This Wounded Land

There is an environmentalist group in Mallorca called Terraferida. The name means wounded land, and the group takes aim at what is sees as wounds inflicted on Mallorca's land. For Terraferida, human intervention is not benign. It responds to population growth, tourism, economic development and speculation. It serves itself at the expense of land, wounding it in the process.

Underpinning the beliefs of groups such as Terraferida is an unstated idyll, a hankering for a time before intervention altered the land. Yet human intervention goes to the heart of the supposedly unwounded land. It goes back to times many centuries ago, which have only recently been honoured by Unesco. The landscaping of the Tramuntana mountains was the product of ingenious intervention which created dry-stone walls, terraces and passages that survive to this day. The mountains are placed on a pedestal for tourism of an alternative variety - cultural, historical, natural - yet the mountains and this alternative tourism owe a great deal if not everything to human intervention. The motivations for intervention were quite different - they essentially boiled down to survival - but it was necessary to shape the land way back when, just as it is nowadays.

The key difference is the aggressive nature of this intervention. And interwoven with this is a connection with the land that can too easily be overlooked or not be appreciated. The connection can also be overstated, but somewhere in the middle there exists a soul in Mallorca that beats because of its land.

Contemporary political and social discourse is littered with references to land, to landscape, to scenery, to natural patrimony. This might be taken to be a consequence of the reassertion of the values of the land that were severely undermined by the process of "Balearisation" which changed coastal Mallorca irretrievably. Although Terraferida and others will point to more current-day evidence of aggressive intervention, it is the collective memory of Balearisation which informs much of this discourse. It hasn't been forgotten, and it hasn't been forgiven.

But if one goes back to times pre-Balearisation, the discourse was much the same. The early twentieth century founders of Mallorca's tourism spoke of little else than land and landscape. They were to be grateful to the publicists - the landscape artists, the writers who introduced this idyll in the Mediterranean to a gradually global audience.

It was landscape and patrimony, both natural and manmade (such as with the Cathedral), that the early movers of Mallorca's tourism promoted. And they did so, at least in part, as a response to crisis. It was one that affected the land - phylloxera.

The damage that was caused to the vineyards of Mallorca served only to reinforce the vulnerability of the island, one surviving mainly on a monoculture economy of agriculture. Tourism, predicated on land, was to provide a solution. Nowadays, the land is looked to as a means of providing a new solution to a different monoculture - that of tourism and principally a tourism of the coasts.

There has been much discussion about how tourist tax revenue is to be spent. Why, it has been asked, should revenue go to agrarian projects. One reason why is in order to recover, maintain or improve the landscape and the natural patrimony. It is too easy perhaps to consider landscape as being the Tramuntana and nothing else, purely because so much is said about the mountains. But this landscape - obviously enough - is everywhere, and it is one that provides, among other things, almond blossom at this time of the year.

The land has been wounded again. Drought and floods have created the wounds, and the land finds itself confronted by another enemy - xylella - which can deepen the wounds further. These are not self-inflicted wounds, like Balearisation was, these are natural and have an impact on the natural patrimony.

But there have been "plagues" before, such as phylloxera. The land recovers, and if human intervention can be shown to be at its most benign by hastening recovery or indeed preventing its need by stopping the destruction of almonds, olives and others, then so much the better. We wish them the very best. They are working with the soul of Mallorca - the land.

The Mysterious Non-Growth Of Puerto Pollensa

In days of yore, Mallorca didn't see the necessity to divide its year into two seasons: ones commencing on 1 May and 1 November. Back in the day, and we're talking very much back in the day - as in the early decades of the last century - the seasons were as they normally are. There were four. Not dictated to by tourism, the island accommodated what tourists there were and existed in low-key, all-year touristic bliss.

Accommodation was key to all this. There wasn't a great deal of it, which was hardly surprising as there weren't great hordes of tourists demanding it. But of what there was, as in hotels, there was a distinct lack of even distribution. The typical tourist, northern European for example, vacationed in what would now be dubbed the low season (in broad terms from November to April). As a consequence, places which had hotels enjoyed what, in very relative terms, was a thriving all-year tourist business.

Immediately prior to the Civil War, Mallorca could count on having a mere 2,000 places in 32 hotels plus some pensions, hostels and inns. And of the 32 hotels, eleven of them were in Pollensa. After Palma, Pollensa was the principal centre of tourism on the island, and specifically it was Puerto Pollensa. While the Niu family in Cala San Vicente set about developing its old pension, and the ancestors of ex-Pollensa mayor Tomeu Cifre had a hotel in Pollensa town from 1907 (the Cosmopolita, now the Juma), most of this hotel activity was to be found in the port, plus the Hotel Formentor.

In Puerto Pollensa's case, there was all-year activity, and it wasn't solely reliant on the hotels. From the start of the twentieth century, it started to attract islanders who vacationed there in summer. They would use fishermen's cottages before beginning to build their own summer homes. But the islanders were far from being the only ones. The naming of a hotel in Pollensa - Cosmopolita - was highly prescient, although even by 1907 there were the first signs of cosmopolitanism. This was provided by the first wave of foreign painters, who were to be so crucial in promoting the area (the Tramuntana especially), and also the Royal Navy: British naval squadrons were to appear regularly in Pollensa bay.

The real "boom" in Puerto Pollensa occurred in the ten years before the war. During this time the Illa d'Or and the Formentor hotels opened, and celebrated names appeared, such as Agatha Christie. She arrived in Mallorca in March 1932. Not with any particular forethought of staying in Puerto Pollensa, she observed that "everyone, English, Americans were going to Mallorca in winter". There was nowhere to stay in Palma, so she took a taxi north and was fascinated by what she saw - the bay of Pollensa.

Move forward to the years of the 1950s and 1960s, and Puerto Pollensa - it might be thought - was in a strong position to build on the reputation and infrastructure it had acquired before the war. But this wasn't to happen. To the relief of so many who now live there and take holidays there, Puerto Pollensa avoided the excesses of so-called Balearisation. Why though?

It has been suggested that this was due to farsightedness on behalf of the town hall. Later on perhaps, but not necessarily in the early boom years. There were, after all, to be hotels of several storeys height - the Pollensa Park and Molins in Cala San Vicente. A key reason was that pre-war development. Puerto Pollensa had become a tourist resort before anywhere else away from Palma. When the demand came for the tourism boom, the focus was on what had been the incipient garden city resorts of the 1930s, such as Palmanova, Santa Ponsa and Son Baulo (Can Picafort). Plus, there was Puerto Alcudia, not conceived as a garden city but already with the outline of what was to become the City of Lakes. These offered tremendous scope for development; it was to be done from an almost blank sheet. Puerto Pollensa, on the other hand, had a comparatively full sheet.

The development had to be rapid. The Franco regime, with its desperate need for foreign exchange, earmarked Mallorca for expansion and then pretty much let the island get on with things. It was far easier to develop from the pre-war plans that resided in town halls like Calvia and Santa Margalida, and ones that were unencumbered by existing infrastructure and interests.

But there was at least one other very important reason why Puerto Pollensa avoided the massive boom, and it was something it shared with Puerto Soller. That resort had also become popular before the war, especially with French tourists. It also escaped the worst excesses of development, and for that, thanks have to be given to the military. The regime, requiring tourism development, was also highly militaristic and paranoid. Where there were bases of strategic importance, tourism could develop only so much.

The Lost Soul Of Mallorca

For three days from tomorrow, the Hotel Formentor becomes the location for high literary culture. They're holding the ninth annual Formentor Conversations. They'll be conversing about ghosts and lost souls in purgatory over the weekend.

They also hand out an award. The Formentor Prize for Literature is going this year to the Italian author Roberto Calasso, whose oeuvre is characterised as considering the relationship between myth and the emergence of modern consciousness. His work will feature during the conversations. Works by other authors will include those by the likes of Dickens ("A Christmas Carol"), Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

Low brow this gathering most certainly is not, while its surroundings are those of the distinctly high brow: the hotel itself, at which you could have parted with up to 1,000 euros a couple of weeks ago to see the American violinist Hilary Hahn; the nearby La Fortalesa, which will forever now be known as Roper's house; the Villa Cortina, the object of much controversy, now seemingly being made legal so that the one-time executive president of Repsol can live in it.

Literary tradition runs deep in Mallorca, albeit for the casual observer of the island it may as well not exist. Language, let's be blunt, doesn't help in this regard. This is a tradition that has generally not gone and will not go beyond borders. But it is there nevertheless, and Formentor plays its role. Arguably the most famous Mallorcan poem took a pine from Formentor and made it highly representative of the Mallorca School of poets: Miquel Costa i Llobera's "El pi de Formentor", written in 1875.

Costa i Llobera died in 1922. He was witness therefore to the early days of  Mallorca's tourism that grew in the years of the twentieth century prior to the Civil War. This was a tourism that was essentially high brow. It had to be in those days - travel was for the wealthy, and in its touristic version it was predominantly for the culture-seeker and the cultured, notwithstanding the occasional Bohemians. The Formentor Conversations are, therefore, like an echo of those distant days, not least because the founder of the hotel, the Argentine poet Adan Diehl, looked upon his building as a haven for the artistic and literary minded.

The Conversations, with their allusion to that past, are an example of the striking contrasts of this island. This is civilised Mallorca, one of culture, refinement and no small amount of money. In a touristic sense it is the complete opposite of the conversations held about Magalluf. Yet that allusion to the past and to what supplanted it when mass tourism started makes even more stark the extent to which Mallorca was transformed by its "industrial revolution".

There are all sorts of examples of the ways in which societies have undergone immense change over a comparatively short period of time - parts of the Middle East, for instance - and in Mallorca's case this transformation has occurred over the period of only two generations. It is an experience that has been lived by many and one that can perhaps be all too easily overlooked.

When researchers recently asked about current-day opinions regarding tourism - a survey in light of "saturation" - it was notable that the older generation felt the saturation sensation most acutely. Notable but not surprising. Here is a generation which, as an example, can recall how at the end of the 1950s Can Picafort had a couple of small hotels, a series of tracks made from sand, and a row of dunes. Now, it is a resort of high-density urbanisation. There aren't the dunes. They were flattened.

It was this process of "Balearisation" - the unprecedented development of the coasts - which contributed to Mallorca's one-time reputation. A further process of gentrification has shifted that reputation dramatically, but this makes it also easy to overlook how Mallorca was once shorthand for naffness.

The Formentor Conversations are an extreme and somewhat obscure manifestation of the extension to this gentrification, a desire to attempt to reclaim some essence of former times. There are things that cannot be reclaimed - the dunes that were built on, for example - but others can be. And one is a degree of civility. A further one is a spot of respect.

There is a tendency to argue that Mallorca should be grateful for the legacy bestowed upon it by mass tourism. There is gratitude, but here is a word that can disguise a patronising demand for servility. In the global economy, tourism no longer works as it once did, with the destination and its people expected to lump whatever was thrown at them.

Mallorca has a right to decide for itself, and within the context of current debates regarding saturation and sustainability, it may well do. Consequences of Balearisation will remain, but the lost soul of its purgatory can be reclaimed.