Parasite Of Love: Mallorca's "picadors"

A picador is the horseman who thrusts a lance into the bull during the bullfight. Is he not? He is, but there is another type of picador, one who might possibly be said to still exist but who had his heyday during the years of Mallorca's great tourism boom.

The chances are that, of things you can do over the next few days, you will not be going to the Can March Gallery in Inca on Friday or the town hall in Montuïri on Saturday in order to hear a presentation about a book written in Catalan. It's a shame. As with several other books written about some of the idiosyncrasies of Mallorca during the early boom years, it isn't available in English, but be this as it may. The book in question is by a young Mallorcan historian, Tomeu Canyelles, who first came to my attention when he collaborated with one of Mallorca's leading musicologists, Francesc Vicens, in researching the book "Beatles Made in Mallorca". This complemented a previous work by Vicens, "Paradise of Love", which looked at how pop music and tourism collided in Mallorca in the sixties and into the 1970s. They are two historians who have studied and will doubtless continue to study the ways in which popular culture was shaped and influenced by tourism in the days of innocence and not-so-innocence under the Franco regime. And into this research mix has come the latest work by Canyelles. It is a study of a social phenomenon, one that couldn't have existed without the wave of tourism from countries where attitudes were more liberal than in the Spain of the time. The title of the book in Catalan is "Els Picadors Mallorquins". Its subtitle translates as "seducers and seduced during the touristic boom". "Els picadors mallorquins", the Mallorcan picadors, derived their name not from the bullfight but from the mosquito. A picador is a synonym. You get an unpleasant bite from a mosquito, and the mosquito is a parasite. The picador, it was to become accepted, was a parasite.

So, who was he? You may have already put two and two together. Seducer, seduced, more liberal attitudes, parasite? If not, let's spell it out. The picador was the sleazy, smarmy, greasy Latin lover, the tourist gigolo of legend. He wasn't a myth. He genuinely did exist. And there were few places where he existed in greater number than in Mallorca.

It has been said that the early days of tourism made young Mallorcan men distinctly uncomfortable - probably in more ways than one. They had not previously been exposed to the amount of female flesh that now presented itself. There were many who couldn't handle the cultural and psychological upheaval typified by the bikini once it was legalised. On the other hand, there were many who could handle it, and handling was what they principally hand in mind. And this was a mind firmly devoted to the body and to its pleasures.

The picador's modus operandi was pretty straightforward. Eye up a young foreign girl, use some well-practised foreign phrases, charm her with Latin looks and, with any luck, bingo. The picador's territory was also pretty obvious. The beach was ideal and so was the disco, the latter in some ways better on account of alcohol that was in those days cheaper even than chips and served in measures equivalent to a small bucket.

Once it became apparent, fairly early on during the tourism boom, that this new industry was spawning whole legions of lecherous young men with dodgy moustaches who showered in some concoction that made Brut smell good, moral outrage began to raise its head. The church, never a great fan of tourism in any event, condemned the lack of morality, while, and the reverse of how it is today, British newspapers highlighted the perils of the picador. In the 1960s, the young Mallorcan male was the sexual predator who was worthy of contempt. Nowadays, as we know, the loose morality flies in en masse wearing lads-on-tour t-shirts, heads for Magalluf and gets filmed with its pants down.

However, there was, as with contemporary Magalluf, another side of the coin. Despite the indignant stereotyping by Fleet Street and becoming the target for British comedians and dreadful film spin-offs from sitcoms, the picador had his appeal. Tomeu Canyelles admits that, in some respects, the picador may have actually helped to boost tourism, though by the same token he did very little to give Mallorca a good reputation in the eyes of many, including mostly all other Mallorcans.

The picadors didn't last. Or not in the same way. Many clubs were forced to close because of economic crisis in the mid-1970s, while female attitudes were changing. They were less impressed and less easily won over, while there was also far greater awareness of sexually transmitted disease. The picador story ended at the turn of the 1980s, but it lives on in different ways, and one is Tomeu Canyelles' book.