Broadening Appeal: Religious tourism

In one of the more unlikely of tourism coincidences, the regional government has managed to confirm that guests who wish to partake of overnight hospitality in one of the unfortunately named "cells" at Lluc monastery will have to pay the tourist tax. The government did so, just as various experts were preparing to make their way to the monastery for a two-day chinwag about religious tourism.

If any of the participants plan on spending the night at the monastery, it will presumably be a case of early to bed and none of the staying up until three and drinking the bar dry, as is normally demanded of those attending conferences. If too many cold drinks are to be had by the Lluc conference flock, they will do what all attendees do the day after, which is to fall asleep.

There again, religious tourism sounds as if it is a likely subject candidate for curing insomnia. Despite the imminence of a one-euro per night imposition for availing oneself of a bed in a cell, it is doubtful that the conference will be enlivened by fierce, full and frank debate regarding the government's sustainable tourism tax and its negative impact on a tourism niche or indeed a religious tourist's hunt for icons lurking in the niches of ecclesiastical establishments. Or maybe, just as with every other sector of the tourism industry, outrage will be expressed while at the same time inventories will be drawn up for purposes to which the tax could be put. Maybe the Lluc cells could do with a lick of paint.

For a mere 35 euros, one can head off into the Tramuntana and learn over the two-day conference (today and Friday) about, among other things, the competitiveness of religious tourism, the cultural management of religious spaces, spiritual tourism and the history and future of tourism in the Tramuntana. And there is indeed the option to do an overnight: 95 euros for full board plus the conference. That'll be 96 euros from next year.

Niching tourism according to religion brings with it one major pitfall. If you don't happen to be religious, then the notion would probably be a turnoff. While there is religious tourism which is very much of a religious character, there is also, however, a great deal which doesn't presuppose that one is actually religious. It does rather boil down to how it's marketed, which might explain why the promoter of the Christian theme park in Mallorca (yes, it's still being talked about) insists that it isn't as religious a project as people might think. As things stand, though, the theme park, last heard of destined for Ses Salines, will not be getting the green light in any event: the Council of Mallorca has deemed its development to not be in the "general interest", if only in Ses Salines.

Religious tourism on the mainland has been given something of a boost this year. The 500th anniversary of the birth of Teresa of Ávila, later Saint Teresa of Jesus, has been commemorated. Various tourist routes and "products" were created in her honour. Here is an example of where the religious angle would dominate, but if one strips away the religious element, what one is left with is essentially a form of cultural and heritage tourism, based on religious sites.

In an article a couple of years ago, I suggested that there was potential merit in a tourism product of routes that cover Palma's cathedral and the churches, monasteries and hermitages of Mallorca. Palma alone has numerous sites, while elsewhere there are sites of special significance - Lluc, Miramar (because of Ramon Llull) and now Petra since the canonisation of Junipero Serra. Each town and village has its own site or sites with their stories to tell, while outside towns there are the likes of the Santa Magdalena hermitage near Inca.

Mallorca could never compete with, say, the religious tourism of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and to Spain's spiritual heartland, but it could make a virtue of its own spirituality - a great deal of it linked to the Tramuntana - through the development of tourism that encapsulates the separateness of the island's religious history, one aspect of this being the way in which it was Mallorca that held on to the tradition of the Sibil-la when it was abandoned elsewhere because of Rome's prohibition.

It would all depend, though, on marketing in order to broaden the appeal and to avoid such tourism being pigeonholed as one only for the religious. And a broadening of the marketing message might well appeal to administrations as they now are in Mallorca which aren't necessarily the greatest friends of the Church. They are friends of the island's heritage though, so much so that they would like a tax to help preserve it, and religious sites are key to a great deal of this heritage.

MALLORCA TODAY - Church bell seeks funds

The large bell of Sa Pobla's parish church has not rung for five years. A crack developed and the cost of repairing the bell is 25,000 euros. Only a fifth of the money has been raised, so the church is now seeking to renew efforts to raise the funds for the repair.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

Wondrous Stories: Muro's church

One of the beauties of churches is that you don't have to be religious to find them wondrous. Indeed, not being religious can be a benefit, as you will be more likely to keep your eyes open and your head up so that you can take in their magnificence, rather than closing your eyes and lowering your head in respect to or in hope of heavenly munificence.

Not all of Mallorca's churches are magnificent. Some are modern, such as that in Puerto Alcúdia. It is truly hideous, something that wouldn't look out of place on a council estate in Coventry. There aren't the contemporary horrors of rebuilt cathedrals, such as Coventry's, just some horrible looking constructions that you could easily fail to realise were churches. There are plenty of people who know Puerto Alcúdia who don't know there is a church there.

Alcúdia town, on the other hand, has the great pile of Sant Jaume that dominates the landscape to the left as you drive towards Puerto Alcúdia. Sant Jaume is something of a fraud, however. It isn't anything like as old as you imagine. The previous church all but collapsed in the nineteenth century; the current one is not quite 120 years old.

Nevertheless, the scale of Sant Jaume, most evident as you view it from a distance, is in keeping with the vastness of other older Gothic structures. One of the most imposing of parish churches is that of Muro town.

On the eve of the fiesta of Sant Joan (i.e. on 23 June), the Sant Joan Baptista church reached the grand old age of four hundred years. It took forty years to build, the previous church having been deemed too small for a village of some 1500 people. Nowadays Muro has a population of around 7000. Back in the sixteenth century the then bishop of Mallorca might have believed Muro was on the point of massive population growth. More likely he ordered the rebuilding on the grounds that if it was a church it had to be bloody enormous, regardless of how many people it might accommodate.

Sant Joan Baptista is far too big for purpose, and always was. But then the same can be said for most Catholic churches. They were absurd indulgences and are even more so for a contemporary society in which church attendance has dropped so alarmingly.

Nevertheless, we have the egotistical and boastful extravagance of Catholic church building to thank for the colossi that sit bang in the middle of Mallorca's old towns. And Muro's is one of the best examples, if only because it is so overwhelmingly obvious with a large empty square in front of it, emphasising its size and urban dominance.

It isn't because I'm a "murer" that I find the church one of the island's most appealing. And it isn't a case of familiarity breeding a familiarity of favouritism. I venture into Muro town relatively infrequently; I am far more exposed to churches in Alcúdia and Pollensa for example. The appeal lies in the fact that it is so self-regardingly and obstinately there. Though Alcúdia's Sant Jaume looms out of the landscape, close up it is less obtrusive, welded to the walls of the old town and tucked in front of a small plaza. Pollensa's churches similarly blend in. They are brooding presences, most obviously the ominous parish church in the Plaça Major, but the threat they hold is diluted by surrounding townhouses and narrow lanes. Muro's church in its isolationist preposterousness simply can't be avoided.

Moreover, there is something different about it. Gothic in style, it has a feel of the Byzantine, heightened by the presence of palms at its entrance. Is it a trick of the light or is the stonework really rather redder than you would normally expect? This isn't, or doesn't appear to be, the golden sandstone of the south-east of the island, that which makes Santanyi such an attractive town and appear to be in a permanent state of mellow sunset as a consequence. The stonework complements the ruddy, red earth to be found around Muro.

It is the physical presence and architecture of the church plus what it represents historically and socially that make it as fascinating as it is. And other churches in Mallorca have their own idiosyncrasies and their own stories to tell.

I'm not sure that they do tours of churches. Probably because it sounds too boring, and it would be if it were just about the religion. But they should do tours as there is way more to a Mallorcan church than prayer. So long as you keep your eyes open and your head up, they are their own not-so-little worlds of times gone by and of being communities' focal points. And they don't come any more focal than in Muro.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Wall

There is a Wall in Staffordshire, a Wall in Northumbria; there is also a Wall Bank and a Wall Hill. There are Walls with additions, such as Wallasey, others that have lost one of their doubles, like Walmer, and which are not walls but Welsh - respectively, island of the Welsh and lake of the Welsh, curiously enough, given that Walmer is in Kent. Not all Walls that have been similarly added to or stripped of an "l" are Welsh; Walsall is Walh's valley, Waltham, an estate by a wood. The Walls of Staffordshire and Northumbria are specific walls - Roman.

The town of Muro is also a wall. The name means "wall". It is not Welsh or Walh but also Roman, or so it is believed. There seems to be some debate. The Arabs kept the name, nonetheless, and in the process of their occupation also granted the name of Albufera to the wetlands that stretched further than they now do. Albufera was once Al Buhayra, but is still, primarily, a piece of nature that belongs to Muro. The resort of Playa de Muro sounds exotic with its Spanish title, less so when one translates it as Wall Beach. Yet it is, of course, Wall Beach that most people - tourists - know, except those who believe that Wall Beach is part of The Hill, or Alcúdia to give it its currently correct name; the Arabs were responsible for that as well.

Travel from The Hill along the coast road, pass through Wall Beach, turn right at the Home of Picafort and head off to Wall, and you pass the woods that conceal what will become the Wall golf course and also pass richly terracotta brown earth that grows potatoes and other vegetables and which provides, together with the earth of Sa Pobla, the country kitchen of northern Mallorca. Take this road to Wall, and you eventually arrive at a roadside industrial estate, a garage and a Pepsi distribution centre. Like other towns of the north - Pollensa, for example - in which the outskirts are non-resplendent, the entry to Wall is misleading. It threatens drabness, a lack of scale, functionality rather than grandeur. But unless you turn your back on Wall and drive off through the agricultural lands towards Sa Pobla or take the road of broken tarmac for Palma, you cannot avoid going into the centre of Wall. And you need to really go into the centre, to the square to which, on one side, lies the town hall and, on the other, the parish church.

How inadequate parish church sounds. It is reminiscent of demur English countryside and understated small scale. Because if the entrance into Wall hints at little of scale that lies within, you cannot miss, once in the centre, the colossal presence of the Muro parish church. It is the most forbidding, impressive, massive of the local town churches. In Pollensa, on the Plaça Major, the church there is a vertical elevation of Gothic Hammer horror. It should, you feel, topple on top of you. Its sudden rise from the town's main square is the Munch scream of a shock that accompanies its appearance and encounter, but it is town house church by comparison with Muro's, wrapped in the surrounds of the Plaça. Alcúdia's Sant Jaume can only truly be appreciated from a distance, from the ruins of Pollentia or from further away, a colossus on the landscape. In Muro, the church assails you in its isolation and with its sheer leviathan magnificence. It is a beast of religiosity.

People - tourists - don't go to Muro, much. They should. If only to be dwarfed by the church. The sadness of the centre and the square with no cafés between the church and the town hall is that they concreted it over. It needs to still be dust. Were it to be so, it would complement more colourfully the sandstone of the huge blocks that constitute the church. In hottest summer, as the temperatures nudge a hundred, this square, given back to dust and sand, with the brooding threat of the church, would be man with no name land, spaghetti western Mallorca. They may have spoiled it, placed plastic chairs around the edges of the square, on which old men sit and talk away the odd hour, but the centre, because of the church, is still an astonishing manifestation of unexpected scale. You should go there.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Christina Aguilera, "Beautiful", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-USUDzycRvM. Today's title - no prizes for this or for knowing which "another" should be added.

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)

Am I Ever Gonna See My Wedding Day?

BEING SPANISH - PART THREE

Take a look along a street or at a row of houses or other buildings, and one - it might be hoped - would gain an appreciation as to one's location, albeit a very general location. It might be a good idea for some form of general knowledge quiz. Show the contestants photos of representative streets, and get them to name the country or the area. I wonder how many might get Spanish if they were to be shown some of the streets or buildings around here.

When the tourist is first deposited in one of the tourism centres, let's take The Mile as an example, what does he or she see? That expectation that some may have had of being Spanish would soon dissipate. What being Spanish is there? Only the Spanish word - nada - nothing. Tourism centres are built with one thing in mind and that's the first word of this sentence - tourism - and these centres tend to a conformity of the non-descript. They are, in some respects, comforting, as in their architectural barrenness they aspire to nothing more than a neutrality; the tourist feels no sense of dislocation by being jettisoned into a habitat of non-architecture. They are mass architecture for a mass tourism. Yet some centres could even be described as anti-architecture; they have elevated the art of a miserabilist prefabrication, combined with naked and unsympathetic commerce, into a state of anti-being Spanish which means that verification as to location can only be made through the consultation of a map or the airline ticket that confirms that one is indeed no longer in one's country of origin. Such anti-architecture exists all around, and it is not unique to one resort: Can Picafort has it in abundance; Playa de Muro boasts its hideous strip from the municipal office to the Banca March roundabout: the stretch going into the port of Alcúdia is also unit-upon-unit of unintelligent design as is that part of the frontline of Puerto Pollensa from the nautical club to Sail & Surf. Nowhere is immune to the appetite of anti-architecture.

But in truth, what does one really expect? These tourism centres are, for the most part, creations with only one thing in mind, and they are manifestations of a modernity that went largely unplanned. Moreover, these are not historic or heritage centres where conformity to a style is the first item on the planning application. Consequently, the tourism centre's sense of "being Spanish" can be said to be indeed Spanish because of its essentially ad-hoc nature. It may not be what some vague romantic image, conjured up in the mind of the tourist, may have anticipated, but it is a form of being Spanish nevertheless, albeit an equivocal one.

One looks, however, to the old towns and to the port areas for hints of something more exact. Yet what does one find? It is all too easy to overlook the fact that both the ports and both the old towns of Alcúdia and Pollensa are places not just of tourism but also of residence and business. This trinity of needs has not been well reconciled, and nowhere is evidence of this more startling than in Puerto Pollensa. There is a curious tag that gets attached to Puerto Pollensa which is that it is unspoilt or relatively unspoilt. There is no such thing as unspoilt unless there is no habitation; there is only degree of having been spoiled. But the unspoilt tag is perhaps illuminating; it is being Spanish euphemism. And so one casts one eye around Puerto Pollensa and what is revealed is a largely arbitrary set of apartments with no commonality, among which is the chic white and grey blandness of Taylor Woodrow's construction on the former Garbi hole. Where is this "being Spanish"? There is elegance, for sure; the marina has it, but not as much as Alcúdia's does. But neither marina can be defined as Spanish. If elegance is a facet of being Spanish, ironically the Taylor Woodrow building is arguably, despite its having been built without any sense of context, one of the few in Puerto Pollensa that can be said to possess it. The quaintness of old hotels in the centre of the port, unlike Alcúdia in this respect, smacks of a past, but it does not suggest Spanish as such. It is only when one gets to the square that one feels the stirrings of this vague concept, and it is the church that does it. Squares, in themselves, are not redolent of a uniquely Spanish style. Nor are churches especially, but the imposing style of Catholic churches and their positions in the centres of urban areas are a move in that direction. Puerto Pollensa does this much better than Puerto Alcúdia where there is no square and a church that one could be forgiven for ignoring. I used to. Indeed when I was first there and was told that such and such was near to the church, my reaction was what church. It was only when one day in its vicinity I heard the bells that I realised that the building which could pass for a community hall in a British council estate was indeed a church.

Amongst the non- and anti-architecture, it is the grand statements of religion that cause one to pause and recognise a being Spanish. Of course, such churches exist elsewhere in the Mediterranean as do the narrow streets of tightly built townhouses with shuttered windows, but it is they, and they alone, which impress with their strength and scale and argue the case for a being Spanish. And Pollensa old town does this with brilliance. The connections between the churches, along those narrow streets and from one square to another transport one into a clearly different place. In an architectural antiquity fashion, nowhere tries being Spanish better than Pollensa.


GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING
And talking of churches ... . This past weekend has seen the fifteenth annual wedding fair in Palma. Here is a strange old thing, not weddings, but the degree of interest there is in having a wedding in Mallorca; it is one of the things I get asked about from time to time, i.e. in terms of those from the UK who wish to have their wedding here. And the problem is, I don't really have a clue. I thought that one had to be a resident to have a church wedding, and this may be the case, but there is a whole industry here that arranges weddings in whatever setting. Also, there are restaurants that promote themselves as wedding breakfast locations, the splendid Jardin in Puerto Alcúdia for example. The "boda" is a massive deal here, as it is anywhere.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Bill Withers (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28wpt_bill-withers-lovely-day-live_music). Today's title - a line from a cheesy but still great song. Who?

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)