The Year Of The Friar: Junípero Serra

The Council of Mallorca has declared that 2013 is to be the year of Fray Junípero Serra. The Franciscan friar, born in 1713 in the town of Petra, acquired his fame by establishing missions in California. His name is as known there as it is in Mallorca. Or not known, as the case may be.

Mallorca does a pretty lousy job of letting people know about the very few Mallorcans with genuine claims to fame. It doesn't need to do much when it comes to Rafael Nadal, he's quite capable of spreading his fame without any local help, but for historical figures, such as the friar, it does need to help. Unfortunately, what help it does give goes largely unnoticed.

If you were to ask a hundred tourists at random if they had ever heard of Serra, what do you suppose their response would be? If you were to ask a hundred Brit expats at random the same question, what would their response be? Junípero who? If you were to then explain that he was a Franciscan missionary to the USA, you should be prepared for a glazing over of the eyes. Sorry to have to say this, but some old monk doesn't really do it in tourist or expat terms.

The historical fame game in Mallorca operates from a pretty small pool and given the fact that famous Mallorcans are, generally speaking, not famous, non-Mallorcans of fame are co-opted with an eye on the main chance of generating tourism revenue; hence, Chopin and his stupid cell at Valldemossa, or the cell that used to be thought to have been his cell but now turns out not to have been.

Serra, three hundred years of his birth and all that, means tourism revenue. Or an attempt at getting some. But where are these tourists going to come from? America, it would be hoped. And more specifically, California. To what extent Serra is known to Americans outside of the sunshine state, though, is a good question. A group of Americans with whom I became acquainted recently had never heard of him. I had suggested that they would probably wish to go to Petra, and of course they hadn't heard of Petra either.

However, one imagines there are goodly numbers of devout American (Californian) Catholics, chomping at the bit to come to Mallorca in order to pay homage. If there indeed are, then they face one small problem; the roundabout way of getting to Mallorca. The Americans of my recent acquaintance came in via Madrid and only managed to get their Iberia connection as scheduled, thanks to Iberia pilots having been kind enough to have been flying to Palma on a day when they weren't flying anywhere else because they were on strike. 

Air Berlin's boss in Spain and Portugal, Alvaro Middelmann, has gone on record as saying that he wishes to develop a route from California, but it still wouldn't mean direct flights. It's a shame. American tourism, of whatever variety, would be an immense boost for Mallorca. Not all Americans are everyone's cup of tea, but overwhelmingly they are unfailingly polite, highly inquisitive and therefore minded to take note of aspects of Mallorca not solely of a beach nature, and more often than not, they are loaded. If Serra is the sprat to catch the American mackerel, then everything should be done to exploit the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth.

One drawback with Serra is that he, as with other figures from the past, has been subjected to revision. Like Columbus (a would-be Mallorcan, some would insist), whose achievements have been sullied by the knowledge that he in effect engaged in a spot of genocide, so Serra's reputation has become tainted. It doesn't play particularly well in the US, or elsewhere come to that, that he treated American Indians in a brutal fashion. If they were going to be converted to Christianity, then they were going to be beaten into conversion, which is pretty much what happened.

There again, back in the eighteenth century, mistreating some heathen natives in the name of the church and of Christ was considered fair enough. Serra can't really be blamed for having been a product of his time. Even those who have criticised him have admitted that when it came to religion and to piety, he was from the top drawer. He was apparently possessed of a formidable intellect and of no little courage. 

2013 will be the year of the friar. At the end of the year though, apart from a few more American tourists having perhaps ventured to Mallorca, will anything have changed? Will non-Mallorcans be any the wiser and know who Junípero was? Well, will they?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.