The Fomento was handing out its gongs the other evening. This Fomento is that of Turismo, the Majorca Tourist Board, 110 years old this year. Among the recipients, not in person, was King Felipe. A commemorative medal on the occasion of the 110 years will be heading his way. It is recognition also of the support that he, his father and mother and others in the Spanish Royal Family have given to Mallorca's tourism. At a time when the gardens of the Marivent appear destined to be enjoyed at first hand by the citizenry (and presumably also tourists) from next year - a decision which ushers in a sense of greater openness by the royals and also greater closeness to the general public - the contrast with how things were under the King's great-grandfather couldn't be greater. He was Alfonso XIII, who was to eventually end up in exile: Republican fervour was that much stronger in the 1930s than it is nowadays.
There again, the contrast in 1905 (and for some years after), compared to today, was total. Barely anyone, anywhere had heard of Mallorca. It was an island in the middle of nowhere. No one, or very few anyway, went to islands. For the traveller and the nascent tourist, small islands in the Med held minimal appeal unless they were the birthplace of a civilisation, such as Crete. And even there, there was hardly what you could call a flourishing tourism industry. How the hell did they get there, anyway? The early twentieth century traveller preferred the mainland city and its grand hotels: Palma had only just got one when the tourist board was founded.
Royal patronage of Mallorca in 1905 was not that of Alfonso. It came from a foreign royal, the Archduke Louis Salvador, an admittedly fairly minor royal, but a royal nonetheless. One hundred years dead, the Archduke was, in many ways, synonymous with tourism as it existed then. He was to become an honorary president of the tourist board a few years before war forced him to abandon Mallorca (ordered to leave by the Emperor of Austria) and before he was to die in Bohemia in 1915.
I'm unaware of the connection having been made - in vaguely official circles at any rate - between the Archduke's royal lineage, Mallorca and the history of the Nueva Planta, with its own anniversary having just been not celebrated. The Archduke was a Habsburg. He was, therefore, from the European dynasty that Mallorca and the rest of the Crown of Aragon, including Catalonia, had supported during what turned out to be the fateful War of the Spanish Succession. Alfonso was a Bourbon, a descendant of Felipe V, he who had decreed the Nueva Planta.
There is nothing to suggest that the tourist board in its early years concerned itself with such historical matters, but the connection surely couldn't have been lost on some of its members. When the Archduke died, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the Nueva Planta, Mallorca lost one of its great advocates, a supporter of the island from a legacy that the island was deprived of as the consequence of what in effect ended up as a civil war in the early eighteenth century.
As noted previously when looking back at the early years of Mallorca's tourism, the great and good who were involved with the tourist board came from a very broad range of island society. To the ambitions of businesspeople, engineers and the bankers were added the checks and balances that came from the worlds of art, culture, history and nature. This eclectic mix was able to foster development through what was mostly mutual and beneficial regard for seemingly opposing views - those of business and economic development on the one hand and of the environment and heritage, the island's conservation and preservation, on the other. Fundamental to this was the message that the Archduke gave and was to leave behind. His was a tourism of nature and of culture. He was one of Mallorca's first great conservationists. Despite his royal background, he would be a point of reference for certain eco-tourism politicians of the present day.
This said, it was that much easier for the Archduke to have been a conservationist. They weren't to invent Magalluf, for example, until the turn of the 1960s. Nevertheless, the message of the Habsburg defender of Mallorca resonates today, and none more so than in the arguments over what we are not supposed to call the eco-tax but do.
At the tourist board's awards ceremony, its president fired a broadside at the tourism minister, Biel Barceló (who was in attendance). The tax is unjust, it will affect competitiveness. What, one wonders, might the Archduke make of the tax? It is a tax that it is a culmination of 110 years of increasing tension that he couldn't have foreseen: the constant battle between conservation and development.
Showing posts with label Archduke Louis Salvador. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Archduke Louis Salvador. Show all posts
Thursday, December 03, 2015
Saturday, May 02, 2015
Mallorca's First Luxury Yacht
Dating from the 1920s are three promotional images for hotels in Mallorca that were reproduced in the history of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourist Board), which was published to coincide with its one-hundredth anniversary in 2005. Of the three, one is a photograph, while the other two are paintings. Though their styles and the medium differ, they share one thing in common - the images. None of the hotels exist any longer. They were the Hotel Costa Brava in Sóller and the Hotel Royal and Gran Hotel Mediterraneo in Palma, but in front of each hotel is a distinctive shape and colour: a white sail. The symbolism of the image is profound. Mallorca's tourism from the days well before the masses arrived was inextricably linked to the sea, to sail boats, to yachts and to ships.
It is a pretty obvious point to make that, once upon a time, what tourism there was in Mallorca came by sea, and even when the first planes started to bring tourists, they required the sea. Air France was something of a pioneer in this regard, its seaplanes making Mallorca a stop-off point on the route between Marseille and Algiers.
Nautical tourism, as opposed to tourism which arrived by ship, was, despite those white sails that had been witnessed in the 1920s, a minority element in the island's tourism mix in the years immediately after the Second World War. It might of course be said that all tourism was something of a minority interest in those days, but the story of Mallorca's tourism history is more complex and longer than one which takes the "boom" of the early 1960s as its starting-point. The entrepreneurs and visionaries of the tourist board were ever alert to opportunities, one of which was announced in 1947 and which was to be realised the following year. In 1948, Palma's Real Club Náutico was founded. In the same year, the Club Naútico de Sóller was also founded. It could count, it is said, on a sporting leisure "fleet" of more than 250 vessels - snipe dinghies, monotypes, felucca sailing boats.
1948 can probably, therefore, be cited as the year when nautical tourism truly started in Mallorca, and from its relatively humble beginnings it has grown to what it now is - a tourism niche capable of generating annual revenues in the order of some 500 million euros thanks to the marinas of the Balearics and of bringing over 300,000 tourists: a niche which is substantially greater than that of either cycling or golf.
Mallorca sits in the centre of an imaginary cross, its western and southern points shorter than those of the north and east. But if the distances to Sete and Sardinia are longer than those to Valencia and Algiers, they are no real distance for today's super yachts with cruising speeds of knots in the twenties or thirties and top speeds of double these. It is this advantageous location that has helped to make Mallorca the attraction it is to the nautical tourist, he or she with a super yacht or something rather more modest, but time was - long ago - when Mallorca was not looked upon so favourably by the traveller. It was an island, and for the traveller - the earliest form of "tourist" - of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, islands in the middle of the Mediterranean were felt to offer little in terms of experience by comparison with the grand cities and ports of the Med.
This perception was to alter, however. The yachts of the nineteenth century were the preserve of Europe's rich, nobility and bourgeoisie, and it was to be one of the nobility who was to not only mark Mallorca out as a destination that others from the upper class as well as from the wealthy middle class might wish to consider but also to - arguably - invent the whole idea of the luxury yacht. He was the Archduke Louis Salvador.
The Archduke's "Nixe" might just be the most famous vessel to be associated with Mallorca, though in what follows, there are other claimants to this crown. The Archduke, renowned for his work in documenting Mallorcan culture, society and nature in his series "Die Balearen" and for his property owning in the Tramuntana mountains, was one of life's restless souls. He liked to travel, and he had the means to do so. Though he came to Mallorca in the 1860s, he wasn't a permanent resident. His journeying was such that he came to realise that rather than fork out for stays on ships, he may as well have one of his own. In August 1872, therefore, the "Nixe", built in the shipyard in Fiume (aka Rijeka) in Croatia, was launched. Its initial journey was to Alexandria, where the Archduke was awaiting its arrival. He climbed aboard, and the "Nixe" set sail, finally entering Mallorcan waters for the first time in May 1873.
Fifty-two metres long and six metres wide, the "Nixe" was a large vessel which had three masts but which was principally propelled by its steam engine rather than its sails. There is a debate as to whether it deserves the description "yacht" or not, but for the purposes of Mallorcan nautical tourism history, "yacht" it is; and luxury yacht is an even better description.
For twenty-one years, the Archduke would take himself off on his journeys around the Mediterranean on board the "Nixe". It was Mallorca to which it always returned, until disaster struck. One night during the summer of 1894, the "Nixe", close to the Algerian coast, collided with a reef. No lives were lost, but the "Nixe" was. It ended up on the seabed.
The Archduke was nothing if not considerate to his crew. They didn't have to fear for losing their jobs because the Archduke was determined to replace the "Nixe". He went to the site of the birth of the original - Croatia - and found a craft called the "Hertha", which closely resembled the "Nixe". He bought it at a cost of eighty thousand florins, it set off for Mallorca, was anchored off Sóller and was renamed. The "Nixe II" arrived in November 1894, only months after the sinking.
It is a pretty obvious point to make that, once upon a time, what tourism there was in Mallorca came by sea, and even when the first planes started to bring tourists, they required the sea. Air France was something of a pioneer in this regard, its seaplanes making Mallorca a stop-off point on the route between Marseille and Algiers.
Nautical tourism, as opposed to tourism which arrived by ship, was, despite those white sails that had been witnessed in the 1920s, a minority element in the island's tourism mix in the years immediately after the Second World War. It might of course be said that all tourism was something of a minority interest in those days, but the story of Mallorca's tourism history is more complex and longer than one which takes the "boom" of the early 1960s as its starting-point. The entrepreneurs and visionaries of the tourist board were ever alert to opportunities, one of which was announced in 1947 and which was to be realised the following year. In 1948, Palma's Real Club Náutico was founded. In the same year, the Club Naútico de Sóller was also founded. It could count, it is said, on a sporting leisure "fleet" of more than 250 vessels - snipe dinghies, monotypes, felucca sailing boats.
1948 can probably, therefore, be cited as the year when nautical tourism truly started in Mallorca, and from its relatively humble beginnings it has grown to what it now is - a tourism niche capable of generating annual revenues in the order of some 500 million euros thanks to the marinas of the Balearics and of bringing over 300,000 tourists: a niche which is substantially greater than that of either cycling or golf.
Mallorca sits in the centre of an imaginary cross, its western and southern points shorter than those of the north and east. But if the distances to Sete and Sardinia are longer than those to Valencia and Algiers, they are no real distance for today's super yachts with cruising speeds of knots in the twenties or thirties and top speeds of double these. It is this advantageous location that has helped to make Mallorca the attraction it is to the nautical tourist, he or she with a super yacht or something rather more modest, but time was - long ago - when Mallorca was not looked upon so favourably by the traveller. It was an island, and for the traveller - the earliest form of "tourist" - of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, islands in the middle of the Mediterranean were felt to offer little in terms of experience by comparison with the grand cities and ports of the Med.
This perception was to alter, however. The yachts of the nineteenth century were the preserve of Europe's rich, nobility and bourgeoisie, and it was to be one of the nobility who was to not only mark Mallorca out as a destination that others from the upper class as well as from the wealthy middle class might wish to consider but also to - arguably - invent the whole idea of the luxury yacht. He was the Archduke Louis Salvador.
The Archduke's "Nixe" might just be the most famous vessel to be associated with Mallorca, though in what follows, there are other claimants to this crown. The Archduke, renowned for his work in documenting Mallorcan culture, society and nature in his series "Die Balearen" and for his property owning in the Tramuntana mountains, was one of life's restless souls. He liked to travel, and he had the means to do so. Though he came to Mallorca in the 1860s, he wasn't a permanent resident. His journeying was such that he came to realise that rather than fork out for stays on ships, he may as well have one of his own. In August 1872, therefore, the "Nixe", built in the shipyard in Fiume (aka Rijeka) in Croatia, was launched. Its initial journey was to Alexandria, where the Archduke was awaiting its arrival. He climbed aboard, and the "Nixe" set sail, finally entering Mallorcan waters for the first time in May 1873.
Fifty-two metres long and six metres wide, the "Nixe" was a large vessel which had three masts but which was principally propelled by its steam engine rather than its sails. There is a debate as to whether it deserves the description "yacht" or not, but for the purposes of Mallorcan nautical tourism history, "yacht" it is; and luxury yacht is an even better description.
For twenty-one years, the Archduke would take himself off on his journeys around the Mediterranean on board the "Nixe". It was Mallorca to which it always returned, until disaster struck. One night during the summer of 1894, the "Nixe", close to the Algerian coast, collided with a reef. No lives were lost, but the "Nixe" was. It ended up on the seabed.
The Archduke was nothing if not considerate to his crew. They didn't have to fear for losing their jobs because the Archduke was determined to replace the "Nixe". He went to the site of the birth of the original - Croatia - and found a craft called the "Hertha", which closely resembled the "Nixe". He bought it at a cost of eighty thousand florins, it set off for Mallorca, was anchored off Sóller and was renamed. The "Nixe II" arrived in November 1894, only months after the sinking.
Friday, January 02, 2015
The Year Of The Archduke
2015 is officially the Archduke's year, the regional government having confirmed that it would be in 2013. The statement which the government issued in September of that year referred to its responsibility to promote and celebrate individuals of maximum relevance to the history and culture of the Balearics. There will, therefore, be a good deal spoken and written about the Archduke this year and there will be exhibitions, such as a major one that will open at Palma's Casal Solleric at the end of February.
Yet, for all that this will be the Archduke's year, what sort of an impact will it have? The answer to this may well be reflected in the fact that for some or perhaps many of you reading this, there needs to be an explanation as to who the Archduke was and as to why he is deemed to be important as he was. To cut a long story short, the Archduke Louis Salvador of Austria turned up in Mallorca in the 1860s, was charmed, bought land and properties, invited a load of intellectual friends to the island, became an honorary president of the Mallorca Tourist Board (Fomento del Turismo) and, above all, wrote the many volumes that comprise "Die Balearen", a narrative encyclopedia of the islands, the scope of which remains unmatched and unsurpassed.
The impact will be reserved mainly for the German-speaking market. The books were, after all, written in German. There are Spanish and Catalan versions but no English translation. Promotion will thus focus on German visitors, many of whom will already be very familiar with the Archduke. It is perhaps a generalisation to suggest that German tourists are more curious about Mallorca than their British counterparts, but there is some truth to it, and a good reason why is because of the Archduke and "Die Balearen". It is a work of enormous cultural significance for Mallorca but it is also of enormous significance in having helped to establish a bond between Germany and Mallorca that is far stronger than that between the UK and the island. Arguably, therefore, "Die Balearen" is more culturally relevant to Germans and German-speakers than it is to Mallorcans.
This is the year of the Archduke, but this will also be the first year of another historical figure whose importance is greater still. By a remarkable coincidence, Ramon Llull died 700 years ago, or at least his death is normally said to have occurred in June 1315 (there is some evidence to suggest that it was the following year). Because of this uncertainty the celebration of the anniversary of his death will straddle 2015 and 2016, while it won't officially begin until November. The coincidence of the anniversaries of the deaths of the Archduke and Llull is made stronger because of the connection between the two, principally the fact that the Archduke bought the Miramar monastery in Valldemossa which Llull had persuaded King Jaume II to assist him in founding in 1276.
Mallorca has produced its intellectuals but none can match Llull in terms of the breadth of his interests, studies and innovations and none can lay a claim to his having been the original populariser of Catalan on the island. Llull, therefore, dominates Mallorcan cultural history. He is pre-eminent among a select group whose influence on this history is absolute, and the Archduke is one of that group but the only one of modern times with the possible exception of Antoni Maria Alcover.
Cultural history forms part of what Mallorca desires by way of alternative tourism. But it is a culture which suffers by comparison with parts of Spain in appearing to be less than rich. This year, however, throws up the odd coincidence of the Archduke and Llull's anniversaries, and this coincidence does, moreover, create a link to the current day. From Llull, Miramar and so the Aragon crown and the kings of Mallorca through to the Archduke and his acquisition of Miramar and thence to tourism. The Archduke was not just an honorary president of the tourist board, he is often referred to as the founder of the island's tourism. So, 2015 offers a unique opportunity to promote culture through the joining together of the Archduke and Llull. It would have to be a promotion with sufficient force in order to break through the barrier of unawareness of visitors, but it could be done. Sadly, it won't be. It should be the year of Mallorcan cultural history: the Archduke and Llull side by side.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
The Invention Of The Summer Season
In a few days time we will wish April goodbye. We will thank it for its mostly blissful and unusually warm weather. Thank it for bringing riches of tourists over Easter. Thank it for having been a more-than-decent warm-up act for once. In a few days time it will be the first of May, the official opening day of the summer tourism season. The resorts, generally already reasonably busy, will crank up their busy-ness. There will be more coaches, more people, more of everything. But being the first day of the season, it will also be a national holiday. Labour Day. Fortunately, not everyone chooses to close for the day, though there is something comically appropriate about the season's commencement coinciding with a day of non-labour.
Official starts to seasons are the stuff of recent tourism vintage. In the good old days, there weren't official starts. There weren't seasons - not in a tourism sense of the word. There wasn't tourism, so how could there have been?
The tourism summer season is typically styled as being a phenomenon which took off in the early 1960s. In terms of mass tourism, this was the case, but the summer season already existed and its roots lay with the new fad for sunbathing that grew between the two world wars. Assigning a precise date (if not place) to the emergence of the summer season is impossible. Tourism, prior to the advent of its organisers - the tour operators - was mostly organic. It had a natural development, aided by those who acted as cheerleaders for the "island of calm", a term first used by the Catalan artist and writer Santiago Rusiñol in 1912.
Rusiñol was in the vanguard of literary and artistic sorts who were to introduce a Bohemian element to Mallorca. If places on the island can be identified as original destinations for summer tourism, then they would be those with which these Bohemians were associated - Formentor and Puerto Pollensa and El Terreno in Palma. But most visitors in the early part of the last century were attracted less by the summer than by the winter; tourism to Mallorca was predominantly during what we would now call the off-season. It was the sunbathing trend - with the French and Americans to its fore - which was to secure Mallorca's summer future.
Going back further, Mallorca was an island that was mainly unknown and generally ignored. The first tourists to anywhere, it might be said, were the upper-class young men of the Grand Tour. For two centuries from the mid-seventeenth century they took journeys of European cultural discovery. Mallorca was not on the Grand Tour; indeed Spain was not part of the usual itinerary. Mallorca had nothing to offer. It was some island stuck in the middle of the sea.
It makes for a bit of a story, but crediting Frederic Chopin with having been the first Mallorcan tourist is somewhat far-fetched. It could be argued that he invented the notion of health tourism, as his stay on Mallorca in the late 1830s had supposedly been intended to have been for the good of his poor health. But he wintered miserably, along with his live-in lover, and wasn't about to become a regular return visitor to the island. The greater claim on having been a first-mover of Mallorcan tourism was one of those European upper-class young men: an aristocratic young man, the Archduke Louis Salvador Maria Joseph John Baptist Dominic Rainer Ferdinand Charles Zenobius Anthony of Austria. The many-named Archduke was a tour party all of his own. The Archduke, who laboured for over 20 years putting together the several volumes of his grand work, "Die Balearen", wasn't a tourist though. He was a resident. It was to be friends and associates who visited him in Valldemossa and Deyá in the later part of the nineteenth century who were the tourists. Painters, historians, naturalists, poets, ornithologists; you name them, they visited.
The Archduke, who was to be named honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourist Board) in 1909, was undeniably important in fostering subsequent tourism in the form of Germanic generations who were to come for the sun and who were to - for all time - become the butt of jokes on account of their beach-towel behaviour. But that was to be a different type of tourism to that which his friends enjoyed. This different type - summer season tourism - can only truly be said to have started with Gerard Blitz (Club Med) and Vladimir Raitz (Horizon) at the start of the 1950s, though the role of the British Workers' Travel Association shouldn't be forgotten in the context of the development of the Mallorcan summer season. A trade-union association, its membership would have applauded the fact that Labour Day was a national holiday and the first day of the season.
Official starts to seasons are the stuff of recent tourism vintage. In the good old days, there weren't official starts. There weren't seasons - not in a tourism sense of the word. There wasn't tourism, so how could there have been?
The tourism summer season is typically styled as being a phenomenon which took off in the early 1960s. In terms of mass tourism, this was the case, but the summer season already existed and its roots lay with the new fad for sunbathing that grew between the two world wars. Assigning a precise date (if not place) to the emergence of the summer season is impossible. Tourism, prior to the advent of its organisers - the tour operators - was mostly organic. It had a natural development, aided by those who acted as cheerleaders for the "island of calm", a term first used by the Catalan artist and writer Santiago Rusiñol in 1912.
Rusiñol was in the vanguard of literary and artistic sorts who were to introduce a Bohemian element to Mallorca. If places on the island can be identified as original destinations for summer tourism, then they would be those with which these Bohemians were associated - Formentor and Puerto Pollensa and El Terreno in Palma. But most visitors in the early part of the last century were attracted less by the summer than by the winter; tourism to Mallorca was predominantly during what we would now call the off-season. It was the sunbathing trend - with the French and Americans to its fore - which was to secure Mallorca's summer future.
Going back further, Mallorca was an island that was mainly unknown and generally ignored. The first tourists to anywhere, it might be said, were the upper-class young men of the Grand Tour. For two centuries from the mid-seventeenth century they took journeys of European cultural discovery. Mallorca was not on the Grand Tour; indeed Spain was not part of the usual itinerary. Mallorca had nothing to offer. It was some island stuck in the middle of the sea.
It makes for a bit of a story, but crediting Frederic Chopin with having been the first Mallorcan tourist is somewhat far-fetched. It could be argued that he invented the notion of health tourism, as his stay on Mallorca in the late 1830s had supposedly been intended to have been for the good of his poor health. But he wintered miserably, along with his live-in lover, and wasn't about to become a regular return visitor to the island. The greater claim on having been a first-mover of Mallorcan tourism was one of those European upper-class young men: an aristocratic young man, the Archduke Louis Salvador Maria Joseph John Baptist Dominic Rainer Ferdinand Charles Zenobius Anthony of Austria. The many-named Archduke was a tour party all of his own. The Archduke, who laboured for over 20 years putting together the several volumes of his grand work, "Die Balearen", wasn't a tourist though. He was a resident. It was to be friends and associates who visited him in Valldemossa and Deyá in the later part of the nineteenth century who were the tourists. Painters, historians, naturalists, poets, ornithologists; you name them, they visited.
The Archduke, who was to be named honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourist Board) in 1909, was undeniably important in fostering subsequent tourism in the form of Germanic generations who were to come for the sun and who were to - for all time - become the butt of jokes on account of their beach-towel behaviour. But that was to be a different type of tourism to that which his friends enjoyed. This different type - summer season tourism - can only truly be said to have started with Gerard Blitz (Club Med) and Vladimir Raitz (Horizon) at the start of the 1950s, though the role of the British Workers' Travel Association shouldn't be forgotten in the context of the development of the Mallorcan summer season. A trade-union association, its membership would have applauded the fact that Labour Day was a national holiday and the first day of the season.
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