Two Seasons In One Day: Mallorcan spring

If you had been awake at 06:14 this morning, you could have stood in your garden or on your balcony and greeted the start of spring. In fact you wouldn't have needed to be in the garden or on the balcony as spring would have been all around you. At 06:13 it was still winter, the next minute it wasn't.

The time would have depended on your operating according to Central European Time. To this end, had by any chance you been in Amsterdam, you would have been able to put on your best East End, music-hallish singing voice, rush into the Volkspark and sing "When it's spring again, I'll bring again tulips from Amsterdam". Max Bygraves' classic was, most opportunely, a double A-side with "You Need Hands", the hands of a clock ticking to 06:14 and bringing forth a burst of Max from the other side of the disc.

I can't say that I have ever seen a tulip in Mallorca. No doubt there are some, and no doubt someone will let me know that I am an idiot and that there are whole fields of them lurking somewhere, but the tulip has failed to register on what is not admittedly a particularly alert radar when it comes to the local floral world. Daffodils yes, indeed there are some in my garden, now on their way out and preparing for their annual meeting with a lawnmower (they actually grow in the lawn for some reason that has nothing to do with me as I most certainly didn't put them there).

The Mallorcan spring, like the Mallorcan autumn, is an odd affair, for the simple reason that it doesn't officially exist. There may be references to the equinox and all that and an acknowledgement that spring has sprung, if only by the national TV channel putting "primavera" onto the introduction to its weather reports, but otherwise spring is still technically winter until 30 April.

Max's clock hands come in useful right on the stroke of midnight on the last day of April, as one second past midnight summer begins. Mallorca has two seasons - summer and not-summer, and summer is between 1 May and 31 October. Tourism and its seasons (or rather, season) have disrupted a fundamental principle of nature. Four seasons become two, or in effect only one.

Rather like periods of the day are determined by law, as in, for instance, a Mallorcan evening officially being between eight and eleven (albeit that everyone has forgotten this change to the law), so officialdom determines the seasons. 1 May is summer, which does rather go against convention which normally has it that summer starts 51 days later, except on those occasions when it is 50 days later. Fortunately for the sake of 51-day-later consistency, the Mallorcan summer solstice will in fact begin at eight minutes past one on the morning of 21 June this year, not that this matters of course, as the Mallorcan summer will, by this time, have been well underway for almost two months.

The movability of the starting-points of the astronomical seasons is such that, you may have realised, spring has come a day earlier than is usually thought to be the case. This said, in meteorological circles, spring has been with us for almost three weeks, though these meteorological circles don't appear to stretch to the national Spanish TV weather forecast, which is stubbornly astronomical and equinoctial.

By the same meteorological token, summer starts on 1 June, so the Mallorcan summer can be said to kick in only a month earlier than is normally thought to be the case, rather than 51 (or 50) days earlier. Because of all these alternative definitions, it is perhaps understandable that the Mallorcans have simply done away with a couple of seasons altogether and made their own up.

Whenever spring does or doesn't start, or whether it exists or it doesn't, there are certain signs, other than early-shooting daffodils, that spring is with us, and the most obvious is the arrival of the pollen. Pine trees, olive trees, nettles, lichwort and sticky-weed, they all toss that yellowy-greeny stuff around that attaches itself to car windscreens and terraces. And to washing.

So you know it's spring by the fact that having hung the washing out to dry, you have to put it straight back into the wash. But then it isn't really spring because it's still winter. Four seasons in one day? In Mallorca, there can be no such thing.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.