Prefab Sprout: Colonia Sant Pere

I once had a brainstorm in a shop's music department. I had gone in with the intention of buying a Primal Scream CD. When I got home, I realised that I had one by Prefab Sprout. I could only attribute the error to some form of temporary alphabetic dyslexia. Or more likely, the CDs had been next to each other in the rack and I hadn't been paying attention.

Character similarity apart, Primal Scream and Prefab Sprout bore no similarity, especially as Paddy McAloon had by now embarked upon his reinvention as a singing cowboy; in total contrast, therefore, to Bobby Gillespie. You might find it odd that the decidedly odd little coastal town of Colonia Sant Pere should bring this recollection to mind, but trust me, there is some sense as to why it should.

Colonia Sant Pere is one of the last stops on the bay of Alcúdia. Being one of the last stops, no one takes a great deal of notice of it, which probably helps to explain its oddness. The great sweep of the bay has at either end rocky coastline and mountainous elevation. In between are the miles of virtually unbroken sandy beach that Puerto Alcúdia, Playa de Muro and Can Picafort boast.

This sandy beach starts to break down as you head east past Can Picafort. There are still stretches of beach, including an artificial one in Colonia, but rocks become more evident as do small coves dotted along the bay as it reaches its end at Cap Farrutx. Colonia is Mallorca resort land that time forgot, rather like its neighbours Son Serra de Marina and the disturbingly named Betlem which, even if its name wasn't derived from Bedlam, sounds as though it should have been.

If the resorts of the bay of Alcúdia were rock groups, then Puerto Alcúdia would be Primal Scream and "Get Your Rocks Off". Colonia, on the other hand, would be Prefab Sprout, either in its sweetly gentle "Steve McQueen" phase or once McAloon had decided he was Jesse James with the Steve McQueen later-life full set. It is Wild West resort land without the wild, a one-horse town just like Son Serra except when Son Serra's beach is full of horses from Rancho Grande, the owner of which I once described, in good Bon Jovi terms, as a cowboy on a steel horse (he rides a quad as well as a horse, you see).

Colonia Sant Pere didn't exist until the late nineteenth century. It was a colony created specifically so that people could move from the island's interior at a time when there was a need for new parts of the island to be settled and cultivated. It went into decline and between 1940 and 1970 its population fell by a quarter. Tourism revived Colonia but only up to a point. Off the main highway between Alcúdia and Artà by several kilometres of narrow road, it has never been somewhere capable of supporting anything more than a small tourism industry. Nevertheless, in the late 1990s came the expansion of its marina together with another development - tourist bungalows.

The first few bungalows were made of wood but then a whole load more - prefabs - sprouted up, creating a tourist enclave like a superior Jaywick Sands. They could only have emerged in somewhere such as Colonia, stuck away on the bay, right off the beaten track and largely unnoticed by anyone. Except of course that the prefabs didn't go unnoticed. By 2006 the legal system had swung into operation, and six years later a demolition notice hangs over the prefabs that have been unused for years.

The owners have the right to appeal against the Council of Mallorca demolition order, though as the prefabs have apparently been illegal all along, it is hard to see what grounds there are for appeal.

It's a shame. Colonia is a part of weird Mallorca, which is why I like it. It is somewhere, as with Son Serra, that I struggle, as do others, to make sense of. But its oddness is what makes it, and its sense lies with the fact that it isn't a Puerto Alcúdia, full of primal scream and dominating hotels. Colonia is a small, quiet place in which a bloke with a long beard can pluck on an acoustic guitar and sing cowboy songs. It doesn't really have hotels, it doesn't have anything much at all, apart from a strange enchantment, and if this also means some unusual little prefabs, then why not. It is a place that exists outside of Mallorca's hotelism and is evidence as to why this hotelism is not the be all and end all. 


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.