This article starts out by referring to the book of "Determinations of the faithful town of Alcúdia (1702-1707)". One of these determinations, i.e. decisions, was dated 14 August, 1707. It was a decision to cover the well at the Xara gate in the old town. The reason why was to stop children from throwing stones down the well and to so further prevent costs of having to clean the well up each year.
A question this raises is - where is the Xara gate? It is in fact the gate more commonly referred to as the Porta des Moll, the one in the market square (or Plaça Carles V). The next question is - what does Xara refer to? The word is encountered in different places in Alcúdia. There is a road called Xara which leads out of the town towards Bonaire. The beach next to the marina is sometimes referred to as Xara beach, and the building by the beach, under which are restaurants such as Pippers and El Yate, is the Xara building. So what's the significance?
Xara has different meanings. One of them is a corruption from Arabic to mean Sharia, and thus Sharia Law. This, despite the Arabic history of Alcúdia, is not what is meant. Or at least one assumes not. A xara (also Arabic in origin) is a place with rocky shrubs. Where these rocky shrubs were is anyone's guess, but Alcúdia's xara is almost certainly derived from them.
The point of the article, though, is that well at the Xara (aka Moll) gate. We discover from the article that the well was positioned "106 steps from the cross", i.e. of Sant Jaume church, but where actually was it? It came to have considerable significance in the twentieth century, as it was in fact where the old Balearic Electricity Energy was, a building on the Carles square which, in 1927, was sold to the company Tapices Vidal (tapices meaning tapestries but also fabrics). The well, therefore, was what drove both the old electricity plant (and I doubt many of you will know that there was such a plant right in the old town) and then the factory, which is now a listed building.
The well then took on a greater significance. Enter into its story Pere Mas i Reus (aka Pedro Mas y Reus, after whom the Bellevue Mile is named). Mas y Reus owned the electricity distribution network in Alcúdia. The water from the well was extracted and pumped by electricity to fire this network. In 1933, Mas y Reus bought 198 hectares of land on and by Albufera. It was sold to him by Joaquim Gual de Torrella, the aristocrat who had acquired that land when he bought out what remained of the bankrupt company started by Frederick Bateman (one of the engineers responsible for the draining of Albufera in the second half of the nineteenth century).
What Mas y Reus bought corresponded, more or less, with what is now Alcúdia's main tourism centre. (He was, it should be noted, not the only one involved in the purchase; Jaume Ensenyat was, too.) They set about selling off one hundred plots and also set about creating the golf course, which was shortlived because of the Civil War, and building the Hotel Golf, which today is the Vanity Golf. On this land there was another building, the Club House, which is now the Calypso by Sea Club.
The well was important because it was needed to water the golf course and to provide water to the urbanisation which Mas y Reus and Ensenyat envisaged, but which didn't really get off the ground because of the war and only came to be realised in the 1960s when the land was properly reclaimed from the Albufera wetland. So, a pipeline was created to take the water from the old town, and Mas y Reus and Ensenyat paid Tapices Vidal two centimos of a peseta for each cubic metre for general use and seven centimos for water destined to water gardens.
All of this came to a stop in 1936, but this old well, says the article, has a well-deserved place in the economic development of Alcúdia and of Mallorca in general.
You never know what you might find in fiesta programmes. A bit of history which, I imagine for most people, is all but unknown.
* Photo of the old factory, taken from the programme for this year's Sant Jaume fiestas.
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