Alcúdia's Language Of Tourism

Well, you know how it is. You wait an eternity for a fair and then three of them turn up at once. Let's be grateful there are only three, though. The Pollensa Wine Fair (next weekend, 18-19 April) has often coincided with one of this weekend's threesome - the Puerto Alcúdia cuttlefish and boats jolly - in the past.

Before everyone has the chance to troop off to Pollensa and get drunk next weekend, the town has its April Fair, one that is loosely based on the Seville Fair and is organised by the local Andalusian Cultural Association.

Something rather curious has happened with this fair this year. They have actually got round to publicising it rather more effectively than in the past. Accordingly, I was sent the programme by the tourist office and asked if I could supply a translation. Not, to be honest, that there was much to translate, but I'm always happy to oblige, as I am when Alcúdia tourist office makes a similar request. Could we have the boats and cuttlefish in English, pretty please?

The poster and programme that has been put out for the April Fair is a revealing document. It notes the "special collaboration" of both the regional government and Pollensa Town Hall, yet here is a piece of promotion that is not in Catalan. Andalusians don't speak Catalan, except perhaps for some who live in Pollensa, so Castellano it is.

Appropriate though the use of Castellano is, its use highlights, and not for the first time, the curious relationship between languages and promotion of events: curious primarily because there isn't a relationship, save one - Catalan. This subject is an old chestnut, I do recognise, but it is one that doesn't go away and indeed becomes ever more relevant. April is an odd month in tourism terms. Despite Easter falling in April this year, it isn't a month which is considered to officially form part of the tourism season. It is an off-season month, one which local authorities would love to develop in order to lengthen the season and so reduce the harmful impact of tourism seasonality.

The trouble is, as I think many of us are aware, there is a sizable gap between what is hoped for and said and what is actually done, and the promotion of events that occur this weekend pretty much sums this up. Pollensa's April Fair is, in the scheme of things, a minor event, but those in Muro and Puerto Alcúdia are not. Yet, if one takes the boat show and cuttlefish gastronomy extravaganza as an example, what does Alcúdia do? It asks some sucker to supply an English version. Free. This, to me, does not suggest a town hall fully committed to effective promotion. Rather, it suggests one that is content to put up with an ad-hoc arrangement so that English-speaking visitors might be aware that "sipia" is in fact cuttlefish.

Alcúdia has something called the consortium for overseas promotion. It is one rarely referred to and usually only when it has gone off to Miami to try and entice the odd cruise ship to put in an appearance. What does this consortium actually do? Who is on it? Does it not believe in a touch more professionalism, such as establishing a formal arrangement for having its promotional literature in foreign languages? (And I'm sorry, you Germans, I'm not about to put myself out and translate into German as well - there's probably some other mug doing that.)

The apparent indifference towards effective foreign promotion and so evidence of the lack of genuine commitment to lengthening the season can be found in the programme for this weekend's fair. It isn't simply that it is all in Catalan, it is what is to be found in one of the greetings. It comes from the councillor with responsibility for fairs, Carme Garcia. It starts: "Benvolguts Alcudiencs i Visitants". Dear people of Alcúdia and visitors. It is the "visitants" which gives the game away. If you are greeting dear visitors, do you not seek to do so in a fashion that they might understand? Or are the "visitants" considered only to be people from, say, Inca or Santa Margalida? I suspect that they may be.

Carme is a councillor from whom Castellano has to be wrenched out. Passion for the language is fine, and I have no objection, but not when it positively discriminates against precisely some of the people who should be being greeted. With such an attitude, and Carme also has responsibility for "linguistic normalisation" (i.e. the promotion of Catalan), what is she doing in charge of the fair?

I fail to understand, and Alcúdia is not unique in this regard, why fairs, fiestas and tourism are the responsibilities of three different councillors. Yes, there is administration required for fairs and fiestas and yes, of course, they are events for the people of Alcúdia, but they are regularly held up as being for tourists. And this weekend's fair is a prime example. But the town hall's own structure has an in-built mechanism which undermines what should be a principal objective: tourism development.

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.

Boats And Cuttlefish: A spring fair

Whereas the autumn fair comes with an in-built ominousness, the spring fair arrives only with the air of optimism: a spring in its step, rather than the arthritic creak of encroaching winter. It's the name of the season that does it of course, but in combination with fair, there is an abundance of vitality and expectation that attaches itself to the spring fair in a way that no autumn fair could possibly achieve.

They don't call Puerto Alcúdia's fair a spring fair, but this is what it is. It couldn't really be anything else, given that it is held in spring, but it comes with an alternative moniker, two in fact. It is both boat and cuttlefish. Or rather, boat and sepia. Cuttlefish simply doesn't do it as a name for a fair. Sepia, on the other hand, does. No one much may actually like sepia, but if there has to be a fair devoted to the rubbery cephalopod, far better that it adopts its Latin genus title.

Curiously, despite very few people holding their hands up and saying that they would normally give a cuttlefish the time of culinary day, the fair attracts an astonishing number of people. Any old excuse perhaps, but the boat/sepia fair, version 2012, was busier than it has ever been. All those crammed into the gastronomy marquees weren't eating meat, so either they do genuinely like sepia or are prepared to live with it for a day, especially if it comes at a special-offer low price.

Of the various fairs in the north of Mallorca which typically avoid making overt statements of their springlike quality (they hide behind saints names, farming, wine as well as cuttlefish and boats), the Puerto Alcúdia fair is by some distance the grandest. It was the boats that originally did it. They were spun off from the old town's autumn fair some years ago, shifted a few months and shifted also to where it had always been more appropriate that they should have been - by the sea, rather than by the town's walls. When they made the decision to move the boats, they decided to give the fair some added value, and it came in the form of cuttlefish. Strange, but true.

Were it not for the cuttlefish, it is questionable whether the fair, as a mere nautical exposition event, would be anything like as popular as it is. The boats are nice to look at, but whether any business takes place it is hard to say. It never seems to be, but then maybe this isn't what is meant to happen at a boat show. 

So much had the cuttlefish and the market that also forms part of the fair assumed the upper hand over the boats, it had seemed possible that the boats would make a dignified exit. But then Palma decided not to stage its boat show this year, and Palma, for once, came to Alcúdia this weekend; there were more boats than ever before. Where had previously been the knick-knackery of artisanal artefacts, there were boats, boats and more boats. This still didn't stop the hordes heading past the rows of boats and heading for the gastronomy marquees, but as boat shows go, or as Puerto Alcúdia's boat show goes, it would have to be deemed a great success.

There is a great benefit, naturally enough, from the great influx of islanders into Puerto Alcúdia over an April weekend. The fair is a pre-season warm-up for the restaurants, most of which had terraces packed to the gunwales. Not of course that restaurants have gunnels as such - boats do - but terraces jammed pack a week or so prior to the official start of the tourism season is jam on top for the owners.

What bars and restaurants in other parts of Puerto Alcúdia make of the whole event, though, is another matter. So many cars had turned up that parking, by not long after midday on Sunday, meant finding a spot by the Magic roundabout. There was a great deal of activity away from the actual port area, but it was activity that was manoeuvring itself into a parking space, disgorging its inhabitants and allowing them to walk the ten minutes or so into the port, away from and past other restaurants.

The success of the fair is genuinely to be welcomed, but it is a success that merely helps to reinforce the sense of imbalance in Puerto Alcúdia. There do seem to be rumblings, as myself had hinted at, regarding the siting of the new market. Why wasn't it located in the tourist area, an area that receives little or nothing by way of official events, be they for fiestas, fairs or whatever? This imbalance is something that the town hall should address. Whether it will is another matter, but in Alcúdia, unlike towns in which the old towns are very much divorced from their resorts (such as in Pollensa), there is an unmistakable division between the combination of old town and port on the one hand and the tourist centre on the other.

But for now, let's just be satisfied that the spring fair was so successful and that it perhaps puts into people's minds the idea of hope springing eternal, or at least hope springing beyond spring and into summer and to a similarly successful tourism season.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - More participants at Alcúdia's boat show

The boat show in Puerto Alcúdia over the weekend of 21-22 April will have a greater number of businesses from the nautical sector participating this year. There will also be 23 local restaurants present in the sepia (cuttlefish) gastronomy tent.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - Boat parade at Alcúdia's sepia fair

The boat show that has been a part of the sepia (cuttlefish) gastronomy fair in Puerto Alcúdia since the fair's inception is to be boosted this year by there being a a "boat parade". With the boat show in Palma having been called off, Alcúdia is anticipating greater participation by the nautical industry this year. The fair takes place over the weekend of 21 and 22 April, a week before the Palma boat show should have started.

See more: Diario de Mallorca