Dark Tourism: Cemeteries in Mallorca

How many significant cemeteries would you say there are in Mallorca? If you reckon one or more than one, then I'm afraid you would be wrong. According to the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe (and trust me there is such an association), there are none. Which is a pretty poor show when there are apparently more than 150 significant cemeteries across Europe, 19 of them in Spain.

Since 2010, the European cemeteries route has been mentioned as part of the Council of Europe's cultural itinerary, itself a mark of quality in cultural terms. Of Spain's 19 significant cemeteries, some are where you would expect them to be - Granada, Barcelona, Bilbao and other major towns and cities with a distinctly cultural side to them. Others are in places you might not expect to find them; Lloret de Mar, for example, which boasts a modernist cemetery created at the end of the nineteenth century.

Cemeteries might not be the first thing you think of as being a tourist attraction, but they do have a lot going for them thanks to their architecture, landscaping and social values as well as religious associations. They are also part of a wider tourism movement, the umbrella titles of which are dark tourism, morbid tourism or death tourism. To put it bluntly, death, disaster and destruction are all attractions. Some of the more visited dark tourism sites include New York's Ground Zero and Paris's Pont de l'Alma tunnel (where Princess Diana met her end).

The impulse to visit such sites is not driven by some perverse desire but simply by curiosity and fascination, a point that has been made by two professors at the University of Central Lancashire, Philip Stone and Richard Sharpley, who are experts in dark tourism. The university has its own Institute for Dark Tourism Research and part of what this institute does is to consult on "the appropriate development, management, interpretation and promotion of dark tourism sites, attractions and exhibitions".

Which is all very interesting, though whether there would be a great deal to consult on in Mallorca, I don't know. I'm inclined to think there would in fact be very little; Mallorca doesn't have a great history of death, disaster and destruction. There have been and are some examples: famine, battles, the great Palma earthquake of 1851 (not that this was that great compared with some great earthquakes), Civil War burial sites, but little that is really up there in the macabre stakes. So, Mallorca's dark tourism, were there to be any, would need to rely on the island's cemeteries, none of which, as yet, are deemed significant.

Nevertheless, there are a couple of candidates. Sóller's cemetery has been there since the early nineteenth century. It is as much a park as it is a cemetery, but what is intriguing about Sóller's cemetery is that it offers a social history of the town, of the most notable families and of those who returned to die and to be buried, having gone off, mainly to France, in search of fortune or having been involved in the export trades that helped to make Sóller one of Mallorca's richest towns in the nineteenth century - oranges and olives.

Palma's cemetery, dating from a similar time as Sóller's, has more to commend it in that there is more of a flavour of the macabre. It has catacombs and a wall for the dead of the 1918 flu epidemic, a monument for Franco's brother who was killed in a seaplane crash and who had overseen the development of Puerto Pollensa's military base the year before his death. There are also the tombs for the March family, the most famous member of which was Joan March, Franco's banker, whose death in a road accident in the early 1960s still has something of the mystery about it; was it really an accident?

I have no idea how a cemetery qualifies as being significant. One way may be to join the Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe. Perhaps the Sóller and Palma cemeteries should consider joining if they haven't already. As part of the drive towards cultural tourism, they would add a rather different type of attraction or be better known as an attraction. It could be that they come under the Spanish network of cultural routes. This was founded earlier this year and one of its cultural itineraries is a cemetery route. But Mallorca can often suffer in attempts at developing cultural tourism because it is remote from the mainland. Mallorca needs to get its own cultural route, of which cemeteries would be a part, as might be any other dark tourism that is lurking and of which we might be unfamiliar.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.