Tales Of The Llevant: Cala Ratjada

In 1956, members of the council in Santa Margalida took a journey eastwards. The purpose of the journey was to offer the award of "illustrious son" of the town in exchange for money to assist in the building of a new town hall. The illustrious son in question rarely bothered with his home town by then. He is said to have declined the offer anyway, citing financial problems, which seemed a little unlikely. He was, after all, resident in a sizable pile on the north-eastern coast of Mallorca. He was and had been for years intimately associated with virtually everything that moved or didn't move in Mallorca. He was hardly strapped for cash. He was Joan March, founder of the Banca March, Franco's banker, all-round rogue-come-philanthropist. The sizable pile was and still is in Cala Ratjada.

There is an old photo from 1905. It shows Cala Ratjada as it then was. Some fishermen's cottages are set back just from the sea, there are two fishing boats in the small port area, the coast itself is rocky and there is a rudimentary walkway/promenade with a low wall. In the background is a building which rises from behind a wooded area. It is that sizable pile. Or at least it was the first stage of its construction. Dates vary as to its completion but certainly by 1916 it was finished and acquired its full grandeur. It was the Palacio de Joan March. The photo was taken on the day of March's wedding to Leonor Servera Melis, who was a native of Capdepera, i.e. the municipality of which Cala Ratjada is a part.

In the photo there is another building, more modest than the palace but definitely much grander than the fishermen's cottages. It was to come to belong to Antoni Maura, the only Mallorcan to have ever been prime minister of Spain. By 1905, Cala Ratjada, for reasons that have no obvious explanation, had become the summer haunt of the island's rich and powerful. They built fine houses or, in the case of Joan March, an entire palace.

It is well chronicled that the then tiny fishing port became the summer destination of choice for Mallorca's elite, but it is not well chronicled as to why. Was it simply because Cala Ratjada is about the furthest point in Mallorca away from Palma? Possibly so. Possibly it was just because it offered a quiet location for relaxation and a diversion from business and political concerns. Or possibly there was another reason. Cala Ratjada became an unofficial seat of power, the elite able to meet in summertime, drawn by the already immensely influential Joan March, who in 1905 was still years away from founding the bank or being involved with the Trasmediterranea shipping company or indeed with the early electricity industry that was to eventually evolve into GESA.

Capdepera town hall was doubtless delighted to welcome this elite. March was accepted with open arms. There is no official record of there ever having been a town hall agreement, but in 1916, the palace completed, the road that runs by it was named after him. It led from an avenue named after his wife. In 1953, Capdepera, unlike Santa Margalida, didn't want anything in exchange. They named March adoptive son of the town.

In the history of Mallorca's tourism, Cala Ratjada doesn't really feature until it underwent a transformation in the 1960s. In one respect this is curious. It was, after all, a place that had been earmarked for summer vacationing by the island's rich. But perhaps this was why there was no obvious development in the inter-war years, other than a hotel, as there was in some other parts of Mallorca. The rich wanted to keep the place to themselves.

Though Cala Ratjada is described in clichéd terms as having been a picturesque tiny fishing village at the turn of the twentieth century, it wasn't as much of a backwater as might be thought. Its port was important, more so than Alcúdia's not so far away around the Cap Farrutx and so in the bay of Alcúdia. Its importance lay with the transporting of two key products - the "llata" wicker works that were made from palmitos and for which Capdepera became famous in the late nineteenth century and the "mares" stones for building purposes.

Last week that old tradition of the llata and the new one of tourism came together. On the beach of Cala Agulla, there was a day of palmito collection, as there has been for several years now, and of its working into wicker products - the "obra de pauma" - a tribute to a facet of the local economy which sustained Cala Ratjada before the arrival of tourism. In his palace, Joan March no doubt used to once draw on his cigar while sitting in his wicker chair.