Selling Weirdness: Giants and tall tales

A tour guide of my acquaintance told me about an American couple he was showing around Palma. By chance the tour coincided with the gathering of giants for the Virgin Mary's birthday fiestas. The Americans were suitably impressed. You don't stumble across giants in the US as a rule. Not when history is as short as it is there.

Back in late June, a German friend, visiting with her partner and small children, asked about a what's-on event she had seen mentioned in a local German newspaper. It was the annual walk from Alcúdia town to the hermitage at La Victoria. Would the giants, who take part in the walk, be something the children would like to see? Why not, I suggested. They did see and they enjoyed.

On Monday they were dragging large boxes out of Alcúdia's council chamber and lugging them on to the steps of the town hall building. There were four boxes, just a sample, as there are other boxes which house the heads of the characters who make up the gang that follows the conquering king of Mallorca, Jaume I of Aragon. S'Estol Rei en Jaume is a motley crew of the historically factual and legendary invented. For the presentation of the annual fair's poster, four of the heads were on display - those of the king himself, that of his Moorish opponent, and then two who are inventions: the mad miller and the girl who tries to be nice but who is in fact utterly gross.

Impressed though the Americans were by the history parading through the streets of Palma, this is history of recent invention. The giants of Mallorca are invariably quite new, but the giants' tradition, and also that of big heads, is long: at least back to the sixteenth century. But something which Mallorca does very well is to make recent creations seem very old, and the giants and big heads are representative of this inventiveness.

These are creations which clearly impress both the young and the older, be it the small German children or the adult Americans, and I can include myself in the latter category. On one particular occasion, I happened to go into the town hall in Muro and was confronted by Toni and Joan, who, as far as I am aware, are the only all-male giants' pairing in Mallorca. There they were, in the reception of the town hall with their bagpipe, drum and whistle. They were shocking, given that I hadn't expected them to be there and because they were and are so enormous and so downright odd.

There is a strain of tourism potential lurking in Mallorca's culture that I'm not sure is entirely appreciated. It is tourism of the weird, and Mallorca has a great deal of weirdness. Odd, peculiar, strange, unusual, however you describe phenomena such as giants, big heads, dragons, demons and all the rest, they all contribute to a collective weirdness and difference. Yes, there are such characters elsewhere, especially Catalonia, but when there is talk of alternative tourism, there seems too little recognition of the fact that staring everyone in the face are manifestations of alternativism.

These are characters who put in appearances at fiestas and fairs and are then more or less forgotten, but it is here where I think a trick is being missed, not just in promotional terms but also in a wider marketing sense to include products and merchandise.

To come back to the Alcúdia figures, these have their own back stories. Characters like the mad miller come from folk tales, yet these stories remain locked in the Catalan language. This isn't a plea for translation but the suggestion of the possibility of making up stories related to these odd creations. S'Estol Rei en Jaume is like a mini-Canterbury Tale. The miller's tale, the gross girl's tale, the tale of the stupid boy who has grown donkey's ears, the water woman who stops children looking down wells and falling into them and drowning. Children's stories and so storybooks or audio books.

As for the figures and characters themselves, has it ever been considered that these might become dolls or figurines? Maybe it has been, but if so, I can't say that I've ever seen any. When it comes to souvenirs, and to a revitalisation of a part of the tourist retail market that has been in the doldrums for some considerable time, then might the characters of fairs and fiestas not provide an opportunity? The point being, of course, that everywhere in Mallorca has them - the giants, the big heads and what have you.

Mallorca, or some involved in tourism promotion, talks a good story about its history, but it ignores the stories themselves. Dates, facts, battles, they're all very interesting, but behind them are the stories, the legends, the oddities. Weird Mallorca - the stories and the souvenirs. They should do it.