Resort Redevelopment: No Money, No Time

The Mallorca Hoteliers Federation is the most powerful of all regional federations. Its power lies, to a very large extent, in there being so many powerful hotel groups in Mallorca. Nowhere else in Spain comes close to the might which exists on the island. The power is such that the federation, acting on its own, can command the ear of the national government. The usual channel would be via the national confederation, but Mallorca can bypass this and go right to the very top.

While there might have been some misgivings regarding the previous incumbents of the positions of national tourism minister and secretary of state for tourism, the federation's relationship was never dogged by the politics which meant that a Partido Popular minister and Partido Popular president of the Balearics ceased to be on speaking terms. Nevertheless, the federation found it difficult to make headway, despite the secretary of state having been Mallorcan. With replacements for both positions in place, it senses that it might achieve more.

Soon after Matilde Asián was named secretary of state, she had a meeting with the hoteliers' president, Inma de Benito. In a rare act of solidarity with the current Balearic government, Benito requested that consideration be given to reforming the tenancy act. The hoteliers and government have different reasons for wishing this, but the reform would be the same: remove the loophole that facilitates so many holiday rentals.

Benito had some other requests, one of which was echoed last week in Berlin. This had to do with finding ways to obtain funds to rehabilitate tourist resorts. When she met Asián in December, the talk was of seeking European funds. Last week, it had simply become funds.

The hoteliers argue, with justification, that millions of private investment have gone towards modernising and upgrading hotels but that this investment has not been matched by the public sector. There are, to cite a general view, five-star hotels from which guests step out onto two-star pavements and streets. The infrastructure is as it has been for years but is getting worse.

We know of course all about Magalluf and Calvia's efforts to try and follow the lead of Meliá and others. But keeping up with these efforts isn't straightforward. Many town halls, having spent the years of austerity remodelling their finances, have surpluses. However, they can't use them; or only small parts of them. They are restricted by Madrid, which in turn bends to the requirements of Brussels.

Take the case of Palma. The town hall is regularly upbraided by hoteliers and residents alike because of its neglect of Playa de Palma. Yet here was supposed to have been one of the stellar resort transformation projects. How long has it been waited for? This isn't the fault solely of the town hall because the scheme has always demanded (and been promised) national funds. The scale of the redevelopment outstrips that of other resorts, but the failures to date serve only to highlight the demands of Mallorca's hoteliers.

Mayor José Hila, referring to Benito's request for national funding, said last week that the principal problem is the cut in public investment. And he isn't entirely wrong. Town halls are bound by rules for budgetary stability. These restrict what they can spend and when.

Town halls, where they are able to, do make investments. In Puerto Pollensa, despite all the rows, the improvement, mainly confined as yet to pavements, has been massive. Previously, some of them wouldn't have merited any star let alone two. The rows were, however, understandable, because of the amount of work required and the consequent inconvenience and noise.

These rows are now being repeated in Cala Bona and Cala Millor. It's reasonable to ask, as is the case, why the work is being done now and will last, in all likelihood, until May. Son Servera town hall, though, will have been mindful of how it is forced to budget for such schemes, which is basically the point that Hila was making.

In other parts of Mallorca, work has caused some rumpus: Paguera, Alcudia, Puerto Soller are and have been examples during this low season. But work in all these resorts achieves only so much. The years of underinvestment, and not just the years of austerity, have created resorts in desperate need of improvement. This extends to buildings as well, and not just hotels. In this regard, Calvia's attempt to incentivise owners has thus far been a dead loss.

The national minister, Álvaro Nadal, has himself spoken of the need to modernise "mature resorts". At present, though, budgetary demands limit his ability to effect modernisation just as they do town halls. If the time comes, though, and the purse strings are loosened sufficiently to enable wholesale resort redevelopments, a question needs answering. When could it be done? Lengthening the tourism season has its drawbacks. Just ask the good folk of Cala Bona.

* Photo: Work along part of Alcudia's Mile.

Tales Of The Llevant: Cala Bona

Ninety years ago, on 20 July 1924, there was an inauguration in Cala Bona. It wouldn't have been a grand affair. It is doubtful that numerous dignitaries and general freeloaders attended. This, after all, was just a tiny place on the east coast with a wee small port and some fishermen. Nevertheless, on that day ninety years ago Miquel Vives Servera and his wife, Matilde Maria Gonzalez Miralles, opened Sa Fonda de Can Cupa, sometimes also referred to as Sa Fonda de Can Bona. Their daughter, also Matilde, who was eighteen years old at the time, came to be renowned for her bouillabaisse and lobster à l'Américaine, but even then she had a good reputation. There may not have been many dignitaries at the opening, but the fonda (inn) attracted people from various parts of Mallorca. They came from Sineu, they came from Sant Joan, and the doctor in Vilafranca also came. The inn flourished and the inn became a hotel. The Hotel Cala Bona.

In 1960, just as the tourism boom was about to get underway, the hotel could boast all of fifteen rooms. The clientele wasn't foreign. It primarily came just the short distance from Manacor to sample a new speciality of the house, red mullet. In 1961, a plan was put forward to put two more floors on to the hotel. By the following year, the German tour operator Quelle had entered into an arrangement with the hotel, and the rest, needless to say, was history. Cala Bona, as a tourist resort, was born, and its pioneer was Matilde's son, Sebastian Bauzá. In 1963, the Hotel Llevant was opened, but immediately hit problems. The failure of a tour operator it had contracted with left it with more waiters than guests. By 1964, though, things had picked up. And there was another hotel, not one that was the creation of local Mallorcan families but of a Swiss couple, Wolfgang and Trudel Schrader, who had been invited by a friend to Cala Bona in 1960, had bought some land and had built a hotel. It was the Gran Sol.

In 1992, Matilde Vives was honoured by the Cala Millor hoteliers' association. She was asked if, back in the days of the original inn, she could have imagined how the inn and then the hotel would come to play a part in the new tourism world. It was a daft question. How could she have been expected to have foreseen what was to be? And especially on the east coast of Mallorca. As she commented then, while Cala Bona had its inn, Cala Millor had nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a house and certainly not a hotel. It wasn't until 1933 that a hotel emerged in Cala Millor - the Eureka - by which time there were also some small houses.

In the inter-war years, the east coast was all but overlooked when it came to the early development of resorts (Porto Cristo and especially the caves were a different matter; they hadn't been overlooked). As I remarked yesterday, Cala Ratjada, which had its rich villa and palace owners, might have become one of those inter-war resorts, but it didn't. The only true tourism development was way down on the south-east corner in what was to be called Cala d'Or. When tourism development kicked in in the 1960s, it was development with a large "D". The coast from Cala Bona down to Calas de Mallorca was referred to, in derogatory terms, as the "wall of concrete", and it was compared with a similar "wall" along the Playa de Palma. There was, however, one pretty crucial difference. Playa de Palma was planned. They actually wanted to build a wall of concrete in Palma. It was within one municipality, i.e. Palma, and stretched from the original resort of Ciudad Jardin to the border with Llucmajor and so Arenal, which, as an incipient resort development back in the 1930s, had been called Bellavista. The east-coast wall was not planned quite so systematically; it couldn't have been because there were three municipalities involved. 

This so-called east-coast wall came into being in a more piecemeal fashion. Calas de Mallorca, at its lower end, wasn't a factor until a 1963 law on "the centres of national touristic interest" declared it a zone for development (Playa de Muro was another resort which was covered by this law). By the time that Calas de Mallorca was being legally defined, Cala Millor had been, as tourism legend tells us, "discovered" by Skytours.

Mallorca's tourism history is full of pioneers, those like Sebastian Bauzá and indeed his mother and father. But these pioneers, down Mallorca's east coast certainly, were not all, as was the case with Cala Bona, local people. There were the Schraders as well. And there were also the Belgians. Which is another tale entirely.