as you had no way of verifying them. You could see a map, but you couldn't see the truth of it for yourself. Maps were virtual reality before the term was invented. More than this, because maps were shorn of intimacy, they were templates for invention and imagination. They hid stories and histories.

The map, therefore, has served a dual purpose, that of practicality and that of interpretation. The imagination that was released by maps has, however, become dulled. A trend towards three-dimensionalism hastened the emergence of technologies such as exist today, the most extreme removal of imagination being the obscenity of Google Street View.

Such intimacy, such real reality makes archaic some of the most fabulous creations of the cartographer. It would be impossible for Beck to diagrammatically show the London Underground nowadays. He would be considered an idiot. Yet he achieved what should have been an impossibility - functionalism made from the abstract. And in so doing, his map added power to one of London's most enduring stories, that of the mystery of its old tube stations and lines.

Technology has not, however, replaced the map. It has digitalised it, put it onto mobile phones, zoomed into it and out of it, but the map remains, even in its basic, non-intimate state.

The tourist coming to Mallorca is confronted with map after map after map. It is the single most useful piece of information the tourist can have. Some may indeed app a map, but most don't. They seek the utility of something that never folds properly and that flaps in a breeze. Utility is the key, so much so that a tour operator rep once told me that he and colleagues used to have to clean up transfer coaches on which adverts that had surrounded maps handed out to the newly arrived had been discarded. The tourists would tear the ads off and keep the map. Why? Who knows.

For tourists who don't vandalise their maps, utility is served by being able to locate Bar Brit and its steak and chips and Sky TV on the corner of Calle Ikis and Calle E-griega. An advert without a means of locating an establishment for the unknowledgeable tourist isn't a great deal of use, yet many businesses persist in using media that fail to impart such knowledge.

The local maps, of the resorts and towns, and the maps of Mallorca are almost exclusively only used in a functional way. The other purpose of the map, the interpretation, is rarely deployed you would think. Yet take a look at a map of Mallorca and you see all manner of strangeness. The name places themselves are strange. They should conjure up enquiry, but how many do actually enquire? What is it with, say, Biniali or Bunyola or the innuendo of Búger? What are their stories?

Maps should map the imagination. A map of Mallorca should be a map of Mallorca's imagination.

You may remember a time when maps would be put up on walls and pins would be placed on them to denote this or that. You can still stick a pin in a map. Shut your eyes, and when you've stuck the pin in, off you go. To wherever it might be and to whatever story the place on your map is hiding.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.