The Early "Summer" Of A Mallorcan Spring

We have a seasonal problem. Defining it. Not so long ago it was easy. The Mallorca summer started on 1 May. Contracts were signed, hotels opened, bars followed suit. Summer is now earlier. We have to redefine it as starting on 1 April or before, even if there is still some official insistence that at the stroke of midnight on 30 April, winter passes and summer commences.

As always, there is the issue of how universal this is. Even within resorts, universality does not apply. In Alcudia, much of the main tourism centre is still a building site - streets dug up, hotels with ongoing renovations, dust flying everywhere, combining with the pollen and keeping the car washes hyper-busy. Otherwise, the perception is one previously reserved for later in the "summer". Great activity, the roads are like velodromes, and it isn't April until tomorrow.

More fool we, though, for thinking that "summer" has been lengthened? The Mallorcan summer? Starting it in February will take some believing, but April seems increasingly apt. And providers of tourism numbers - the tour operators - are saying that this April is the new June; Easter does help in this regard.

Is this all the consequence of what experts call geopolitics, better known as security issues elsewhere? Partly it probably is. Otherwise, I remain unconvinced that it has a great deal to do with the regional tourism ministry. It will glow in the sharp light of a Mallorcan spring (aka early "summer") and insist that it is all to do with efforts to tackle seasonality. But there has been talk of tackling seasonality problems ever since seasons began in Mallorca: around about the time that tourism started to acquire its initial 1960s' mass.

There are plenty of others who do the ministry's work for it, such as those who loiter on social media, terrain that the ministry's promotional gurus don't appear yet to have heard of. Social serendipity, coming across a Mallorcan early "summer" by chance, seems to play as much of a part as anything. Then there are the cyclists. Yes, the cyclists. Hotels don't only house them, you know. The spin-off from all those wheels spinning around and clogging up the roads is a beneficial one. Hotels which didn't once open now do. Airbnb, speak its name quietly and not in front of a hotelier, may also have inadvertently done some of the ministry's work. Much to the ministry's chagrin; hence its search to stop this work being done for it.

And we do perhaps also have to thank Palma. Its growth as a city-break destination and the affectionate media spotlight that has been shone on the city are advantageous not solely to it. Palma is part of Mallorca. Just a part. There is an afterglow for the "part forana" (anywhere that isn't Palma), as reputation and recommendations radiate out beyond the Via Cintura.

What of this early "summer", though? What's it like? April is bright, extraordinarily bright. It has the light that painted many a canvas. Clear and sharp and minus the ozone haze of real summer. Such clarity is in the air, the freshness of the breezes that are not quite cold, fooling winter skins into feeling that the sun is not at its more penetrative. It is, even with moderate UV ratings.

The early "summer " of April passes into later early summer, namely May. And it does so with superyachts bumping into each other on gentle waters in the bay of Palma, carefully avoiding collisions with the returning leviathans of the seas, disgorging their saturating tourists. Palma's boat show is the fairest of all the seasonal fairs. It is an occasion only partially reserved for politicians. For the Balearic president and the minister for employment, trade and industry to announce how important the nautical industry is to Mallorca, how significant it is for economic diversification, how vital it is in the pursuit of the Holy Grail of deseasonalisation.

Prior to Palma, the old fishermen of Alcudia sew their nets on the quayside and wait for their remuneration from the sale of sepia. Alcudia's boat show is more an attraction than a point of sale. Vessels to be ogled, as thousands of visitors stroll towards the greater temptations of three-euro-a-pop cuttlefish tapas. Giants do what giants do. They stand and guard, unblinking in the startling light. Bigheads parade, launch flour on unsuspecting spectators, beat on the ankles small children who chant their teasing rhymes. All the fun of the early "summer" fair.

In Muro on the weekend after Easter, they celebrate Saint Francis of Paola by climbing a tree and liberating a rabbit. Someone will probably say that they shouldn't. There's a law against it. Maybe. It depends on how many years the rabbit (not the same one) has found itself in an abnormal situation on top of a tree.

These are the spring (early "summer") fairs. Santa Margalida's heralds the arrival of Holy Week. The fair is always on Palm Sunday. The palms are blessed, the oddly terrifying religious garb parades as it also parades later in the week. The terrifyingly moving ceremonies of the "Davallament" glorify the Good Fridays of Arta, Felanitx, Palma and Pollensa. Silence descends on the Cathedral steps for the staging of Llorenç Moya's "Via Crucis". And the week after Holy Week becomes picnic week, the annual pancaritat pilgrimages. The greatest number of pilgrims head for Bellver Castle on the Sunday after Easter for the Day of the Angel.

This is early "summer". The new season. It begins on 1 April. Or does it?

The Allure Of The Mallorcan April Fair

When summer slips into autumn, you know that the season is changing, not because of leaves turning brown and falling but because the fiestas finish and the fairs start. The thing that we erroneously refer to as "winter" in Mallorca is bookended by fairs. They usher it in and they show it the door. The fairs are back, an agricultural-industrial-artisanal merry-go-round of pre-match warm-ups for the main events of the summer fiestas.  

The fairs are not all tractors, light engineering and pots to which livestock may or may not be added to their list of attractions, but it is Mallorca's agro-industrial complex which dominates the exhibition stands at the island's April fairs. Andraitx this weekend, Calvia, Santa Eugènia, Santa Margalida all next weekend, Muro and Santa Maria over the final weekend of the month. Each fair follows a similar theme, a variant being next weekend in Porreres where the fair has been ecologicalised.

The exceptions to this rule of fairs include, appropriately enough for the bookending nature of the spring fairs, the book fair in Vilafranca at the end of the month. A town more commonly associated with its melon gluttony goes cultural. Another exception is the Playa de Muro bike fest this coming week, a predominantly Germanic gathering of cycle technology, fitness and racing. At the end of the month and stretching into May is the daddy of all the fairs - the Palma boat show, happily restored following its hiatus. And this weekend there is another boat show, Puerto Alcúdia's mini-me to Palma's maxi.

There didn't used to be a fair in Alcúdia's port. The boats did make an appearance, but they showed up in the old town at the October fair. The people of the "moll" were keen on having their own slice of the fair cake, and so they suggested that the boats might be better off being next to what one normally associates boats with - water, rather than the ancient walls of old Alcúdia. And so, the port's fair came into being, but boats were to be only one part of the fair. The other part was to be gastronomy, and what did they choose as a theme? One also associated with water, a fishy theme but one, for many Brits, with an altogether different association, that of budgies. The cuttlefish gastronomy fair, which when it is referred to in its Castellano or Catalan versions sounds very much enticing - sepia/sipia.

I confess to finding cuttlefish in its full-bodied form somewhat less than appealing. It shares with other species of the Cephalopoda class the unfortunate trait of having been manufactured by Dunlop. Yet, take a handy knife to it and reduce it to less than mouth-sized bites, fry it in herby/spicy oil and present it with rice blackened by its own ink and with a side portion of mayo, and yum, yum. Other recipes are of course available, and the restaurants' marquee at the fair will have been doing a roaring trade in its variety of sepia tapas.

The Alcúdia boat show/sepia fair is in its ninth edition. My, how they love telling us how many editions there have been of fairs and other events. None is respectable without some Roman numerals forming a prefix to the title. I have witnessed the fair's development over its nine editions. The first one, blessed with glorious early April weather, was a huge success. It was a tremendous idea, as it breathed life into a port area struggling to wake up after the prolonged winter. It remains a tremendous idea. The whole island seems to turn up, make parking anywhere near the port impossible, pack the terraces and the marquees, watch the fishermen at work, dream of their own boat and gawp at the inevitable giants.

But it is a fair that has had its moments of controversy. The fishermen got into a right old hump a few years back when the restaurants refused to pay their prices for cuttlefish. It all seemed a little odd that a fair in celebration of the local catch would instead use sepia snaffled up much cheaper from wholesalers. The town hall intervened in order to come to a compromise agreement. Then the crafty-artisany sorts got into a strop of their own. The reason? Too many damn boats occupying specks along the extended Paseo Marítimo that had previously been for the sale of knicky-knackery. The growth in the on-land flotilla was a direct consequence of Palma's boat show having gone into hibernation. Mini-me has been restored, along with the pots and craft paraphernalia.

The fairs are not confined to April. In May, you can barely move for them. But, in seeking an alliteration for Mallorca in April, they have an allure, and even cuttlefish can have a certain allure, which is saying something.

Photo: Gawping at giants, 2011.