Brainless In Plaza

You know those photos you get of solitary beaches, the turquoise sea lapping against the velvety white sands, a rare fluffy cloud in a sky of deep blue partially hidden by palm trees gently bent by the prevailing wind. These beaches don't really exist, or rather they do exist in adverts for luxury holidays in Sunday colour supplements. No one goes to such beaches, unless they happen to have been washed up on them following the sinking of a cruise ship, and they find, to their horror, that the idyll is disturbed by a marauding bunch of English public schoolboys roaring around with pigs' heads and claiming speaking rights when one of them grabs the conch.

Were anyone to actually find such a beach by regular means, they would be able to indulge themselves in what one is supposed to indulge oneself in on such beaches and in the holiday resorts that accompany them. For these resorts would be of the hut under the palms variety. Smiling natives would serenade guests with the accompaniment of some primitive string instrument as the sun dips towards the horizon and everyone drinks fruit cocktails out of a coconut shell. And nowhere would there be a road, a pavement or any mess; just miles upon miles of velvety white sands on which the holidaymaker can walk - without shoes.

Barefoot on holiday is one thing if you are indeed at an isolated beach or resort. It is quite another when you aren't. I'm sorry to have to say this but, for all the paradise island stuff, Mallorca doesn't actually have resorts like this. True, there may be small seaside enclaves that haven't been invaded by concrete, buildings, roads, traffic and enormous numbers of people, but for the most part the resorts have been invaded thus. Yet despite this, you will still find people walking around without shoes. Walking around as though they were in a second life of Sunday colour supplementing.

What on earth are they thinking of? Why, for example, would you knowingly walk through a square such as Puerto Pollensa's plaza or cross a main road like that which runs parallel to the bay of Alcúdia without anything on your feet? One can understand it if drink has been taken and flip-flops have been carelessly mislaid, but to consciously undertake the walk back from the beach, minus footwear, requires that the barefooted have never been made aware of all those complaints regarding the movement of Rover's bowels. Or blindness as to the presence of a shattered Saint Mick bottle, a volume of vomit and the remnants of what the bin men managed to scatter around.

There is a simple enough answer to this bizarre practice. It lies with those photos of solitary beaches. Solitary the beaches in Mallorca may not be, huts under palms there may also not be, but the holiday mind assumes they are there. The holiday mind manages to make a leap of imagination - and faith, when it comes to walking barefoot - in perceiving the urbanised resorts of Mallorca as though they were stuck in the middle of the Pacific with development confined to no more than Robinson Crusoe's karaoke bar.

Brainless in plaza it is to bare the soles to a potentially tetanoid tread, but then brainlessness equates to holiday. It's fair enough, I suppose. For the same reason as the trainers may be discarded en route back to the hotel (" 'cos I'm on 'oliday"), so the shirt is left behind when planning a trip to the supermarket. You can't or wouldn't go to the Tesco in Watford stripped to the waist, but on holiday you can. Not that there is a Tesco, which may be part of the problem. Were there, then one suspects that great acres of exposed white flesh gone pink wouldn't be lumbering about the local supermarkets gathering bags of crisps.

What you have in the resorts is a reconciliation that has never been made. What came first, the resort or the non-resort? Regardless of the answer, the collision between working and residential urbanisation and holidaymaking has always created a tension of mutual living space. The two are basically incompatible. Not because there is disharmony, but because of the co-existence of two opposing cultures - one on holiday and one that isn't.

It is fully understandable that there is brainless in plaza. The holidaymaker makes of the urbanised resorts what he or she can. Ideally and idyllically, he or she would be on that solitary beach. But this isn't possible. The local culture may look upon holidaymakers as though they were mad, but when this local culture heads off for its holidays it does the same and has to try and reconcile its colliding with someone else's urbanisation. And it does so flip-flop-less.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.