Who Are Fiestas For?

In the late 1960s, a leaflet was produced to promote the Cossier folk dancers of Algaida. This was a curious time for Mallorca and its traditions, the Franco regime appearing disinterested in them and preferring instead to make them subordinate to standardised tradtions of Spain. Flamenco and so on, therefore became the symbols of tradition in the resorts. Apparent disinterest was compounded by migration. Workers moved to the coasts, so when it came time for the annual fiestas back in the village, any number of them could no longer attend. The old traditions began to wane.

The perception of disinterest wasn't an entirely accurate one though. While initially, at the start of the tourism boom, traditions and fiestas in Mallorca were paid little attention to, there was a gradual appreciation that they might actually have some benefit for tourism. A landmark decision in this regard, where Mallorca was concerned, was the declaration of Sa Pobla's Sant Antoni fiestas as being in the national tourist interest. This was in 1966. Sant Antoni does of course take place in January, but even back then, there was a realisation that tourism had to break out of a seasonal pattern. It was why, for example, the regime made "tourism days" mandatory towards the end of September: the season in the early years more or less stopped once schools in Britain and Germany had gone back.

The Algaida Cossiers had something in common with the Sa Pobla fiesta, and they still do. They dance during the summer fiestas of Sant Jaume, but they also appear at exactly the same time in January, when Algaida honours its winter patron, Sant Honorat. So, by the late 1960s the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourism Board, was assisting in the promotion of the Cossiers, which also meant that the fiestas themselves were being promoted.

If you go right back in time to the start of organised tourism development with the formation of the tourism board in 1905, you will find that fiestas and fairs were among promotional efforts. Though these were specifically for Palma, which made perfect sense given the undeveloped nature of the island, the tourism potential was being explored.

Come into the present, and two years ago the town hall in Algaida published its strategy for tourism. All municipalities in Mallorca had been told by the tourism ministry that they had to have one. Though Carlos Delgado, the minister who insisted on this, took his fair share of criticism, the order that was sent out to the town halls was a sensible one. For the first time, an attempt was being made at some form of unified strategy for the whole island, a strategy based on the importance of tourism for each and every part of Mallorca.

Algaida, a town with very little actual tourism in the sense of having tourism accommodation, focused its strategy on a variety of elements, one of which was the dance of the Cossiers and so the fiestas of Sant Jaume and Sant Honorat. If you go to the town's tourism website - www.visitalgaida.com - you will discover a fairly decent effort at promotion, included in which are the fiestas, the Cossiers and indeed the Algaida fair.

The point about Algaida is that it is a typical inland village which is easy to overlook. The same can be said for several other villages (or towns, if you prefer). Take Vilafranca de Bonany or Sant Joan for instance. They are quite near to Algaida, but both suffer as they are off the main Palma-Manacor road. It might also be said that they suffer because neither has immediately obvious tourism interest. Except of course that they do, and one interest is that of fiestas and fairs. Vilafranca, adhering to the command for a tourism strategic plan, wants to push its melon fair in early September. Sant Joan, by its very name, has an obvious association with the fiestas of Sant Joan - John the Baptist - in June and August (one for his birth, one for his death). Neither town has gone as far as Algaida has in promoting fiestas, but both have an appreciation of the potential tourism benefit.

The title of this article asks who the fiestas are for. Fundamentally, they are for the local people. There has, though, been some disquiet expressed at the possibility of village fiestas being the target for tourists. But in one way or another, they always have been. It would be most unlikely, even with stronger promotion, that the village fiestas would ever be flooded with tourists, as it would need excursions' operators to do so, and they, with the odd exception, don't bother. To suggest, however, that these village fiestas are not for tourists would be wrong. The tourism value was recognised over a hundred years ago, it was understood by the Franco regime, and it has now, strategically, also been recognised.

Have You Got A Moment?

I recall that when Francina Armengol was given the keys to the presidential suite at the Council of Mallorca in 2007, she was going to usher in a new way of doing things. Her door, she said, would always be open, by which she didn't mean that the general public could just wander in off the street and have a good old nosey around. Rather, Francina was all for doing things differently; she was an open and communicative president and not the one from whom she had taken over (now residing at his majesty's pleasure). Eight years later, we find Francina in pole position (if not actually first in the polls) to become Bauzá's successor, and so she has been reflecting on ... the need for a new way of doing things. These new ways come in eight-year cycles, it would appear. "Another way of doing politics is possible," she informed a gathering of PSOE-ites in Valencia. "Through dialogue rather than imposition." "Through participation and ..." At this point, lights will have gone on in the minds of the fellow PSOE-ites. Participation. Now, where have we been hearing about this?

Suddenly, everyone's talking about participation, and they have to thank (and/or fear) Pablo Iglesias for doing so. Yes, there is a new and participative way of doing things, and someone had beaten Francina to the idea by several months. Her version, whatever it might in fact be, is political catch-up blended with ample dollops of opportunism. What are Podemos good at? Participation. Right, we'll have some of that for ourselves. And, blow me, only a few days later, PSOE in Calvia were unveiling their own participative re-invention. Under the slogan - "have you got a moment" - they've come up with a mobile app through which residents can answer three questions, such as "what is it that most concerns you about Calvia?" A multiple choice gives various options for answering - corruption, safety, taxes, tourism, etc. More than this, they are planning on having "participative budgets", so that the folk of Calvia can decide where money goes for certain things.

This isn't as revolutionary as it might sound, as they already do this in little old Algaida, where the council is PSOE-controlled and which is the home town of Francina's predecessor as leader of PSOE, her good chum and former president of the Balearics, Francesc Antich. So, it's been Algaida which has been the source of inspiration for Francina; has it? Possibly, but new ways of doing things haven't simply shifted towards citizen decisions as to how 300 grand are spent; new ways have emerged because things have been turned on their head. And Francina knows full well by whom and why she has to get the participation craze as well. As Little Eva might have sung (but didn't): "Everybody's doing a brand new political dance now. Come on, baby, do The Participation".

The Week Of The Beards

As we head towards the fiestas of the saints Antoni and Sebastià, it is perhaps easy to overlook some other saints who are knocking around on the mid-January saints' line-up. Antoni is one of three saints who have given rise to what this current week is called: "la setmana dels barbuts", the week of the bearded ones. In addition to Antoni, there are also Sant Pau (Paul the Hermit) and Sant Maur (in English Mauro or Maurus) whose long white beards are said to recall the Roman god Saturn and so the winter festival of Saturnalia, the remote origin of Carnival.

Pau was the first of the Christian hermits. He has an association with Antoni on several counts. One was that they were both Egyptian. A second was that Antoni also committed himself to an hermitic existence in the desert. A third was that Antoni supposedly learned about Pau in a dream, went in search of him and found him, by which time Pau was 113 years old.

Maur is a rather different kettle of saintly fish. Not a great deal is known about him, other than that he was Italian and seemingly lived in the sixth century. That's the original tale. There is a totally different one that was adapted for Catalan tradition. This has it that Maur was a native of Roussillon in southern France, with all that this implied for the Occitan language and its links with Catalan. His story is thus almost certainly a total fabrication, but then fact and fiction where most saints are concerned are difficult to distinguish; Antoni and Pau are both cases in point.

It just so happens that Pau and Maur share the same feast day, i.e. 15 January. Thrown together with Antoni, where Catalan religious tradition is concerned, and you get the week of the bearded ones (or three days of the bearded ones to be more accurate). The beards of Antoni and Pau are probably not disputable, insofar as anything can be said to be fact. Living the hermit's life would have meant eschewing the luxury of a razor blade and some shaving gel. Maur, on the other hand, is normally depicted in a less hirsute style. Indeed, he looks a fairly baby-faced saint minus any facial hair, but then that's the image that the Italians have of him. Catalan tradition demands the full set.

The week of the bearded ones has a greater significance than simply not shaving. This week is considered, in traditional terms, to be the coldest one of the winter, and what better way to keep an old saint warm during those freezing nights in the desert (or in Roussillon) than a beard.

Despite this bearded celebration of the tufted triumvirate, Antoni is the only one of the three who genuinely enters the Mallorcan consciousness. There are no big gigs for Pau or Maur. But, and never let it be said that the saintly calendar isn't a packed one, there are other saints who gatecrash bearded week and either attach themselves to the fiery feast of Sant Antoni or don't. In the latter category are Sant Hilari (13 January), the so-called hammer of the Arians and thus a male Hilary, and Santa Priscil-la (18 January), of whom it can probably safely be assumed that she would fail to qualify for bearded week in any event. Then we come to Sant Honorat (Honoratus in English).  

From the evidence of an icon, Honorat did have a beard, not on account of having spent cold nights in the desert but because he just did. This particular Honorat was the bishop of Arles in the fifth century. Given that Arles is in Provence, there is, as with Sant Maur, that distant Catalan linguistic and so cultural connection.

In the town of Algaida, Honorat is patron saint and as his feast day is 16 January, bingo, Honorat's day and Antoni's eve coincide, which means that Honorat must have his eve as well, resulting therefore in two successive evenings of fire-making which become three successive evenings because they move things around in Algaida. On Antoni's day, there are bonfires, barbecues and wine at the hermitage on the Randa puig; not for Antoni but for Honorat. And why? Well, Honorat did give his name to the hermitage which, for more than a hundred years, was once where the brotherhood of Sant Pau and Sant Antoni lived, so linking the town to two of the three bearded ones of beard week plus one, Honorat, who did have a beard though isn't one of the three, but not to the other, Maur, who didn't necessarily have a beard at all.

Note: There are two other saints who make it onto the bearded week roll call, Sant Fruitós (21 January) and Sant Vicenç Màrtir (22 January), which helps to explain the "week", but neither are generally referred to.

Photo: Sant Maur as he is in La Bruca, Italy. Not a lot of beard going on here it must be said.

Folk Dance Traditions: The cossiers

In 1962, Mallorca welcomed an English dance group. It was called Thurrock International Folk Dance. Alas, this group no longer appears to exist, and one wonders whether its rather grand title didn't perhaps disguise a dance troupe altogether less grand. With all due respect, Thurrock, lying as it does on the Thames Estuary, is not the first place which comes to mind when one thinks of folk-dance traditions. Nevertheless, the group was given a warm welcome in Mallorca. It had been in touch with José María Oliver, a name that may be familiar to those who were around in the heyday of the Casa Oliver in Palma. The building was important in the history of tourism in Palma. It was one of the establishments which formed, along with the likes of Tagomago and Son Amar, the Palma de Noche excursion. It attracted international artists - genuine ones rather than those from Thurrock - and was known for its music and of course its dance. It ceased to be in 1990.

José María had long had an association with folk-dance traditions on the island. Two years after Casa Oliver closed, he was awarded the Belgian Order of the Crown. His relationship with Belgium had also gone back to 1962, when he had arranged for the Folkloric Group to perform for disabled visitors from Belgium in Santa Ponsa. He was, therefore, just the man that Thurrock International Folk Dance was looking for. It wished to get to know the folk-dance traditions of Mallorca, and José María threw a reception in the group's honour at Casa Oliver and made sure that its members got in free to various shows.

What Thurrock International Folk Dance did with the knowledge it gleaned is unknown. It was doubtless interested in Mallorcan folk dance, but - and I hope I am not doing its memory an injustice - it is just possible that it was one of those groups who managed to come to Mallorca as a "closed" group and who therefore got package travel prices lower than normal airfares. When it came in 1962, folk dance, as with anything traditional in Mallorca, was under threat. This was right at the time when mass tourism and migration to the coasts from the countryside were starting to do their best (or worst) to undermine traditions.

Nevertheless, around this time there were specific efforts to attract tourists to these traditions. The town of Algaida produced a short leaflet. It featured four dancers waving what look like hankies and a fifth dancer dressed as a demon. They were the town's cossiers.

Documentary evidence of the existence of these folk dancers dates back to Sóller in 1544. Many towns came to have cossier troupes, but the number of towns dwindled. Today, there are, in addition to Palma, only five - Manacor, Alaró, Pollensa, Algaida and its immediate neighbour, Montuïri - and of these, the latter two are the only towns where the cossier tradition has been virtually unbroken for centuries (Algaida had a short break not long after it produced its leaflet, but the tradition was swiftly revived in 1973).

The gaps in the tradition have been very much longer elsewhere. In Pollensa, for instance, it was some fifty years before the cossiers were brought back to life at the annual La Patrona fiestas, having previously been a feature of the June Sant Pere fiesta in Puerto Pollensa, something which had come to a halt at the end of the 1920s. The cossiers are now very much a part of the celebrations on the day of La Patrona, but their tradition in Pollensa is nothing like as strong as it is in Algaida or especially in Montuïri.

Written evidence of the cossiers in Montuïri can be found from the 1820s, though the tradition there is much older. And it is this nearly two-hundred-year-old evidence which acts as the template for cossiers elsewhere. Three pairs of men, the lady and the devil, a collision of good and bad, which provides further evidence to suggest that the cossiers' dances are rooted in ancient paganism that passed through Catalan tradition before being transplanted in Mallorca. And these dances are defined. There is, for instance, the "flower of myrtle" dance, the "Master John" dance and also the "midnight" dance.

This latter dance had, in effect, been lost for more than sixty years. But it has been revived. At the Sant Bartomeu celebrations in Montuïri last weekend, they danced the "midnight" dance.

Would Thurrock International Folk Dance have witnessed the cossiers? Possibly so. And would the "flower of myrtle" have been danced somewhere in Essex as a consequence? Who knows? But there is one connection between the Mallorcan cossiers and English folk dance. Morris Dancers also have set dances, and some (those without the sticks) are not that far removed from those of the cossiers. It is said that Morris dance comes from Moorish dance in Spain.

The Unnecessary Tourism Plan

Algaida. What do you know of the place? Do you know where it is? To be brutally honest, Algaida is one of the towns in Mallorca which is just there. On the road from Palma to Manacor, it is near enough to Palma to almost be a suburb, but it is far enough away to be somewhere that no one would necessarily venture to. It is on-the-way-to-somewhere-else Mallorca, in this case Manacor, and even one of its greater claims to fame, the Osborne Bull statue, is on the way, i.e. on the way to the next town, Montuïri, along the road to Manacor.

Algaida is a town of some 5,000 people. Like other parts of Mallorca, it has its prehistory (talayotic period) and its Conquest history; two farms were recorded under the Arabic name "al-gaida", meaning the wood, three years after Jaume I invaded. It has a few sites, such as the Cura sanctuary on the Puig de Randa, but it is not a town known for its tourism. On Algaida town hall's website, though there is supposedly an English section, when it comes to information such as that for fairs and fiestas and cycling routes, the menu lists these in English but the explanatory text is in Catalan. There is no tourism section as such. Of areas of responsibility of the town hall's seven councillors who form the administration, not one of them has any responsibility for tourism. It is a town where tourism, in terms of officialdom, does not exist.

Oddly though, Algaida council has just approved its plan for tourism development. The mayor says that it is a "realistic project" for a municipality in the plain of Mallorca which will preserve the character of the village and its environmental, social and cultural characteristics.

All of which sounds reasonable enough, even if it doesn't actually say what will be developed, if anything. But then, maybe there isn't really anything much to develop when it comes to a tourism plan. If so, then why has the town hall gone to the trouble of approving one.

The reason why is because it was told to. As with every other municipality in the Balearics, Algaida has had to come up with a tourism plan. The Balearics tourism minister, Carlos Delgado, pointed out this summer that under the 2012 Tourism Law, all municipalities had to have one. And he was right to have pointed this out, as many municipalities may not have realised that they had to have a plan. Under Chapter One, Article Eight of the law (to do with competences of various bodies), there was item F, the approval of municipal tourism development plans. And item C of Article Eight refers to the "promotion of tourist activities within the municipality", which in turn will be integrated into "tourism promotion ... in the context of the promotion of each of the Balearic Islands" (item B).

On the principle that tourism is Mallorca's most important industry and so on a further principle that any municipality, even one without a notable tourism industry of its own, should form part of this island-wide industry, it seems fair to expect individual towns to have plans. Fair, but what does having a plan achieve? In Algaida's case, its sites, its Bull, its cuisine (it is reckoned to be the centre of the Mallorcan style of cuisine) are all matters of record with or without a plan. What should Algaida now do? Throw money at promoting them? Money it almost certainly doesn't have.

The national government's attempt at reforming local authorities - one which would see responsibilities being assumed by higher authorities, i.e. the Council of Mallorca, in the case of smaller towns, those with fewer than 20,000 people - is currently stumbling along and not really getting anywhere. This reform points out that the scope of powers for "issues of purely local interest" is limited, and tourism is one such issue for which the scope of powers is limited. This, though, is both vague and too wide. There are towns in Mallorca which have very much stronger local interests in tourism than others, and some of these, like Algaida, are quite small. Muro has only a couple of thousand more inhabitants, but it is firmly a tourist town and one that definitely requires a tourism plan.

While the power remains, even if it is limited, then the Balearic Government can insist that each municipality draws up its own tourism plan, but where Algaida is concerned, how different is it to neighbouring or nearby towns? It isn't particularly.

Now that the Council of Mallorca has finally relented and accepted that it will take on responsibility for tourism promotion (it had said it wouldn't because it didn't have the money), it will presumably be made aware of whatever Algaida has in its plan. And once aware of this, then what?

It's all well and good there being different plans for different towns, some of which don't have much by way of tourism, and there being a moving of the tourism promotion responsibility furniture, but would it not be better if there were an overarching and integrated plan? Maybe there will be, but at present the requirements placed on towns like Algaida, where the absence of a councillor with responsibility for tourism emphasises tourism's relative lack of importance, seem unnecessary. It is a town like many others.

* Photo of Gràcia Sanctuary on the Puig de Randa, Algaida from Wikipedia.