A Summer In Mallorca: Heat and novels

According to one particular website, the highest temperature ever recorded in Spain was in Murcia on 29 July 1876. It was 47.8C. After this is another high in Murcia, a slightly lower 47.2C on 4 July 1994. Then come Badajoz in Extremadura on 26 June 1864 with 47C and three positively shivering recordings of only 46.6C at Moron de la Frontera (Seville) on 19 July 1967 and on 23 July 1995 in both Cordoba and Seville. Palma, which for the purposes of these records appears to mean the whole of the Balearics, is quite a long way off the pace: 40.6C at Son Sant Joan airport on 30 July 1983.

You do have to be careful with these records though. The Murcia 1876 temperature is considered unreliable as indeed are ones which have been pretty well discarded from meteorological history - the 51C and 50C of Seville in 1876 and 1881. The Murcia 1994 temperature, however, is reliable. Officially, it is the highest temperature ever recorded: 116.9 in old Fahrenheit money. It is important in the context of Mallorca's weather, too. At the time of that particular ultra-heatwave, the highest temperature in Mallorca was registered, and it was 44.2C in Muro: the Palma high eleven years before didn't even come close.

When the temperatures get as high as they do, though not as high as 1994, they are treated as unusual events and so evidence of something or other. They may indeed be evidence of something or other, or they may just be relatively common. Those unreliable highs back in the nineteenth century will have had some basis in meteorological fact and they would have doubtless coincided with exceptionally high temperatures in Mallorca, though what these might have been is not possible to say as there are no records.

As I write this, the thermometer not far away inland is - according to AEMET - nudging the 40 mark. It nudged it and passed it three years ago at roughly the same time of year. Evidence of something or other. Which may just be that this summer will bear a great deal of similarity to that of 2003: Spain's hottest in terms of duration if not specific records. For almost three months, nighttime temperatures didn't fall below 20C, while daytime highs were not under 30C. If this summer does turn out to be a virtual mirror of 2003, then expect an almighty great storm as 31 August becomes 1 September, which is what happened that year.

It would be nice, mainly because I have a like of unearthing less than well known anniversaries, to be able to apply an anniversary to this summer's weather, but there isn't one which suggests itself. Instead, and because the high temperatures will inspire some to wax lyrically or more likely in clichéd terms, there is a summer literary anniversary which should be remembered. The year in question was forty years ago, so 1975. It was the year when a novel appeared entitled "A Summer in Mallorca". Or more accurately, it was "Un estiu a Mallorca", as its author was Majorcan, and his name was Llorenç Villalonga.

For the uninitiated, Villalonga is generally regarded as Mallorca's greatest novelist. As such, and because he was mightily influenced by the likes of Proust, he wasn't the sort to be inclined to pay overly much attention to the accuracies or otherwise of weather records (which had, by the time he wrote the novel, been systematically kept for some years by then). Instead, he devoted an entire novel - his last - to what was in essence an ironic refuting of George Sand's "A Winter in Mallorca", or "Un hiver à Majorque", given that she was French.

It's a curious novel in which Sand herself is referred to and blended with an of-the-times female writer, a character called Sílvia Ocampo, whose resemblance to the real Sílvina Ocampo (note the distinguishing "n") is only passing, other than that the character is a writer.

Villalonga based his novel forty years before he wrote it, and so the Mallorca of his summer wasn't vastly different to how it would have been had Sand spent a summer rather than a winter in Mallorca: a hundred years hadn't really changed Mallorca fundamentally.

It would have been more instructive, for those of us in contemporary tourism times, had the novel been based in 1975, but then it couldn't have been because in effect Villalonga was placing Sand in 1935, a time when more aristocratic women were still to the fore, which wasn't the case by 1975. So his summer in Mallorca is only partially (very partially) a reflection of a Mallorcan summer as it now is, and so, as with other aspects of modern Mallorca, there is a great work about the summer waiting to be written. Until such time, we'll have to content ourselves with descriptions of how hot it is.