Another First For Alaró

Alaró. What do we know of it? It has a castle. It was the first place in Mallorca to get electricity. The citizens not so long ago took part in a referendum to allow women to be part of the cossiers folk dance troupe. Its first woman mayor took office in 2015. It will have the Balearics first black mayor - Guillem Balboa - later this year. A municipality of firsts, it generally, one might suggest, has a fairly genteel image, as in being free of any associated vulgarities as opposed to being populated by the gentry (save some maybe).

Alaró is therefore not a Magalluf. It would be impossible for it be anyway, given that it doesn't have a coast. Instead, it nestles quietly by the Tramuntana, which cliché demands that it should do. Villages overlooked by mountains are required to nestle. That's all they do.

Unfortunately for Alaró, this carefully carved-out reputation has been shattered. It has joined the ranks of Magalluf (of which one must say, of course, that this is pre-transformation Magalluf). It has attained a new first. It is the first village nestling in the Tramuntana foothills to grab the attention of The Sun and The Daily Mail, except when either of these may have published a travel article describing the pleasures of Mallorcan foothill nestling. The genteel, free of vulgarities image has been destroyed by scenes reminiscent of most nights in Magalluf (sorry, pre-transfomation Magalluf).

The Sun usefully informed its readers of the "shocking moment" that a mass brawl broke out between parents at a kids' football match. Mums screamed "in horror" and scrambled "to protect children from fighting dads". Goodness me, Alaró, what have you done? There's Biel Barceló going on about non-beach tourism, lauding the alternatives of cultural, heritage and nature tourism, facilitating the arrival of inland holiday rentals, and what happens? A village symbolic of all this alternative tourism has threatened the promotional drive by engaging in a re-enactment of Punta Ballena. One thing's for sure. If Alaró signs up to the sports tourism niche as a means of tackling seasonality, it'll carefully sidestep any mention of football.

This is of course greatly exaggerated, as was perhaps a headline in the local press which referred to a scandal with global repercussion. This repercussion will mostly have involved avid social network users having a good laugh. Which isn't to condone what happened, just that values are what they have become. Moreover, it's not as if it is unheard of for parents to get out of hand at kids' football matches. The difference in this instance is that parents behaving badly has gone viral.

The immediate victims of the "mass brawl" (what actually constitutes a mass?) were the Alaró boys. The team has been withdrawn. There again, the boys aren't entirely victims. Certain players face expulsion from the team, such as one seen kicking a man who was on the ground. It might be noted that the whole incident kicked off when an Alaró player chased a Collerense youngster and kicked him. Alaró had already had a player sent off as well as their trainer. The referee had apparently asked for the police to be called fifteen minutes before the brawl broke out. He sensed that there was an inflamed atmosphere.

As a consequence of what took place the public prosecutor is involved, as is the Guardia Civil, the national government's delegation to the Balearics as well as the Balearic Islands Football Federation's Anti-Violence Commission. Fines of up to 10,000 euros could be handed out. There is the threat of possible custodial sentences. And all because of a football match involving 12 and 13 year olds in the Regional Second Division, Group E.

The government and the Council of Mallorca both rushed to condemn Sunday's events. "Values" to be acquired through sport are important, said Biel Barceló in his vice-presidential guise. The Council was at pains to explain that it has a whole project aimed at inculcating these values through sport and at holding workshops to try and prevent violence.

Values, and good ones, are there to be attained, but there are other values being pursued - monetary, fame and celebrity. When the likes of Talk Sport, rather than indulging in shouting, stop and have sensible discussions about football, a subject that comes up is the behaviour of parents. When did they start behaving badly? Around the time when big bucks for junior players loomed. Allied to this are the values displayed on football pitches. Jamie Vardy has been praised in some quarters for having been cute enough in ensuring Samir Nasri was sent off. There are so many other examples.

As a local journalist has written, none of the kids last Sunday will become Messi. But such are the distorted values, that is the parental ambition. Poor Alaró. What had it done to deserve its global repercussion?

Electric Light Orchestra: Mallorca's electricity

Endesa's recent announcement that cold weather had brought about record gas consumption levels in Mallorca was hardly a great surprise. Not because of the cold weather as such, but because natural gas has been supplied to the island for only two and a half years.

Infrastructure can take an awfully long time to be developed. The introduction of natural gas does give rise to the promise that the days of hernias and back problems, thanks to humping butane bottles around, might soon be something of the past. Natural gas is on its way north and west from its Palma base - to Inca and then onwards to Alcúdia and also to Andratx.

The piecemeal approach to the development of a gas infrastructure has echoes of that which brought electricity to Mallorca. There was little danger of there ever having been any light pollution in Mallorca before the turn of the last century, and for some time afterwards the danger only slowly became a possibility.

Electricity arrived on the island, not as you might have expected in Palma, but, of all places, in Alaró. 1901 was the year that the first electricity network was established, thanks to the vision of one Gaspar Perelló, native of Alaró, who had been to Barcelona and realised what vision could really be, thanks to the city's electricity system.

From the first bulbs being lit at the town's Mare de Déu d'Agost fiesta in 1901, it was still several years before other towns started to catch on to the idea. In 1912 Sa Pobla got its first real spark of electrification. The hundredth anniversary of lighting up La Puebla will be on 24 July, coinciding with the Sant Jaume fiesta, and doubtless there will be a display of lighting that befits the occasion and probably results in an overload of the system and power cuts for everyone else.

We can expect a 1912 overture with full orchestral accompaniment in a Sa Pobla piper and whistler style, and there will be further ones over the next years until 2026, the one-hundredth anniversary of the lights truly going on all over Mallorca. But all that sound and light in Sa Pobla will probably be as nothing compared with another electrifying one-hundredth birthday, as the grand switch-on in Sa Pobla was overshadowed, three months earlier, by a fanfare for the common man not on the Clapham omnibus but on the Sóller train. 6 April 1912 was when it was inaugurated, though to be electrically correct, it was to be another 17 years before an electric train ran.

A mere one hundred years later, the electrification of the Palma to Inca railway has now been celebrated, but how long it might be before the extension to Sa Pobla gets its juices flowing, who can tell? He who holds the keys to the 45 million or so that will be required to do so, along with the extension to Manacor; that's who.

With all these electric jubilees knocking around, it is unfortunate that a hundred years of electricity have to coincide with grand switchings-off rather than switchings-on. And in an effort to help with household energy bills, the regional government has hit upon the idea of having meters show consumption directly as euros, instead of kilowatts per hour, something that no one understands, rather like an Endesa bill therefore.

The story of Mallorca's electricity and indeed its trains at the start of the last century was one of lack of interest by government and a reluctance to invest in mostly any form of infrastructure. The story has changed in Spain as a whole, but in Mallorca the story is different to that of the mainland. Álvaro Middelmann, the director of Air Berlin in Spain and Portugal, has said that Mallorca and the Balearics should be compensated because of the islands' transport systems. The citizens of the islands pay the same taxes but they don't get the same benefits of motorway systems or high-speed trains.

Cost of energy is another disadvantage that the islands have. Investment there may have been in natural gas and also in electricity cabling from the mainland, but infrastructure is still lacking by comparison with the mainland. Part of the rail network has been electrified but it is inadequate and subject to political squabbles and funding cuts, as have affected extensions to Alcúdia and Artà.

Still, at least there is some public money. This didn't used to be the case. Alaró's electricity, Sa Pobla's electricity, the Sóller railway; they were all private initiatives. And in the case of the Sóller railway, it still is.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.