Turning Back The Clock: Terrace times

So, Palma town hall is planning to break the midnight terrace curfew. Mayor Isern and his tourism supremo Álvaro Gijón have seen the light, and it needs to stay on past twelve o'clock. "We cannot allow (businesses) to lose the business opportunity caused by the obligation to clear terraces at midnight."

If the town hall goes through with the abandonment of the curfew, it would apply mainly and probably exclusively to tourist area frontlines. It's a move that will doubtless have bar owners in backlines clamouring for a similar dispensation. It could raise charges of discrimination, but it is something.

Apart from bar owners away from the sea fronts, not everyone will be happy, especially if they live above a bar. The midnight curfew has been a compromise, and it has been one of trying to work out a means by which residents (and indeed some tourists) in tourism areas can be accommodated and can get a good night's sleep.

There isn't and never has been a happy medium. Palma, by loosening the regulations, is turning the clock back to a time when residents were disadvantaged. Howls of protest are likely to follow, if it does indeed loosen the regulations. But it would be a loosening very much in line with regional government thinking. As tourism minister Delgado has announced, tourism should no longer be subjugated to urbanism, something that can be interpreted in all sorts of ways.

If Palma goes ahead, there will be calls elsewhere for a relaxation of the midnight rule. Local ordinance governs the operation of terraces in individual municipalities, but changes to local ordinance would run up against a general law, one that defines the parts of a day (and night).

This law, and as far as I am aware it was not re-amended, established during the last administration that "evening" was no longer from eight to twelve but from eight to eleven. It caused a ruckus in Magalluf, Calvià being the only town hall which sought to apply what, for almost everyone, was a totally unknown change to the law. Police went in soon after the law changed, made bars close terraces at eleven, there were protests and everyone promptly forgot about it.

The re-definition of evening was one of a raft of measures brought in by Enviro Man, Miguel Grimalt, daily in the news as he raced across Mallorca in a constant campaign to save the environment in all its facets. The loss of an hour of evening was a confirmation of just how much regulation was being used to make bar owners' lives nigh on impossible.

It was also a confirmation of how little was understood of what many tourists enjoy. In a word, it is fun. It is an impossible compromise, as many other tourists want to be tucked up by midnight, but the possibility to enjoy being up late, sitting outside on a warm summer's night and having a drink was one of the great attractions of "holiday". Along the way, regulators forgot that people came on holiday. A semantic preference for "tourist" has relegated the word association of holidaymaker and fun into virtual non-existence.

Holidays have become sanitised and have lost some of their essence as a consequence. That old romantic Pedro Iriondo, now put out to presidential pasture by the Mallorca Tourist Board, alluded to this when he became president. He reminisced of a time when everyone had happy, smiling faces and there could be night-time barbecues on the beaches, and the police, rather than issuing tickets, would join in. There didn't used to be all the regulation. And if there was, no one took much notice.

Palma's move would not be one of turning the clock back to those more hedonistic days. It would not be one so much with the desires of tourists in mind as with the needs of businesses. And behind the move, one senses the influence of both other regulation and of market change, namely and respectively, the smoking ban and all-inclusives.

A turning back of the clock of a different sort will occur in Calvià, the town hall allowing tiqueteros (PRs) once more. But it is a turning back that comes with a price tag. Calvià's ludicrous tiquetero tax proposal will in all likelihood bring back the worst excesses of tourist harassment. The move is meant to help businesses, but it gives with one hand and takes with another. And unlike longer hours on terraces, it is not a move that most tourists will appreciate, proving that there is indeed no such thing as a happy medium between the wishes of businesses and all tourists.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.


Index for February 2012

Alfredo Rubalcaba is PSOE leader - 6 February 2012
British tourism: reservations down - 26 February 2012
Brochure speak - 1 February 2012
Carnival in Mallorca - 12 February 2012
Charles Dickens, the Mallorcan novel and - 8 February 2012
Class in the Balearics - 7 February 2012
Competitiveness in Mallorca - 21 February 2012
Consumer confidence survey - 15 February 2012
Correbou and tradition - 2 February 2012
Cruise operators and Catalonia tourist tax - 28 February 2012
Culture and expatriates - 10 February 2012
Cyclists and drivers - 24 February 2012
Duke of Palma's court appearance - 27 February 2012
Electricity in Mallorca - 20 February 2012
English in Balearics schools - 3 February 2012
Established since ... - 19 February 2012
French doping satire of Spanish sport - 14 February 2012
Judiciary, Spanish - 23 February 2012
Magalluf new hotels and image - 16 February 2012
Mallorca Tourist Board finances - 18 February 2012
Pesetas - 4 February 2012
Protests - 22 February 2012
Ryanair and Spanish air industry - 9 February 2012
Social media and news - 13 February 2012
Terraces opening after midnight - 29 February 2012
Tiqueteros in Calvia - 25 February 2012
Tourism law - 11 February 2012
Winter weather - 5 February 2012, 17 February 2012