In Memory Of Aurora Picornell

The Council of Mallorca held a ceremony on Monday. Awards were made in the name of the institution. One was posthumous. It was for a favourite daughter of Mallorca. She died eighty years ago. She was Aurora Picornell.

Can Sales in Palma is nowadays a library; it was opened in 2004. Before the Civil War, there was an asylum run by the Hermanitas de los Pobres (sisters of the poor). During the war this became a women's prison. On 5 January 1937, the boss of this makeshift jail read out the names of five women - Catalina Flaquer Pascual and her daughters Antonia and Maria, Belarmina González Rodríguez and Aurora Picornell Femenías. They were taken to Porreres.

The village of Porreres was a conveniently out of the way place, a quiet place. It was a village that nevertheless rang with noise. The women, as with so many others, were shot at the cemetery. In the evening of 5 January, so the story is told, a fascist went into a bar in El Molinar in Palma. He brandished a bra stained with blood. It was Aurora Picornell's bra.

Born in El Molinar in 1912, her parents were communists. She became an activist at a young age. When she was 19, she founded the union for seamstresses. By then, the Second Republic was a reality. Mallorca and Spain were no longer under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. The king was in exile. A new direction was being plotted. It was, but it was one that descended into chaos and anarchy and ultimately into carnage. The dreams for and ambitions of a different Spain were shattered amidst the fighting and the murders. History should perhaps have told them that this would be how it would end. Over the course of the previous 100 or so years there had been attempts at refashioning the politics of the country and its society. The Liberal Triennium lasted, as its title says, three years. The First Republic survived for less than two years.

Aurora Picornell followed her parents into communism. She was one of the leaders of the Mallorcan branch of the Spanish Communist Party. But she is remembered as much for her feminism and for that union. They were to become known as Las Rojas del Molinar, the red women of El Molinar.

Catalina Flaquer Pascual was tortured. Her interrogators wanted to know the whereabouts of her two daughters. They were in hiding. Maria was eventually given away not by her mother but by her three-year-old daughter. The Francoist investigators gained the small girl's trust by giving her sweets. She told them where her mother was.

Although there were five of them, Aurora Picornell stood out. She was the leader. Her activism was such that she had acquired fame (or possibly notoriety) before the war. She was dubbed La Pasionaria de Mallorca (the passion flower). It seems that when she was being taken away from the prison, she and the other women were mocked by the nuns; one presumes the sisters of the poor. It is said that she told the other women that if she was alive in the morning, wherever she might be, she would return for revenge.

That anecdote serves as something of a reminder of how divisions were. The church was seen to be (and not just seen to be) on the side of the Nationalists and the fascists. It shouldn't be forgotten that the Republicans were not whiter than white. They committed atrocities against members of the church. The Balearic government's law on historical memory and graves was, after some considerable debate, reworded in order to take account of victims from both sides.

But it is the name of the Republic which dominates. Hence there have been the exhumations in Porreres. Hence why there will be more and why there is a call for exhumations in Manacor as well. The numbers of dead there, spread over a longer period, vastly exceed the bodies in Porreres.

So much attention is currently being given to this historical memory because there is a government (and a Council of Mallorca) which does not want the memory to go away and which wants some closure for descendants. The memory was allowed to go in the past. It is largely because of the one-time amnesia, the absence of any reconciliation, that events of the 1930s are haunting us now. There is also the symmetry of anniversary. Last year was the eightieth anniversary of the start of the war. This year is the eightieth anniversary of the murders of Las Rojas del Molinar and of the Republican mayors, Emili Darder of Palma and Antoni Mateu of Inca, among others.

The grandson of Aurora Picornell accepted the honour on Monday. President Miquel Ensenyat concluded that he hoped that society could recover its dignity and that the deceased could be returned to their families.

A Former Adopted Son: Count Rossi

The Civil War continues in Mallorca. It continues to be revised. Its protagonists are being expunged. They are being deprived of positions of honour. In Sineu and Felanitx, Francisco Franco Bahamonde has ceased to be a favourite son - "hijo predilecto". In Sant Llorenç, Franco will no more be an adopted son. On the other side of the coin - the Republican side - Palma recently made Alexandre Jaume i Rosselló an illustrious son; he was executed at the same time as Emili Darder, also an illustrious son, and the Alcudia businessman, Antoni Ques.

Son Servera and Alcudia have their own revisions. They concern the same person. He had a nickname - the Lion of Son Servera. In Son Servera they intend removing the title of favourite son. In Alcudia they have done away with adopted son. The council meeting on Monday agreed this. Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi is no longer an adopted son of Alcudia.

Bonaccorsi had two nicknames. Conde de Leon y Son Servera. This was one for Spanish (Mallorcan) consumption. The other was Conde Rossi, Count Aldo Rossi. He granted himself both names. A striking, somewhat maniacal-looking character with red beard and tangled hair, he was as fascist as it could have been. Mussolini was to provide him with the opportunity for glory. The Conde Rossi arrived in Mallorca in late August 1936. Disorganised Nationalists, members of the Falange and the Guardia Civil were to come under his command. The Italian air force, which was to use the one-time golf course in Alcudia as a landing strip, assisted him. The Republicans were defeated. Mallorca was secured. The course of the Civil War was being determined.

Estimates vary as to how many Republicans were murdered during Bonaccorsi's pacification of Mallorca. His "dragons of death" could have killed 3,000. Perhaps the number was as low as 700. The French and the British were appalled. For balance's sake, it was pointed out that some 1,500 Nationalists and priests had also been murdered. For balance's sake today, the Balearic law for remembering the Civil War and its aftermath - the law which has enabled the exhumations of mass graves - was ultimately revised to refer to all victims of war. The Civil War continues.

The diplomatic outrage of the French and the British was to have an impact. Bonaccorsi was recalled to Italy before the end of 1936. His old friend Mussolini was also concerned by Bonaccorsi saying that Mallorca was to be Italian. The fact was that there was some notion that the island could have become a semi-independent entity under Italian influence if the Republicans had won the war. History discarded that possibility.

The role of the Italians and of Bonaccorsi was absolutely crucial in how things panned out in Mallorca. In the early days of the war, the rebels (i.e. the Nationalists) faced enormous problems, especially as the Republicans controlled the Mediterranean coast of Spain and most of the fleet. A Falangist, Captain Juan Thomas, was to be important in negotiating with the Italians, aided by the Germans who took him by boat to Italy. Come the middle of August and Thomas was able to inform the Marquis de Zayas, the leader of the Falange in Mallorca, that those negotiations were going well; these were negotiations for planes.

The Italians needed convincing by a show of money. Three million lire had to be deposited at the Italian consulate in Palma. There was little problem raising the money. Who else was to assist than Joan March, still an illustrious son of Santa Margalida but holding onto the honour by his long decayed fingernails. Three bombing seaplanes were on their way.

Even so, the rebels needed a real leader. Zayas recognised the need for one, so did Captain Margottini, commander of the destroyer Fiume, which was anchored in the bay of Palma. "The biggest problem is the lack of courage of the leaders." Enter Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi, and soon after his entrance came the delivery of more planes - two CR-32 biplane bombers and then three triple-engined SM-81s.

After the retreat of Captain Bayo on 3 September, Mallorca was secured for the Nationalists, but it was Bonaccorsi who sought and received the plaudits. Three days later there was a parade in Palma. Long live the hero, the people cried. The Count Rossi rode his horse at the head of the troops. He was more than content to be seen as the man who liberated Mallorca.

And so this was how, along the way, he came to be both a favourite and an adopted son. But because the Civil War continues, he no longer can be. The strange thing is that it should have taken so long for the war to be revised, for the names to be removed, for their honours to be dishonoured. Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi, formerly known as an adopted son of Alcudia.

The Execution Of Antoni Ques

The dates 23 and 24 February hold a great deal of significance in Spanish and Mallorcan history. At national level they were the days in 1981 when the coup attempt was launched and when it was quashed. The choice of 23 February didn't in itself hold any particular importance other than the fact that it was the day when there was to be a vote in Congress to seek confirmation of Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo as prime minister. Against a background of political crisis, kidnapping, murder, torture and the re-emergence of the far right (expressed in a section of the media), Antonio Tejero, a Guardia Civil lieutenant colonel, and Jaime Milans del Bosch y Ussía, an army lieutenant general, headed the coup attempt. It failed and although there was to be another coup plot in October the following year - one which was kept quiet and was a vain effort to prevent Felipe González and the PSOE socialists from forming the government - the events of February 1981 solidified the movement towards democracy.

The abortive coup of 1981 did nevertheless highlight the ongoing tensions in Spain, ones that have never truly gone away. If 1981 was a manifestation of the clash between democracy in its multiple guises and the former authoritarianism, nowadays the rift is - as it has so long been in Spain - between the crown and the republic.

In the Civil War, the crown, as far as the Nationalists were concerned, was symbolic rather than being a prime institution to defend and restore. In no small part this was because of the historical division in the nature of the monarchy that occurred in the nineteenth century. For much of that era, Spain was in turmoil because of the competing claims on the monarchy that had arisen at the end of the reign of Ferdinand VII in 1833. One of these claims, that of the Carlists, was for a deeply conservative and a Catholic Spain. Franco's Nationalism was in a sense an extension of the Carlists without a monarchical figurehead.

Republicanism and liberalism took root during Ferdinand's reign, especially because of the king's betrayal of the 1812 Liberal Constitution and of those who had sought his restoration and the removal of Bonaparte and the French. While the monarchists were to spend years fighting among themselves and inspiring the Carlist Wars, Republicanism and liberalism bubbled beneath the surface and began to become the breeding ground for an altogether different force in Spain - the middle-class business bourgeoisie.

All this context is important in understanding what was to happen over the years that led up to the Civil War and indeed to events during it. The bourgeoisie, some of it anyway, embraced Republicanism less because of being fiercely anti-monarchist but more because of obstacles presented by the aristocracy. By the time of the Civil War, Republican businessmen represented a movement far removed from other elements which attached themselves to the Republican cause, such as communists and anarchists. They were essentially moderates, defending their business interests.

In Alcudia, 23 and 24 February are significant for very different reasons. The first date relates to the miracle of Sant Crist, which occurred in the sixteenth century. The second date marks the day eighty years ago when an Alcudia businessman - Antoni Maria Ques Ventayol - was executed along with the Republican mayors of Palma and Inca, Emili Darder and Antoni Mateu Ferrer.

There was a ceremony at the weekend to mark the eightieth anniversary. Darder is the best known of those who was executed, but in Alcudia Ques is still remembered: there was a presentation last week in his honour. Ques was far from having been the only businessman who was given a death sentence. Llorenç Roses, Darder's brother-in-law, who was the driving force behind the creation of Palmanova, was another. He had joined the Esquerra Republicana Balear (the Balearic Republican Left), another member of which was Antoni Ques.

The evidence presented against Ques, apart from his membership of this party, was that he was supposedly part of the "Lenin Plan" to impose a Moscow-type dictatorship in Mallorca. A witness, who was later sent to a mental institution, claimed that Ques had amassed over two hundred weapons that were to be used for a massacre. It was a total fiction. The weapons were never found.

Ques was a millionaire. He had known Joan March for many years. He was a shareholder in March's Trasmediterránea shipping company and had established an Palma office in 1915 close to where March had his offices. Yes, he was a Republican but he enjoyed a high social status. A communist he most definitely was not. Unlike March, who had after all founded the Liberal Party in Mallorca but who was astute (or corrupt) enough to know how to shift affiliations, Ques adhered to principles for what he saw as a better political system for business. That was why he was executed.

Ques was remembered at the ceremony at the weekend, a symbol of the tensions that are now some two hundred years old.

* Image is of the poster for the presentation in Alcudia.


Index for February 2017

Adults-only - 1 February 2017
Balearic parliament shenanigans - 5 February 2017, 12 February 2017
Balearics Day - 27 February 2017
Balti Picornell - 9 February 2017
Council of Mallorca - 24 February 2017
Flights increase in Palma - 25 February 2016
Greyhound racing - 19 February 2017
Holiday rentals - 3 February 2017
Mallorca's folk tales - 6 February 2017
Mallorca land - 13 February 2017
Nóos trial verdicts - 21 February 2017, 26 February 2017
Palma urban forest - 17 February 2017
Partido Popular division in the Balearics - 16 February 2017
Picudo rojo and xylella fastidiosa - 8 February 2017
Podemos division - 15 February 2017
Pollensa Sant Antoni cock - 22 February 2017
Puerto Pollensa bus station - 20 February 2017
Quality v. quantity: tourism - 2 February 2017
Republicanism: execution of Antoni Ques - 28 February 2017
Ryanair and lower Spanish airport taxes - 11 February 2017
Saint Valentine's Day - 14 February 2017
Tour operator-hotel relationships - 23 February 2017
Tourist bus services - 18 February 2017
Tourist tax - 4 February 2017
Valtonyc - 10 February 2017
Working conditions in tourism - 7 February 2017

The Many Days Of 12 October

Spain's National Day, Spain's National Holiday, Spain's Day of Hispanicity, the day of the Guardia Civil, the day of the Virgen del Pilar, the day of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. Make your choice. Yesterday was all of them.

They still refer to the "Día de la Hispanidad" - Hispanicity - albeit that a 1987 decree sort of abandoned the notion. As a national day, the Hispanicity concept was one that first surfaced outside Spain: in Argentina to be precise. In 1931, a one-time Spanish ambassador in Buenos Aires proposed that there be one. By that time, Argentina had been celebrating Columbus for some forty years. In 1913, they came up with the Fiesta de la Raza - the festival of the race, the Spanish race. That's another option to add to the 12 October list.

Hispanicity, a form of international nationalism, now seems a gloriously anachronistic and archaic concept. At the time that it surfaced, Spain was entering yet another of its periods of turmoil. Perhaps Hispanicity was something to cling to, an attempt to boost a nationalist morale that had been shattered by, among other things, the losses to the Americans at the end of the previous century.

Five years after that ambassador, Ramiro de Maeztu, proposed the name, what happened? Well, I think we all know what happened. Under Franco, allied to the image of the Virgen del Pilar, here was the perfect means to express what "Spanishness" meant - deeply conservative, highly Catholic, militaristic, fascist.

With the exception of the latter, this was a meaning that had characterised Spain for decades previously, though goodness knows there had already been fascistic tendencies in a line from Ferdinand VII to Primo de Rivera; earlier than even Ferdinand it might be said. A further characteristic was turmoil; it was pretty much the normal state of affairs during the nineteenth century, as liberalism vied with conservatism and usually came off worse.

Was this a fair assessment of Spanishness? And what assessment can be made nowadays? The Civil War has defined Spain ever since. Yet here was a country which had more than 120 years previously given the world the notion of liberalism. Here was a country which during the last century spawned three of the greats of the world of art - Dali, Miró, Picasso - heirs to the crown of arguably the greatest of all, Francisco de Goya. It was a country of suppressed sophistication, a factor which perhaps contributed (and still does contribute) to the fascination that Spain has for the foreigner.

On the surface, Spanishness was also its enduring images, such as the bullfight and flamenco, ones that the Franco regime was only too willing to promote. But there was what lay under the surface. Writer after writer sought to dissect and analyse it. Ernest Hemingway, Laurie Lee, George Orwell. Not all the writers have taken the Civil War as a theme, but many have and still do. Victoria Hislop's "The Return" is a more contemporary example.

The war continues to inform and inspire the foreign writer. It's unsurprising, given that fundamentals of that time continue to inspire national (and independence) debate. The fascism and militarism no longer exist. Hispanicity, in the sense of some form of fading global power, has faded further. The images have altered. The bullfight has been replaced by the beach. Tapas and football are Spain's global brands. But the struggles remain between conservatism and liberalism, the monarchy and the republic, the church and the secular authorities.

The tensions within Spanishness are created by anti-Spanishness. Some of it is vehement, just as it has been since the days, three hundred years ago, of Felipe IV and his Catalan repressions. Some of it is less so, but in its current-day guise it can cause a collision between one of the global brands and a key reason for the tensions. Barcelona's Gerard Piqué will retire from international football. Pro-Catalan, pro-independence, he says he feels unwanted by the national team. The national team: Spain, España, Spanishness writ large for the current day.

The National Day was against the background of the political chaos caused by the two elections. In truth, this chaos is a re-emergence of how it always was. The years of transition, the boom years under González and Aznar and the stability of politics might be seen as their own anachronisms; Spain has historically not done stability. And into the chaos have come throwbacks to the 1930s - those divisions between left and right, wholly unreconcilable and with the corruption which defined attempts at mock democracies prior to the war.

But there is one thing which is now very different and which undermines any psychological yearning for Hispanicity. It is Europe. Yes, Spain has done well by Europe, but the country is grateful. Catalonia would also be grateful. A new Spanishness of regional acceptance and forgiveness might just breed a new form of nationhood.

Reclaiming The Past: Mallorca's War Graves

The reclamation of the disappeared during the Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship on the islands. It's something of a mouthful for the name of a law, but the mouthful is worth it. I'm not convinced that I have the translation absolutely right, as I struggle with the Spanish "recuperación" which is the original word (or rather "recuperació" to be linguistically correct in a Catalan style). Recuperation - restore to health - that doesn't seem right. Recovery? Possibly so in as much as what will be recovered. But reclamation seems to possess greater strength and moral correctness: a reclaiming of what was lost. Lives in this instance.

This is what had been proposed as the war graves (my words) act, though even this was stripped back to the titular barest bones (and I really don't mean a pun) of just "pits". The change to the title reflects a rare occurrence. Often cited, too often cited to be genuinely credible, consensus has nonetheless prevailed. And for once it is genuine enough. So it should be. Genuine, that is. One is talking about people who were murdered. That shouldn't be forgotten.

It had been the Partido Popular (and Ciudadanos) who had proposed the changed title. By doing so the law would appear less one solely driven by Republican sentiment. There would be a recognition that there were two sides and that two sides were capable of atrocity. Inclusion of "the Civil War" permits a nuance of the bipartisan: the two parties to the dreadful events of the second half of the 1930s. The insertion of "the Francoist dictatorship" enables the political right to observe its own revulsion. There may still exist - not may, do - Francoists on the political right, but the contemporary right has for the most part come to terms with the need to distance itself. And generally, it does so with sincerity.

The Balearic political parties stated their views. With consensus sought, found and delivered, there was a lack of stridency. The views were conciliatory. Margalida Capellà, the Més parliamentary deputy who was the chief sponsor of the bill, spoke of issues on which you cannot win, only convince. It was a day of celebration but also the saddest day in the parliament's history. Miquel Jerez for the PP said that the law will serve to "reclaim" the forgotten victims, to remind us of humanity and of memory that is life.

It was Maria Antònia Oliver of the association Memòria de Mallorca, which has been pressing the case for the exhumation of mass graves, who expressed things the best. "The approval of the law through the consent of all parties is a sign of democratic normalisation. This is not a political issue but one of humanity." Amen.

Someone of course did have to go and spoil it. Baltasar Picornell of Podemos displayed a Republican flag. Why? Why do that? The Republican sentiment is and was lost on no one. Why resort to symbolism at a moment of reconciliation?

But is this what it is? Reconciliation? Not as such. There has never been such a thing. It's partly why the Civil War still hangs over Mallorca and Spain: a cloud on the past which officialdom attempted to erase through, for example, the amnesty (aka amnesia). No, this was and is a belated recognition. It will be styled as one by the right, but the law's title facilitates a recognition by the left as well. Consensus as opposed to reconciliation. As it is with the insertion into the text of the adjective "possible". Possible crimes against humanity. This replaced the definitive. There had been no possibility, only certainty. One can never, at the distance of some eighty years, always be certain.

We are of course only weeks away from the eightieth anniversary of the start of the Civil War. A law to permit the exhumation of graves, to provide closure for the families of the disappeared, to raise the "possibility" of pursuing crimes against humanity is as close as there will be to any form of celebration. Just as apposite, if not more, is the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Amnesty Law. The UN has been pressing for Spain to meet obligations on crimes against humanity. The Balearics have now done so. There is no statute of limitations under international law.

Yet while the Balearic parliament, with mostly commendable dignity, has been enacting legislation, in Palma we have had the ongoing controversy of the Feixina monument. A dignified solution for this had been made six years ago: a monument to all victims. Now, the stridency of the left (and the right) is in contrast to the considered reflections of parliament.

Symbols like the monument cannot be ignored. It is perhaps too easy to overlook how deep the feelings remain among some: the genuine ones as opposed to the outraged expressions of politicians. It is for this reason that the monument should be debated with greater dignity. The war graves act offers consensus and a form of reconciliation that have come about through empathetic discussion. Baltasar Picornell says that it is a "big step to closing wounds". Quite so. The monument, on the other hand, is re-opening them.

Paying Homage: 85 years on

They were paying homage yesterday. In towns and villages across the island, they remembered the victims, though the date is more of a celebration. Eighty-five years ago on 14 April, the Second Republic came into being. It was to herald a period of chaos, extraordinary even for a nation that had endured decades of chaos and violence. It was the culmination of all that had been unleashed at least since the time of the Napoleonic War and the drafting of the 1812 Liberal Constitution (some one hundred years earlier, in truth). It ushered in the years of the great dictator - great in the sense that Franco was far more important in dictatorial terms than Primo de Rivera (who had preceded the Republic) had been. Franco can never be considered in isolation. His regime had an inevitability about it: one created by political, religious, monarchical and military disasters. To quote Bismarck: "I am firmly convinced that Spain is the strongest country in the world. Century after century trying to destroy herself and still no success."

Some villages suffered more than most. Pollensa was one of them. Some 26 Republicans were executed. They, and the around 150 people who were imprisoned, were remembered in the town's Seglars square yesterday evening. The executions and imprisonments were often just politically motivated. Being a Republican was a sufficient enough crime. Others who were victims of the Nationalists were so because of motives of revenge. Vendettas, only partly related to the division that fostered the Civil War, were an excuse for payback. Charges were often spurious and weak. I learned recently about a gardener from Pollensa who was imprisoned merely because he had been employed by a Republican.

Pollensa town hall recently expressed its support for the regional government's law on war graves and for the Argentinian legal initiative in respect of violations under Franco. There was almost unanimous backing. The one Partido Popular councillor abstained, out of step with former PP colleagues, including the ex-mayor, who formed a rival group prior to last year's election. For the most part, even the right sympathise with pro-Republican sentiment in Pollensa. Or is this better expressed as anti-Francoist sentiment? There is a difference.

In Palma the homage paid was on a grander scale. Well, there was a DJ as well. It was held in the town hall square - Plaça de Cort. "Visca la República!" said the poster. The gathering had the support of the town hall, Podemos, Més, unions, feminists, a Palestinian group, a Greco-Mallorcan solidarity group and others, one of which was the Fundació Emili Darder. He was the Republican mayor of Palma, shot in 1937. Pollensa's Republican mayor, Pere Josep Cànaves, was shot in 1938.

Why some of these groups were lending their support was not totally clear. But if they wished to, then that was up to them. There was, though, a question about the support shown by the town hall. The PP and the C's questioned it. The town halls' official social media accounts were used to promote the event; Ajuntament de Palma appeared on the poster. The administration, argued the PP/C's, should not be involving itself in something of an ideological and partisan nature.

Absent from the political parties named as supporters was PSOE. By implication, though, it was a supporter. The mayor is a PSOE man, after all. The mayor, José Hila, has appeared to be easily swayed by Republican initiatives. Whereas he once agreed that the Feixina monument should become a monument to the victims of war and so lose its Francoist symbolism, he now heads an administration which has formally announced the specification for the monument's demolition on the Official Bulletin. Hila bends to the will of his political partners, one can't help but feeling. Previous PSOE mayors - all previous and surviving mayors of the democratic era in fact - are opposed to the demolition.

The monument has been allowed to become a cause célèbre, a case of whipping up a storm unnecessarily in the pursuit of ideological righteousness. By some, that is. Does Hila truly subscribe to it? Maybe he does. In the process, division has been created. It may have existed previously but it has been allowed to become more visible, while there are those without strong sympathies either way who have no wish to see the monument go.

One can understand that passions of 80 or more years ago still burn. Heaven knows, it will be 80 years on 17 July when the Civil War broke out with the military uprising in Morocco. There are bound to be events. The past cannot and should not be forgotten. For family descendants, the war graves act might allow them to get that now clichéd word "closure". Remembering and remembrance are appropriate. Ideological posturing is quite a different matter.

Demolishing The Past: Sa Feixina's monument

Sa Feixina. It is the park in Palma as you turn off the Paseo Marítimo onto the Avenida Argentina and then go right for the Paseo de Mallorca. The origin of its name is uncertain. The Catalan-Valencian-Balearic Dictionary offers various alternatives. The favoured one is to describe a ramp embankment with beams ("feix" is a beam) made from branches and sand bags for the protection of soldiers on the outside of a fort. The land, which has belonged to the town hall since the seventeenth century, was modelled as a park in 1935, and a school was built. During the Civil War the school became a barracks. It wasn't to officially be returned to the town hall until the 1960s, a decade during which the park was used to house a fair dedicated to tourism and artisan crafts. In 1991 the park was given a makeover and so now consists of terraces with gardens, trees and various sculptures, one of which is by Aligi Sassu, he of horse-sculpting fame.

In 1928 construction began on a warship at the El Ferrol naval shipyard in Galicia. It was a giant of a ship, almost 200 metres in length. For various reasons it wasn't to be fully commissioned until 1936 and its first true voyage was in December of that year. Two years later the ship was sunk. At the battle of Cabo de Palos the "Baleares" was torpedoed. Eight hundred crew lost their lives. The "Baleares" had become one of the flagships of Franco's Nationalist navy. The torpedoes were those of the Republican navy.

Some years later, in 1945, a monument was built. Perhaps the apparently militaristic origins of the park's name was the reason for the choice of location or perhaps there was no militaristic connotation. Nevertheless, the monument was in memory of the "Baleares". Among the gardens and sculptures of Sa Feixina, the monument stands tall to this day. But for how much longer?

When José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was prime minister, his PSOE administration introduced the law of historic memory. Under this law symbols of Francoism could be removed. It was not a mandatory law in that decisions were left to local authorities to apply the law as they saw fit. It was also not a law that necessarily required the dismantling of physical manifestations of Francoism. The main principle of the law was that symbols which exalted Franco and the regime should go. 

In 2010 the administration in Palma, then led by PSOE's Aina Calvo, applied the law to the monument. A local decree was issued. This established that a shield and words exalting Franco's regime would be removed. The monument would otherwise stay, and there would be a new plaque. It was to read: "This monument was erected in 1945 in memory of the victims of the sinking of the battleship "Baleares" during the Civil War (1936-1939). Today it is a symbol for the city of the democratic will to never forget the errors of wars and dictatorships".

The text had in fact been agreed some years before the law had been brought in. It, and consideration of the monument under the provisions of the law, were studied by two law professors at the university. With their guidance the town hall adopted the decree, Calvo pointing out that the law did not require the monument's withdrawal and also noting that the law recognised the memory of all victims of the war. The monument was thus officially reinterpreted, and this interpretation was made when one of Calvo's deputy mayors was José Hila, now himself mayor of Palma.

The current administration under Hila, which comprises PSOE, Més and the Palma branch of Podemos, is seemingly going to go ahead in approving the demolition of the monument, which doesn't have any protected status insofar as it is not "catalogued" by the municipality, something that would afford it heritage preservation. As has been pointed out, however, in a new era of consultation and dialogue, there hasn't been any, including requests for reports from the likes of ARCA, the association for the preservation of old centres. It concedes that the monument doesn't necessarily have great artistic merit but it does have historical value, and it - as are others - is reminding the administration of the compromise that Calvo arrived at: one with which Hila was in agreement.

The arguments that are now raging are predictable ones. They include accusations that the leftist administration is representative of a tendency which wishes to continue to fight battles of almost eighty years ago but which should let things be. The reinterpretation of the monument was made, and it was done so to the satisfaction of a majority, but the counter-arguments have it that it remains a symbol of the horrors of Francoism and one, moreover, that took the name of the islands.

I Am Of Mallorca, Catalan Island

"Amid the sea, my land rises to touch the sky, that leaves in the Sierra, flags of blue. I am Balearic, I am of Mallorca, Catalan island. All of my past that history puts away, the dye of glory, the Grand Catalonia. In the deep roots of my people, a conqueror is carried by the wind, the ship that left the moorings of Salou following the four bands of the flag. I am of this race, ancient and giant, that scares from the seas the Saracen people. I am of the Fatherland of the brotherhoods, Joanot Colom, old ancestors, heroic defender of traditions that drowned in blood, Austrians and Bourbons."

This is part of a poem, the next verse of which starts "heroes of Mallorca, Catalan heroes", that is entitled "I Am Catalan". Apologies for any translation mistakes, but it's a reasonable attempt in expressing the sentiments of something which could quite easily be written nowadays but was in fact written just a short time after the outbreak of the Civil War. In a few lines, it is a poem which manages to pack in references to Mallorca's natural environment - the Sierra of the Tramuntana - and to key moments in history, i.e. the conquest by Jaume I, the Germanies ("agermanats") uprising led in Mallorca by Joanot Colom, and the War of the Spanish Succession, with all the consequences that this had for Catalonia and Mallorca.

The poem was written by Pere Capellà. He died sixty years ago, and there will be events to commemorate his death, especially in the towns of Algaida and Montuïri as well as Palma later this year. He lived in all three. And the remarkable thing about Pere Capellà is that he ever got to live in Montuïri and Palma and that he managed to die of natural causes at the early age of 47.

As other prominent members of the Republican Left party in the Balearics were shot, it is quite possible that Capellà, who was the leader of this party in Algaida, would have also been shot. To make him an even more likely target for the firing-squad, it wouldn't have gone unnoticed that his literary career had taken off in 1931 when he had penned "Cançons republicanes" (Republican songs). However, when the coup took place, Capellà was able to flee Mallorca and head for Barcelona. He fought for the wrong side and was in Madrid when the city fell to the Nationalists. He was arrested and sentenced in 1940 to twenty years' imprisonment.

But it is at this point that Capellà's story took a turn that in some ways contradicts what might generally be thought about post-Civil War Mallorca. For starters, he served only three years of his sentence. He was released on parole and returned to Mallorca but not to Algaida. The authorities there were reluctant to let him come back, fearing that things might kick off with the local Falange. So, the town hall in neighbouring Montuïri let him come to their town. He was to live there for eight years before moving to El Terreno in Palma, and by that time he was a celebrated dramatist as well as poet.

His involvement with the theatre was through a company called Artis. In 1949, this company staged a production in Palma's Teatre Principal. It was a great success and it was attended by officials from the Franco regime. Despite the difficulties presented by the political system, he was able to write using colloquial language, which meant Mallorquín. He also wrote for a newspaper under the pseudonym Mingo Revulgo, initially in Castellano but then in Catalan. The name was taken from what had also been the pseudonym of a writer of satirical verses who had criticised the Castilian king, Henry IV, in the fifteenth century. These verses were known as "glosas", a word from which the Mallorcan "glosador" folk performer comes, and Capellà was himself also a glosador.

It was evident, even earlier than when Capellà was staging his theatre productions, that glosadors were tolerated by the Franco regime. Though Capellà would have preferred to have been using Catalan and not the colloquial language, it was better than having to use Castellano. But it was clear from his poem, "I Am Catalan", where his sympathies lay, i.e. with a greater Catalan nation. As such, he was expressing precisely the views that some today express. His theatrical work, through expedience rather than desire, used the colloquial language, which is precisely what the Balearic Government would today prefer to Catalan.

The Franco regime wasn't entirely stupid. It couldn't afford to alienate local cultures, and so it allowed Catalan dialects. Capellà was an accomplice in this, though he would have hated having being so. But in having being so, he wrote more than just plays or poems. He wrote, against his instincts, the sub-plot of today's contentious and tragi-comedy play - Mallorquín versus Catalan.

Digging Up The Past: Civil War

They started digging for bodies on Monday. In an old part of the municipal cemetery in Sant Joan, an area of grey earth with a couple of palms and some shrubbery, partially enclosed by a low cloister with chipped pillars, they began the careful process of exhumation. DNA samples will be taken. They will confirm the discovery of the bodies of Miquel Salom, Joan Gual and Jaume Gual, three middle-aged farmers.

Puntiró in Palma has a golf course. It was designed by Jack Nicklaus. It lies next to the old road to Sineu. If you carry on from Sineu, the next town you come to is Maria de la Salut. In October 1936, the three farmers and three others walked from Maria to Palma. They didn't make it to their destination. They were shot in Puntiró. Victims of the Falange, they were Republicans who had been turned in by neighbours. Their bodies were buried in the cemetery in Sant Joan.

The three others who had been made to walk to Palma that night in October managed to escape. One of them was to later testify that it was a Llorenç "Llebro" who shot the three men. One victim had shouted out, "do not kill me". The bodies were left in a well in Son Fred in Sencelles. They were found and taken to Sant Joan, where the local justice of the peace registered them as "unknown". They were placed in what was a communal grave in Sant Joan, the one which now has an unremarkable collection of plants growing on it. Some weeks later, on 28 December, relatives of the dead men claimed their identification but the bodies were not disinterred in order that confirmation could be made. Seventy-eight years later, following pressure from the association Memòria de Mallorca, the digging began on Monday. It is the first exhumation of its kind in Mallorca.

Six years ago, Judge Baltasar Garzón ordered the exhumation of mass graves. He was searching for evidence of slaughter by Franco's Nationalists. Three of these graves were in Mallorca - one in Calvia and two in Porreres. For his trouble, Garzón ended up being disqualified as a judge. He had exceeded his powers and had broken the principle of the amnesty, the legal forgetfulness that prevents Spain from truly coming to terms with the truth of its past. Work on exhumation started but was then paralysed by court order. It still is paralysed. Despite this legal obstacle, the Sant Joan grave, because of the association's insistence, the wishes of the families and the support of the town hall, is being exhumed.

There are reckoned to be 44 mass graves in Mallorca which contain perhaps as many as 2,000 bodies. 24 of them are in cemeteries, such as those of Calvia, Porreres and Sant Joan. Twelve others are in ditches by the sides of main roads. Four are in wells. And four more are under beaches, one of them being in Sa Coma, near to one of the two landing places used by Captain Bayo for his ultimately doomed expedition to wrest Mallorca from the Nationalists.

Sa Coma is in the municipality of Sant Llorenç. Just a bit north of Sa Coma is the resort of Cala Millor, part of which is in Sant Llorenç as well but with the other part in Son Servera. In Son Servera, at the last elections before the coup of July 1936, a Republican Left candidate had been voted in. It is thought that this was the reason why cruelty which occurred in Son Servera was as it was to later be. It is also said that in municipalities on Mallorca's Llevant coast there had been traditions of leftism and Republicanism, a product of discontent with landowners and the "cacique" political bosses that had been evident for many years.

The story of what happened in Son Servera in the lead-up to the coup and between it and the Bayo landings and the consequences of those landings has been detailed by the Memòria de Mallorca association. In one particularly chilling passage, it speaks of the events of the night of 16 August when the Nationalist colonel Unamuno said that he wanted the "jails emptied". These were the jails of Manacor to which Republicans had been taken. Two hundred were shot that night. "In the morning heat, there was an unbearable smell of burnt human flesh." The bodies are supposedly in the Manacor cemetery of Son Coletes.

The number of men from Son Servera who were shot during the Civil War was 52. Others lost their lives in different ways, while many more were placed in concentration camps. The occupations of the 52 have been noted. A doctor, a teacher, a shoemaker, a carpenter. But most were simple farmers. Just like the three men from Maria de la Salut whose bodies are being exhumed in Sant Joan.

The Man Who Made Palmanova

Over the past few days I have been devoting time - a fair amount of it - to writing features for the summer supplement to be published by the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" next month. One of these features deals with the founding of Palmanova, a place that didn't exist, or not by that name at any rate, until the 1930s. You will have to wait for the supplement to come out to find out about Palmanova, but in the meantime, there is a story to be told about the person who was responsible for its creation.

I knew the name but I didn't really know a great deal about Llorenç Roses Bermejo until I started to dig into Palmanova's history. His should perhaps be a story of triumph, that of the man who built a tourist resort, but it isn't. It is one of tragedy. This is something of that story and its gut-wrenching conclusion.

Llorenç wasn't from Calvia. He was from Sóller, though he had in fact been born in Puerto Rico in 1895. His Mallorcan father had been mayor of Arecibo on that island. In 1898, United States forces having invaded Puerto Rico, the island was ceded by Spain to the US under the Treaty of Paris. The family returned to Sóller a year later, and Llorenç was himself to go on to become a mayor - that of Sóller, albeit for a brief period in 1931. Otherwise, Llorenç was something of a property developer, which was how he came to be involved with Palmanova.

1930s Mallorca was a time when a form of tourism infrastructure was being developed, but it was being done so against the background of the Second Republic, gathering turmoil and eventually the Civil War, which brought that infrastructure development to a halt. For some who were involved in that development, it was largely a case of putting on hold their plans until circumstances were more favourable. For Llorenç, however, there was to be no such opportunity.

His brother-in-law was Emili Darder, the mayor of Palma and one of the leading figures in the Republican movement in Mallorca. Llorenç was also a Republican and he joined the Esquerra Republicana Balear (the Balearic Republican Left) when two other parties merged to form it in 1934. It might have seemed odd that businesspeople would support a left-wing party but actually it wasn't so odd. Another member of the party was Antoni Ques Ventayol, an Alcúdia-born businessman who was a shareholder in the Trasmediterránea shipping company, which had been founded by Joan March (later Franco's banker). Ques had also been a member of the Liberal Party in Mallorca, of which March was the leader.

Left-wing or not, for elements of the business class - the bourgeoisie - Republicanism presented an alternative to royalist, aristocratic and conservative dominance. The aristocrats of Mallorca, the principal landowners, were under some pressure by the 1920s. Though a dictator came along, i.e. Primo de Rivera (himself an aristocrat), economic circumstances were not great. Aristocratic landowners faced financial problems, exacerbated by the Great Depression, and then, from 1931, the awful reality of Republicanism.

The reason why Llorenç came to create Palmanova was that he had bought land from an aristocratic family. Selling to a member of the bourgeoisie, even if it were through necessity, represented a loss of face. There were many among the aristocracy who came to resent the wealthy middle-class, and only partly because some of it had Republican sympathies.

After the Civil War broke out in July of 1936, Llorenç was arrested. On the first of October he was sentenced to thirty years' imprisonment, accused, it would seem, of having done no more than voice his opposition to the declaration of a state of war in the Balearics by the Nationalist military commander, Manuel Goded, on 19 July. But there was more to come. He was interrogated further and he began to realise what would happen. On 19 November he was executed.

There is ample evidence which indicates that the Civil War created an environment for revenge. Llorenç was a Republican but he was also a member of the bourgeois middle-class. His trial was a farce. Accusations were made which lacked consistency and which couldn't be justified. He was a victim of bloody reprisal against his class.

Before he was executed, Llorenç wrote a final letter to his wife Dolores. I reproduce some of it:

"Forgive me for what I have made you suffer... Look after my father well. Love him so much and comfort him for the loss of his son... Enjoy everything you can in life. Make life wonderful for the children and for father. I love you and I will die thinking of you and our children. Ask dad to forgive me and my children to forgive my enemies... Teach the children, take care of dad and live long for the children and to pray for your husband... Goodbye my darling wife... My last kiss and goodbye... Llorenç, October 1936."

* Footnote:
Emili Darder and Antoni Ques Ventayol were both executed by firing-squad on 24 February, 1937.
Manuel Goded, having issued the declaration of state of war in the Balearics, flew to Barcelona by seaplane in order to foment insurgency against the Popular Front government. He was arrested on the same day (19 July) and was shot by firing-squad on 12 August.

Spring Backward: Mallorca's tragic spring of 1936

Spring. In one regard, there is no such thing as a Mallorcan spring. In tourism terms, there is winter and there is summer, two seasons determined not by equinoxes or solstices but by employment contracts and by flight and tour operator programmes. "The season" is typically taken (officially even) as starting on 1 May, more or less halfway through spring, but it marks the start of summer, just as 1 November - and the appropriate connotations of the day of the dead - signals the start of winter.

Spring. It has so many meanings. Renewal, rebirth, advance. Even the aide- mémoire for instruction as to which way the clocks are changed hints at advance: spring forward, though it is possible to also spring backward. Advance, renewal and rebirth, they are words of optimism, and the word "spring" has been attached to optimistic movements, those of hoped-for renewal and advance, yet which have proved that optimism can soon be lost. Spring backward. Spring is renewal. It is also revolution. Prague Spring, Arab Spring, the Spring of Nations, the latter a reference to the revolutions of 1848 which swept across Europe, only for them to collapse a year later.

Mallorca has had its own "Spring". It wasn't an optimistic spring, it was the "primavera trágica". 1936. With tragedy evident across Spain, Mallorca was caught up in the prelude to the coup in July and the Civil War. Getting a handle on how this tragic spring played out in Mallorca helps to give a better appreciation of just what Mallorca was like in 1936, because there is often an erroneous view of the island in the mid-1930s - one which suggests an indifference towards politics as a whole and so, therefore, to the politics of the mainland.

In the spring of 1936, working the land dominated the island's economic landscape, but agriculture was not as dominant as it had been even thirty years before, when some 70% of the economy was tied to the land. Urbanisation was such that 30% of the population lived in Palma alone, while industrial development, including tourism, had made significant inroads into a predominantly agrarian economy. Far from being populated by ignorant and apathetic peasants, Mallorca had a wealthy and educated middle-class and a network of workers' organisations. In other words, the island, though still mainly rural, possessed enough ingredients for modern attitudes and beliefs to take hold, which, at that time, included Republicanism.

Mallorca was then, as it still is, a conservative place. Though the cause of Republicanism on the island had been advanced considerably by 1936, it was a minority movement. Electorally, Calvia and Palma were exceptions rather than the rule in the February municipal elections of that year in returning Republicans (for the national election, no Republican was returned). An innate conservatism, perhaps because of the traditional agrarianism, perhaps because of insularity, held sway.

Despite this conservatism, two minority influences were to enter the equation. Over the course of the spring, Communist membership doubled. Though there was a significant Communist protest march in Palma, the Communists were not the main instigators of the violence that was to break out. Its primary cause were the pockets of the Falange who had arrived on the island in 1934. The Falange, a curious mix of its own republicanism, arch-Catholicism but also modernism, barely even registered in the 1936 elections. It had secured only around 200 votes across the Balearics; conservative, right-wing Mallorca was not about to embrace it. In March, the national government proscribed it. This, as much as anything else, was the signal for the outbreak of the tragic spring. Though the press attempted to portray Mallorca as being peaceful, it couldn't ignore acts of violence from Palma to Campanet to Porreres. A reason why some commentators and historians refer to Mallorca's "primavera trágica" is because it unleashed the violence it did on an island unused to such turmoil, largely because of the Falange. Clandestine though it became, it could count on as many members as the Communists; more in fact. In June, less than two weeks before spring became summer, a Falange bomb went off at the Casa del Pueblo in Palma.

A tragic spring might seem like an odd way to introduce a Mallorcan spring, but not really. The circumstances of the Civil War and of its prelude hold a fascination, if not necessarily for the best of reasons. And around the island there are places which have a perhaps surprising and certainly unwanted connection with events leading up to the Civil War and with the rise of the Falange. Sant Martí de Lanzell in Vilafranca de Bonany, one of the most important and oldest "possession" country estates in Mallorca, Vallgornera Vell in Llucmajor, Son Vivot in Inca, now an agrotourism rural hotel; these were, from March 1936, locations for pockets of the Falange to prepare for armed intervention. Spring backward.

* I am indebted to an article by David Ginard i Féron for information here. http://www.historica.cat/?p=6155

What If? Tourism after the wars

1936 and all that. But what might have happened to tourism had things after 1936 been rather different? What-ifs are pure hypothesis but they are still intriguing, and when one considers how Mallorca's tourism was disrupted by 1936, it is intriguing to wonder whether the island's tourism would be like it is today.

Mallorca's tourism can be traced back to the Archduke Luis Salvador, who invited a collection of intellectual and creative friends to Ramon Llull's Miramar in Valldemossa. This was in the nineteenth century, though, and it was a very specific and high-brow type of tourism. Mallorca's first tourism era as such began in the 1920s. There have been two tourism eras, because of what got in the way to cause there to be two.

Of articles I have written previously, there have been those about the old golf course in Alcúdia, about the first tourism seaplane flights from France to Alcúdia, about the first passenger flights from Italy to Puerto Pollensa, about the abandonment of plans for the rail extension to Alcúdia. These are all linked to 1936 which meant that the golf course was built on, the French flights ceased, the Italian ones started and the railway wasn't to be given serious further attention for 70 years.

War obviously has an impact on economic life, and tourism was an economic victim in that it was killed stone dead in 1936. It didn't help that the Civil War was followed immediately by the World War, but, and notwithstanding the relatively small amount of tourism in the 1950s, there was a hiatus of some 25 years between the two tourism eras. War can explain or excuse only so much, though; the rest of the explanation was political and economic.

Accepting the fact of both the Civil and World Wars and their intervention in the first and nascent Mallorcan tourism era, what if the political regime had been more benign, less inward-looking and less economically parochial from the end of World War Two?

A different type of regime wouldn't have brought about the earlier creation of mass tourism, as this was only possible once air transport and general living standards in northern Europe were sufficiently advanced to allow it, but had it been progressive from the late 1940s, more outward-looking and embraced what had started to be shaped before 1936, a different tourism would in all likelihood have been developed.

From the examples above, take golf. This only truly reappeared on the Mallorcan agenda under a tourism plan of the 1980s. Arguably, this was too late, as competitors, such as Portugal, were already far more advanced. Yet had it been given genuine attention much earlier, Mallorca's winter tourism might now not suffer to the extent that it does.

Then take the railway and the flights: infrastructure on Mallorca was neglected; Air France didn't come back; the Italian flights ceased in 1943 and there weren't more (British) until the second half of the 1950s. Had, however, there been a resumption of flights into Alcúdia and Puerto Pollensa and had the northern rail line been established, the accessibility of the north of Mallorca would have been considerably greater than it was and would have altered the balance between north and south in tourism development.

But perhaps most important of all would have been how tourism as a whole would have developed. Mass tourism to Mallorca, the second era, came about through economic necessity, once Franco's technocrats had convinced him that autarky and parochialism were not the way forward. And it led to wholesale environmental destruction in the mad dash to create an economy worthy of the name. Had, though, general economic management not been the total disaster it was until the change of tack in the late '50s and had tourism development been smoother and more along French lines, might the massive resorts have ever been created?

The French model of tourism differs to that of Mallorca and to parts of Spain. Its relatively few purpose-built resorts, such as Cap d'Agde, primarily came into being only as a response to the challenge posed by the Costas. Otherwise, it is more diverse and less ruled by interests of hoteliers.

Mallorca may have ended up with exactly the same tourism it did in the 1960s, regardless of the style of political regime, but it might not have. Had the development been more on a straight line of a continuous tourism era (save for the interruption of war) and had there not been the economic need for the suddenness of what occurred in the 1960s, Mallorca's tourism and indeed whole economy might now be very different.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Republican Sympathies

On Saturday, commemorations were held that marked the 81st anniversary of the establishment of the Second Republic. Mallorca was not excluded from these celebrations. Porreres staged one of the best attended events. In Pollensa, as has become traditional on the anniversary of the birth of the Republic, the PSM (Mallorcan socialists) offered a floral tribute.

That it is the socialists who arrange the event says much about the political colour of the memories of the Republic and also about hopes of a revival of Republicanism. Like its Nationalist counterpoint, it has lurked in the undergrowth away from the main glare of monarchical democracy since 1975. Republicanism wasn't destroyed in 1939 at the end of the Civil War; it remained, in exile and latterly through the titles or sympathies of minority political parties.

The Second Republic ended in total disaster. Its liberalism was overtaken by violence and extremism. Against a background of depression, it couldn't combat unemployment. Economically and politically it was a failure, but Republicanism has remained an ideological force because of what happened after the Republic fell. It is the "good guy" of the Civil War, despite its own atrocities.

It has remained a force also because of what created the Second Republic. The government of the first dictator, Primo de Rivera, had become untenable as had the position of the Bourbon king, Alfonso XIII, who, on 14 April 1931, was forced into exile. Alfonso was considered a traitor as, in 1923, he had not blocked the coup which led to the establishment of the first dictatorship. An understanding of the Civil War and the Franco era is not complete without an appreciation of the monarch's support for Rivera. In 1923, the king assisted in breaking a system of monarchical democracy that was not to be restored for over 50 years.

Lessons of history and all that, but the past has a habit of turning itself into tradition. And with tradition comes a desire for re-enactment or an expectation that history will repeat itself or a perception that history is repeating itself. The tradition of the Civil War, despite the best attempts of many Spaniards to indulge in mass amnesia and the best attempts of the legal and political system to airbrush it out of existence, remains well rooted.

If not of course actual re-enactment, there is the narrative that nuances the current day in terms of this tradition. Republicanism 2012 in Mallorca, and elsewhere no doubt, rejects, as you would expect it to, the rights of another Bourbon king, Juan Carlos. Anti-monarchy sentiment is not unreasonable, but what is unreasonable is to somehow compare the current king with the treacherous Alfonso. It is not only unreasonable, it fails completely in recalling that it was the current king who turned his back on Francoism. For today's Republicans, however, a Bourbon monarch is a Bourbon monarch, regardless of very different circumstances.

Republicanism 2012 manages also to make some quite extraordinary allusions to Nationalism. The Partido Popular government in the Balearics, in agreeing to the development of a hotel near Es Trenc beach, is somehow engaged in Francoism. Well yes, there was destruction of the coastlines in the Franco era. No one would deny this, but it had nothing to do with Francoism or Nationalism; it had everything to do with turning the dross of a basket-case economy into something approximating gold.

The compulsion to style the current day with the narrative of the past extends to the lobbing of insults. When the head of the UGT union in the Balearics called President Bauzá a fascist, rather than requesting the attorney-general to start proceedings, Bauzá would have been far better off returning his own insult and moving on. Resorting to legal redress institutionalises the narrative and therefore the tradition, proving that Balearics politicians are as trapped in the past as are union leaders.

Right-wing governments both nationally and regionally that are pursuing policies of austerity do not, as is being implied by Republicanism 2012, amount to Nationalism. It is an absurdity to suggest that they do, especially as these policies are a furtherance of those initiated by socialist governments. But this is how the narrative insists that it should be.

In Porreres in 1938, a dreadful Nationalist atrocity was committed. The past should not be forgotten, and it is understandable that the town should be the location for a commemoration of Republicanism, but the narrative is of the past, of a time when, unlike today, the army were the ultimate enforcers and the monarchy the arbiters. The narrative is obsolete, a perverse romance of tradition. It is of the past, and that, God willing, is where it remains.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

The Grateful Dead

Were you aware that in the grounds of the aerodrome and military base in Puerto Pollensa there is a stone plinth that lists, in tribute, the names of members of the Condor Legion who died during the Civil War? The Condor Legion, lest it has been forgotten, consisted of German Luftwaffe pilots and personnel who came to the aid of Franco's Nationalists: Guernica was razed thanks to the bombs of the Condor.

Does it matter that this plaque is still in the military base? Pollensa's mayor Cerdà thinks so and took the opportunity of the arrival of military personnel for their annual vacations at the holiday camp that is the military base to reiterate a demand for its removal. Damn right he should. It contravenves, allegedly, the law on historic memory that is designed to rid Spain of symbols of the Franco era. The "monolith" carries the legend "they fell for the liberty of Spain in the battle against the Bolsheviks" (reporting from "The Diario"). It does more than that; it contravenes all sense of morality.

The law on historic memory, applied in its strictest way, might be considered to be excessive, if only for practical reasons, such as the re-naming of streets with Francoist connotations. But in the case of the military base roll of honour, its observance should apply; the monolith should go. There might be a sense of unease were the monolith to be destroyed; unease in respect of the sensitivities of the families of those pilots who died. But the Condor dead go beyond a mere Spanish issue. It was the bombing of Guernica that finally alerted the Allies to what would lie in wait if Nazi Germany went to war - and did lie in wait. The Condor was the export of Nazi militaristic ideology, and the Puerto Pollensa monolith has as much a European dimension as it does a Spanish.

Germany has not sought to erase all memory of Nazism. Anyone who has been to Dachau can testify to that. Preserving the obscenities of the Nazis remains a way of educating and countering a re-emergence ("never again"). The Condor memorial is on a totally different scale, of course, and it is of a different type, but it is still stone engraved from the same wretched quarry of inhumanity. (It should be noted that it is now more than ten years since the Germans legislated to remove the names of members of the Condor from military bases.) Moreover, it is a reminder as to how close Europe might have got to following a different course of history. Franco may have been grateful for German assistance in his fight against the Republicans, but his personal dislike and mistrust of Hitler (and the feeling was mutual) was a strong factor in Spain staying out of the Second World War.

The continuing presence of such a memorial in what is essentially a non-military military base, one frequented by personnel from Spain and other countries and used as a holiday camp, is anachronistic and offensive. For the plinth to still exist within the grounds of a base for holidaying militaries that serve current-day democracies is frankly a disgrace. There may be a vague moral issue attached to its removal, that relating to the families of the dead, but the greater morality lies in the wider context of what that memorial represents. They should get rid of it.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Abba: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8bm6XlxuCY.

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

Through The Barricades

Spain is set to have some new citizens. They are British. They are also very old. They are the few survivors of those who came to fight for the International Brigades against Franco's Nationalists during the Civil War.

The current government is intent on writing Franco's name out of history and on continuing to honour those who fought for or fell in the name of the Republic; citizenships have been conferred in the past. The small band of Britons being offered a joint citizenship are enjoying belated but greater honour in Spain than they did in their own country both during and after the Civil War. They were derided either for being communists, which many indeed were, or for being mercenaries. They were also anti-fascist. What was the greater evil in 1930s Europe - communism or fascism? It's a close call.

Yet raising that question is too simplistic when applied to Spain. Neither the country's communism nor its fascism can or should be viewed in the same way as Stalin's or Hitler and Mussolini's. The Communist Party was essentially wedded to the notion of democracy. It had connections with Stalin, as did the UGT union and the PSOE socialists (the UGT is still closely associated with PSOE in the current-day political scene). The Soviet Union came to supply the Republicans with weaponry, but the strain of communism was a more conservative phenomenon lacking, as it did, any real support among the working class. The altogether more frightening elements that were to side with the Republicans were the anarchists.

Franco was not of a same mind as either Hitler or Mussolini. One indication of this was the fact that he chose not to pursue a war tactic akin to Blitzkrieg against Republican centres, much to the amazement of both Hitler and Mussolini. His justification was that he wanted to avoid unnecessary killing, rich though that may sound. Let it not be forgotten though that it was German bombs that destroyed Guernica, not those of the Nationalists. Franco also sought and got the submission of the more extreme elements of his supporting groups, most obviously the Falangists and the Carlists. What came to be Francoism was not totalitarianism; it was authoritarian, militarist, Catholic and monarchist. Arguably, it was also not strictly fascist.

It is usual to categorise the Civil War as a fight between two competing and extreme political ideologies. The Republicans, though, were communists only in the sense that the Communist Party came to be an ally of the Socialists and the left-leaning Republicans in government at the time of the Civil War's outbreak and at the end of the Second Republic, the failure of which lay largely in the inability of the various political groupings to establish stable government and which had lurched between right and left throughout its five years. The coup of July 1936 was, in no small part, predicated upon this failure. Franco considered political parties unworkable, and after victory in 1939 he ensured that groupings that might have resembled parties were kept submissive, and these included the Falange, despite the philosophy of Francoism being largely based on its agenda of fundamentalist Catholicism. Though the Nationalists are and were portrayed as merely defenders against Communism, the prime concerns for Franco were the restoration of Spanish conservative interests (which precluded therefore such things as Catalan autonomy) and an end to the political parties.

But the story of the Civil War has required the neatness of the fascist-communist polarities. The International Brigades were communist in terms of the various bodies involved in creating them, but they also cannot be summed up quite so neatly. The motivation of those who joined them can be - a detestation of and a will to defeat fascism, whether they personally were communists or not. They failed to effect that defeat, and Spain languished for years as a consequence (and no one can tell what would have ensued had there been a Republican victory). Those who fought against fascism were denied the honour of what was an honourable cause. And now, finally, some have received it in the form of citizenship in a Spain that is doing its utmost to lay to rest the wounds of their defeat.


POLLENSA AND SOME MORE DISSENT
The main surprise regarding a touch of civil dissent in the normally serene calles and caminos of Pollensa is that it doesn't, for once, involve the town hall. This time around it is the local environment ministry which is the target in that a walk across finca land north of the old town has been denied, and it's the ministry doing the denying. This finally brought out a posse of militant ramblers the other day, determined to storm the barricade in order to gain access to the walk to the old king's castle on the camino de Ternelles (if you don't know, this runs from somewhere close to the Roman bridge). All they needed was a Janet Street-Porter; might have helped them, too, in tackling the jobsworths of the forestry wing of the ministry and the security guard who had tried to prevent the taking of photos. Needless to say, the ramblers were told to sling their hook, or something like that, and so they had to leave, dragging their tails of backpacks between their legs. I say that this doesn't involve the town hall, but the mayor was requested to order the opening of the camino, which he hasn't. Maybe because he can't.

What I would like to know though is where is GOB, the enviro pressure group, when you need it. This is a case of nature lovers versus environment overlords. How does GOB reconcile the two? We demand an answer.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Cher - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JElkPACfz_M. Today's title - before two of them became Krays.

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