What If? Tourism after the wars

1936 and all that. But what might have happened to tourism had things after 1936 been rather different? What-ifs are pure hypothesis but they are still intriguing, and when one considers how Mallorca's tourism was disrupted by 1936, it is intriguing to wonder whether the island's tourism would be like it is today.

Mallorca's tourism can be traced back to the Archduke Luis Salvador, who invited a collection of intellectual and creative friends to Ramon Llull's Miramar in Valldemossa. This was in the nineteenth century, though, and it was a very specific and high-brow type of tourism. Mallorca's first tourism era as such began in the 1920s. There have been two tourism eras, because of what got in the way to cause there to be two.

Of articles I have written previously, there have been those about the old golf course in Alcúdia, about the first tourism seaplane flights from France to Alcúdia, about the first passenger flights from Italy to Puerto Pollensa, about the abandonment of plans for the rail extension to Alcúdia. These are all linked to 1936 which meant that the golf course was built on, the French flights ceased, the Italian ones started and the railway wasn't to be given serious further attention for 70 years.

War obviously has an impact on economic life, and tourism was an economic victim in that it was killed stone dead in 1936. It didn't help that the Civil War was followed immediately by the World War, but, and notwithstanding the relatively small amount of tourism in the 1950s, there was a hiatus of some 25 years between the two tourism eras. War can explain or excuse only so much, though; the rest of the explanation was political and economic.

Accepting the fact of both the Civil and World Wars and their intervention in the first and nascent Mallorcan tourism era, what if the political regime had been more benign, less inward-looking and less economically parochial from the end of World War Two?

A different type of regime wouldn't have brought about the earlier creation of mass tourism, as this was only possible once air transport and general living standards in northern Europe were sufficiently advanced to allow it, but had it been progressive from the late 1940s, more outward-looking and embraced what had started to be shaped before 1936, a different tourism would in all likelihood have been developed.

From the examples above, take golf. This only truly reappeared on the Mallorcan agenda under a tourism plan of the 1980s. Arguably, this was too late, as competitors, such as Portugal, were already far more advanced. Yet had it been given genuine attention much earlier, Mallorca's winter tourism might now not suffer to the extent that it does.

Then take the railway and the flights: infrastructure on Mallorca was neglected; Air France didn't come back; the Italian flights ceased in 1943 and there weren't more (British) until the second half of the 1950s. Had, however, there been a resumption of flights into Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa and had the northern rail line been established, the accessibility of the north of Mallorca would have been considerably greater than it was and would have altered the balance between north and south in tourism development.

But perhaps most important of all would have been how tourism as a whole would have developed. Mass tourism to Mallorca, the second era, came about through economic necessity, once Franco's technocrats had convinced him that autarky and parochialism were not the way forward. And it led to wholesale environmental destruction in the mad dash to create an economy worthy of the name. Had, though, general economic management not been the total disaster it was until the change of tack in the late '50s and had tourism development been smoother and more along French lines, might the massive resorts have ever been created?

The French model of tourism differs to that of Mallorca and to parts of Spain. Its relatively few purpose-built resorts, such as Cap d'Agde, primarily came into being only as a response to the challenge posed by the Costas. Otherwise, it is more diverse and less ruled by interests of hoteliers.

Mallorca may have ended up with exactly the same tourism it did in the 1960s, regardless of the style of political regime, but it might not have. Had the development been more on a straight line of a continuous tourism era (save for the interruption of war) and had there not been the economic need for the suddenness of what occurred in the 1960s, Mallorca's tourism and indeed whole economy might now be very different.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.