The Pirates Of Ponsance

I blame Robert Newton. Did he ever actually utter the line - "belay there, Jim lad"? Probably not. You can go further back - to J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Captain Hook - but Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver was what propelled the pirate into the common Sunday-afternoon-black-and-white-film-on-telly consciousness, thus setting off a trail that has passed through the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Johnny Depp to now a hotel in Santa Ponsa.

Mallorca has long done pirates. Many of its old fortifications were designed with them in mind, not as entertainment but as a means of defence. Actual pirates, rather than pretend ones, remained on the scene until alarmingly recently. There is the marvellous story of the Jolly Roger bar in Puerto Alcúdia which, when it first opened in the early 1970s, was told to take down its skull-and-crossbones flag. Presumably, passing post-Newtonian Silvers (and there were some then) might have mistaken it as an invitation for a spot of pirating.

The island's culture is wrapped up in tales of derring-do involving pirates and their being repelled. The grand entertainment that is the annual street theatre of the Moors and Christians battle during Pollensa's Patrona fiesta is a pirate adventure without the entrance fee. Dragut (Turgut) is often portrayed as a sixteenth-century chancer, a pirate in other words. He was far from being so; he was in fact the commander of the Ottoman navy. But the pirate myth has come to suit.

Santa Ponsa has its own Moors and Christians thrash. But it is not one that has been subjected to piratical revisionism. It's the real clash-of-the-religions thing, in that it celebrates the taking of Mallorca by Jaume I and the defeat of the Moors in the thirteenth century as part of the re-conquest of Spain.

A short journey down the Calvia coast, to Magalluf, and there is the Pirates Adventure, the contemporisation for stage of an island history rich in pirate legend.

Santa Ponsa, without a pirate theme as such, now wants to get in on the pirates' act. It is to be the site for more of this stuff of legend and for its commercialisation. The Gran Santa Ponsa Apartments are to become pirate-themed.

"Complementary things" are needed, so says the head of the local hotel association, in order to ward off the competition from other destinations. Like Turkey, for example. Which is where Dragut came from. There's a coals to Newcastle metaphor lurking in this latest piratisation.

Santa Ponsa, it would appear, is to undergo a thematic transformation. The Gran Santa Ponsa will be followed by other theme hotels, thus, according to the hotel association, securing the support of tour operators in guaranteeing flights in March and November. The pirate ships will fly for longer than they currently do. Will they really? Are the pirates not more for the kiddies? How many school holidays are there in November? Or will there be an out-of-season pirates uncut in Santa Ponsa?

The pirates of Ponsance follow in the wake of the Magalluf tourism-reinvention mothership. One of the hotels in line for the Magalluf makeover is already themed; the modern stone-age family hotel, the Antillas Barbados, where you meet The Flintstones - Pedro, Vilma, Pablo and Betty, as they are usually not known.

From the rubble of prehistoric Mallorcan tourism rises the modern stone work of its new age, and it is one full of pirates. The Euro, fast disappearing into the Mediterranean, locked in chests of buried un-treasure, will be replaced by pieces of eight, always assuming they are required and that the pirates are not all-inclusive.

Theming is all well and good, but doesn't it run the risk of becoming a bit out of date? The pirates thing has been done to death. Or maybe it hasn't been. The Flintstones really do now seem like they're from the stone age.

Where next for the theme hotel, then? Bearing in mind a need for internationalism, it would need to make sense to more than just the Brits (or the Irish in Santa Ponsa). A Big Brother-themed hotel perhaps. An X Factor theme maybe, a sort of Eurovision Song Contest hotel; every night is karaoke night with text voting. Dinosaurs and planets of the apes must surely already be being lined up for hotels across Mallorca.

But for now, the pirates have it, so if you go to the Gran Santa Ponsa and see some bloke with one leg and a parrot on his shoulder, be sure to introduce yourself. "I'm Jim Hawkins." "Belay there, Jim lad."


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.