What-If: War and Mallorca's tourism

It's a game we can all play, the what-if game. Ultimately futile, it is nonetheless a game which can be instructive in explaining how things came to be as they are; these things being Mallorca's tourism. It's a game I have been playing again, and the starting-point, strangely enough perhaps, was golf. It was the old course in Alcúdia which set me thinking.

That course was opened in 1934. It closed two years later. Thirty years after it had been opened, Mallorca got what was truly its first golf course. Had it not been for war, there would have been several courses by the time that Son Vida opened. Of that, I think you can be certain. War and what was to follow until Spain began to wake up in the 1950s disrupted the development of tourism in Mallorca, and so my thesis, if you can call it such, is that it was war, as much if not more than the dynamics of the late 1950s, which created the Mallorca of the 1960s and thus the Mallorca of today.

The Alcúdia golf course was part of the planned urbanisation of an area along the bay. Part tourist, part residential, it mirrored other similar enterprises on the island - the garden city resorts of Son Bauló, Cala d'Or, Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. While one cannot and should not ignore the part played by opportunistic entrepreneurs and bankers in the creation of these resorts and while one can also say that there was no obvious all-island masterplan which brought them about, they were nevertheless the consequence of dual philosophies. One was the garden-city philosophy itself, the harmonious co-existence between living space and the environment. The other was that of the fathers of Mallorca's tourism, most obviously Miquel dels Sants Oliver and Bartomeu Amengual at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth.

These two journalists were alert to the potential of tourism for economic development. Indeed, there was a necessity; diversification was called for because of a crisis in agriculture. They saw the potential, so much so that they conceived a tourism for the summer, which ran counter to the generally held view that tourism was a winter phenomenon. This summer tourism may have been one based on the health benefits of the seaside, but it was still a different way of looking at tourism. It was their contributions which were to inform the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board, a body whose own contribution to tourism history anywhere in the world is pretty much without parallel.

There were obviously some powerful business interests that guided the tourist board, but if one looks back at its records during the early years after its founding in 1905, what emerges is a picture of an organisation working with a co-operative spirit and within - to use a dreadful word - an holistic framework. There was little to guide the tourist board. Yes, there were experiences in France, Italy and Switzerland, but the tourist board was working from almost a blank piece of paper and was doing so in creating an integrated industry for an island with its own specific needs and constraints. One of these constraints was land and so, by association, the environment and fragile nature of an island eco-system. There may not have been a scientific environmental perspective back then, but there most definitely was one that was founded on the island's patrimony, its natural heritage. Sants Oliver had it and perhaps crucially so also did any number of individuals from the arts world who were as important to the tourist board's co-operative spirit as the businesspeople. The resorts that emerged in the 1930s were thus in keeping with a guiding philosophy. They sought to balance the needs of construction with those of the island's natural patrimony. But then, war intervened.

It is of course quite legitimate to argue that the many factors of the late 1950s and early 1960s would have conspired to create what was created in any event. There is no escaping the realities of those factors - consumerism, the jet engine, higher standards of living, paid holidays, tour operators and so on. Perhaps it would have happened as it did, but I somewhat doubt it. My argument is that had it not been for war, Mallorca's tourism development would have been organic. It would have taken the creations and attitudes of the 1930s - the garden city resorts, the golf, the awareness of the natural patrimony - allied them to what was evident from the early part of the last century in terms of hotels, predominantly up-market ones, and followed a straighter line in arriving at a different model of tourism. It would thus have been a continuous revision of the original philosophy and one that would have been more sympathetic to that patrimony.

(To be continued tomorrow.)