The Town Which Time Passed By

We may be three years away, but one can presume that in early May 2018 they'll be making a fair old song and dance in the old town of Sineu, and the reason will be the spring fair: it will be seven hundred years since the first one took place. Sineu's fair, considered to be the most important of the Mallorcan spring, holds a very special place in the island's history. It can definitively state that its first fair was held in 1318 and so can claim to be the oldest in the island's "part forana", i.e. anywhere which isn't Palma. The citizens of Inca might take issue with this claim, but as they cannot - because of a lack of accurate documentation - state unequivocally when their spring fair started, Sineu holds the crown. Each early May, therefore, Sineu reclaims an ancient status as the unofficial capital of the "part forana", one that had more official status because of the one-time palace of the kings of Mallorca: having been a Moorish building, it was redeveloped in the early fourteenth century.

Sineu's royal patronage from those times was both usual and unusual. The usual part was that it was one of a number of "royal" villages established by King Jaume II in 1300. The unusual was the fair. Holding one required the granting of royal privilege. Only Sineu and Inca were given this, and the two towns - rivals up to a point - jealously guarded this privilege for nigh on 250 years until Llucmajor, petitioning the Spanish king, was also given the right to have a fair. Even in those days, however, its challenge wasn't straightforward and required the intervention of the courts. Sineu and Inca filed a lawsuit but eventually lost: the tradition of seeking legal redress in Mallorca is as much of a tradition as the island's fairs.

One of the odd things about Sineu is that, despite this old importance, it didn't become one of the large towns in the "part forana". Even now, its population doesn't stretch to 4,000 inhabitants and so is roughly a tenth of that of Llucmajor, which is larger than Inca by around 6,000 residents. Maybe, however, it has been a blessing: Sineu doesn't have some of the ugliness of the industrial developments of the larger towns. Nevertheless, it is a matter of conjecture as to why its development was arrested. It is, after all, right in the very heartland of Mallorca, even if its claim to provide the geographical centre of the island has, once and for all, been dismissed: geographers have established that this is in neighbouring Lloret de Vistalegre. Perhaps, however, it is this centrality which was the issue. Inca was on the route from Palma to the port of Alcudia, not so far to the north, while Manacor and Llucmajor were both similarly closer to ports.

There is some substance to this theory and it is provided by documentation from the very early days of Mallorca's tourism at the start of the last century. In 1908, the Mallorca Tourist Board considered a number of projects for the improvement of the transport infrastructure. One of these involved the building of a "carretera" (main road) from Sineu to Alcudia. However, even once this was indeed built, it was not direct as it had to pass through Maria de la Salut and Santa Margalida. Quite simply, Sineu's location was not terribly advantageous.

Likewise, in tourism terms, Sineu was all but neglected. Casting an eye over the annals of the tourist board up until the outbreak of the Civil War, there is no mention of the town, other than when the need for the road cropped up, and this oversight included the fair. One of the earliest initiatives in tourism development (from the 1920s) was that of promoting fairs and fiestas. Sineu's, it would appear, was not one of them. Consequently, and with coastal and mountain tourism having become the fads of the pre-war years, Sineu, minus burgeoning industries such as those of Inca and Manacor, remained firmly wedded to its agriculture.

And it is this farming tradition which forms the basis for today's Sineu fair. It is a tradition associated with most of the island's spring and autumn fairs, but in Sineu it is absolutely central, as befits a town with its central, rural location. It is a fair which represents the peasant economy of old Mallorca and one which, in terms of authenticity, has few rivals. It is a fair of former times that celebrates the agriculture of Mallorca's plain: a celebration that goes back almost seven hundred years.