An American In Pollensa: Temple Fielding

In Puerto Pollensa there is a street that connects the coast road to the Calle Juan XXIII just by the petrol station. To one side of this street is La Gola, the wetland and so-called "green heart" of the resort. La Gola is not the point of this story, though perhaps it could be. What might a travel-writer have made of La Gola as it was or of the view as you came to the end of what is now this street and had looked out over the bay of Pollensa?

The name of this street is Calle Temple Fielding. How many people nowadays remember Temple Fielding? He did after all die 30 years ago. Will there be, on 18 May this year, an appropriate tribute paid to him? A tribute by Pollensa town hall, by the Balearics regional government or even the Spanish national government?

Street names reveal all manner of history and any number of personalities from the past. And one of these personalities is Temple Fielding, an adopted son of Pollensa. For many years, he lived with his wife Nancy in a fourteen-room villa in Formentor. He rented an office in Puerto Pollensa. Temple Fielding was American, an American travel-writer. He published the Fielding's Travel Guides, one of which was to Mallorca.

Temple Hornaday Fielding was 69 when he died. By then, he and his wife had moved to a penthouse in Palma, as the villa had become too much for them to look after. He was, nevertheless, buried in Pollensa, on 20 May 1983.

Fielding began his guide-publishing business after the Second World War. It was he, more than perhaps anyone, who revealed Europe to American tourists. He started writing about Spain at a time when the country was still, so one would think, very much in the darker days of Francoism. However, in 1952, Fielding observed that, despite the reputation that Spain might have had, political matters would never cross the path of the vacationer. That vacationer could go where he wished to and do what he wanted. There were no shadows to frighten him as there were in the Soviet states, Yugoslavia or, intriguingly, Vienna.

Spain's tourism boom of the sixties was partly the product of a desire on behalf of the Franco regime to attract foreign exchange, but it is wrong to suggest that this benefit was was only appreciated at the end of the 1950s. The regime had been well aware of it several years before; it had been brought home to it by important players bringing American tourists to Spain - American Express, TWA and Conrad Hilton.

Into this American mix came Temple Fielding. Though fiercely anti-Communist, Fielding was initially guarded about Franco. Nevertheless, he was so taken with Spain that he chose to make it his base and home. In 1951, he set up that home in Mallorca. Two years later, he had shed any misgivings in making the case for the strategic importance of Spain to the USA. He offered, to what he considered to be American Communist-dupe anti-Francoites, a defence of Franco. The regime had  had "to wrest the land from the Communists" and it had built "a firmer and better-balanced nation than some others into which we (American governments) have poured millions - without five cents of outside help".

The Franco regime could scarcely believe its luck. Fielding had already become an established name and now he was acting as an apologist for the regime and as a promoter of tourism - by wealthy, currency-exchange-strong Americans. He was given a chauffeur and afforded every courtesy as he travelled around Spain researching his guide.

Though his style was sometimes criticised, Fielding was enormously influential. And in his style and in what he believed, I find some echoes of my own thoughts. In articles, I use the word "tourist" because it is convenient to do so, but I don't really care for it. Fielding never referred to tourists, only to vacationers, voyagers or travellers. He also wondered how much these travellers cared for culture. They paid lip service to it, giving far greater priority to their hotels and their comforts.

Today, there is not a great amount of American tourism - sorry, vacationing - to Mallorca. There are some Americans who live on the island, a few of whom are in Pollensa. Thirty years on from his death, and coinciding with the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Mallorcan missionary to California, Fray Juniper Serra, should there be a concerted effort to boost this American tourism and influence? This will be the year of Juniper Serra, but, important though Serra was, Fielding was arguably as important. Serra took Christianity to a part of America, Fielding brought Americans to Mallorca.

* Fielding featured on the cover of "Time Magazine", June 1969: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19690606,00.html


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Year Of The Friar: Junípero Serra

The Council of Mallorca has declared that 2013 is to be the year of Fray Junípero Serra. The Franciscan friar, born in 1713 in the town of Petra, acquired his fame by establishing missions in California. His name is as known there as it is in Mallorca. Or not known, as the case may be.

Mallorca does a pretty lousy job of letting people know about the very few Mallorcans with genuine claims to fame. It doesn't need to do much when it comes to Rafael Nadal, he's quite capable of spreading his fame without any local help, but for historical figures, such as the friar, it does need to help. Unfortunately, what help it does give goes largely unnoticed.

If you were to ask a hundred tourists at random if they had ever heard of Serra, what do you suppose their response would be? If you were to ask a hundred Brit expats at random the same question, what would their response be? Junípero who? If you were to then explain that he was a Franciscan missionary to the USA, you should be prepared for a glazing over of the eyes. Sorry to have to say this, but some old monk doesn't really do it in tourist or expat terms.

The historical fame game in Mallorca operates from a pretty small pool and given the fact that famous Mallorcans are, generally speaking, not famous, non-Mallorcans of fame are co-opted with an eye on the main chance of generating tourism revenue; hence, Chopin and his stupid cell at Valldemossa, or the cell that used to be thought to have been his cell but now turns out not to have been.

Serra, three hundred years of his birth and all that, means tourism revenue. Or an attempt at getting some. But where are these tourists going to come from? America, it would be hoped. And more specifically, California. To what extent Serra is known to Americans outside of the sunshine state, though, is a good question. A group of Americans with whom I became acquainted recently had never heard of him. I had suggested that they would probably wish to go to Petra, and of course they hadn't heard of Petra either.

However, one imagines there are goodly numbers of devout American (Californian) Catholics, chomping at the bit to come to Mallorca in order to pay homage. If there indeed are, then they face one small problem; the roundabout way of getting to Mallorca. The Americans of my recent acquaintance came in via Madrid and only managed to get their Iberia connection as scheduled, thanks to Iberia pilots having been kind enough to have been flying to Palma on a day when they weren't flying anywhere else because they were on strike. 

Air Berlin's boss in Spain and Portugal, Alvaro Middelmann, has gone on record as saying that he wishes to develop a route from California, but it still wouldn't mean direct flights. It's a shame. American tourism, of whatever variety, would be an immense boost for Mallorca. Not all Americans are everyone's cup of tea, but overwhelmingly they are unfailingly polite, highly inquisitive and therefore minded to take note of aspects of Mallorca not solely of a beach nature, and more often than not, they are loaded. If Serra is the sprat to catch the American mackerel, then everything should be done to exploit the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth.

One drawback with Serra is that he, as with other figures from the past, has been subjected to revision. Like Columbus (a would-be Mallorcan, some would insist), whose achievements have been sullied by the knowledge that he in effect engaged in a spot of genocide, so Serra's reputation has become tainted. It doesn't play particularly well in the US, or elsewhere come to that, that he treated American Indians in a brutal fashion. If they were going to be converted to Christianity, then they were going to be beaten into conversion, which is pretty much what happened.

There again, back in the eighteenth century, mistreating some heathen natives in the name of the church and of Christ was considered fair enough. Serra can't really be blamed for having been a product of his time. Even those who have criticised him have admitted that when it came to religion and to piety, he was from the top drawer. He was apparently possessed of a formidable intellect and of no little courage. 

2013 will be the year of the friar. At the end of the year though, apart from a few more American tourists having perhaps ventured to Mallorca, will anything have changed? Will non-Mallorcans be any the wiser and know who Junípero was? Well, will they?


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.