(In the previous two articles I have argued that it was war and what followed - economic autarky and then technocracy - which destroyed the original principle of Mallorca's tourism from pre-war times and led to the type of tourism which emerged in the 1960s.)
The technocracy was such that it hasn't ever really gone away. It may be more friendly, it may have a greater appreciation of individuals' needs, of the environment and of markets, but it survives in its current-day form. It is typified by a Balearics tourism minister whose background is as an architect and planner and by a Mallorcan national tourism secretary of state whose specialism is property and its planning. They are representative of the new technocracy, knowledgeable of things but not, one fears, people.
Despite all this, we are seeing signs, I believe, of how uninterrupted organic development might have shaped very different resorts. The current-day technocrats are not blind to the sins of the past, even if they can sin in human terms and in being undemocratic in their biases towards property (hotels versus private accommodation, as an example). They have established a framework for belated, very belated modernisation of mature resorts, those which were the result of Fordist mass tourism. This framework cannot bring back what was lost of the natural patrimony but it can, through a re-conception of resorts, bring back - to an extent - the lost philosophy of the greater harmony of the 1930s garden city resorts. And nowhere is this potentially more evident than in Magalluf.
To take again my thesis about how war shaped later tourism development, Magalluf was a prime example. Had there been more organic development, Magalluf would still have become a resort, but it would not have been as it was to become. In 1959, approval was given for its exploitation, and that exploitation was sudden and disastrous. The environment was just one victim of a model of authoritarian-state diktat combined with virtually non-existent planning regulations and with inadequate, easily swayed, corrupt officialdom. Magalluf was, if you like, the model fascistic tourist resort. It was Fordist mass tourism in extremis. From nothing in the late '50s emerged architectural barbarism. It was the technocrats' wet dream.
Palmanova and Santa Ponsa, though they were both to also fall victim to this barbarism, were, unlike Magalluf, products of pre-war planning. Had they developed organically, they too would have been very different. Santa Ponsa is a better example than Palmanova. You can discern from some of its layout the original garden city principle, and that original principle, similar to Alcúdia, would in all likelihood have spawned a golfing resort of a different style to today. It may be forgotten that there was actually a golf company in Santa Ponsa that pre-dated Alcúdia's 1934 golf course. It was to be decades before that golf vision was realised, and by then it had to vie with the technocratic undermining of the original principle.
Magalluf would in all likelihood have been developed before it was. Like its neighbours there was a similar need for land exploitation, but this exploitation would almost certainly have corresponded with the garden city principles in 1930s' Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. All three resorts would thus have taken on a very different appearance to that which they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The chances are that there would have been a form of mass tourism even with organic development, but the mass would have been smaller and it would have been of an alternative character. It would still have been foreign, but the offer would have been less dominated by foreign culture and concreted vandalism. It would simply have been more "Mallorcan". The transformation of Magalluf, as we are not witnessing because of Meliá's intervention, is, I would argue, along lines that would have emerged had Magalluf been left to develop organically and not been that model fascistic tourist resort. Even aspects of the new look owe something to the 1930s principles: boulevard, green areas, and thus a greater harmony between living space and natural patrimony.
One of the challenges that Mallorca faces is determining what mass should now mean. If it is to be smaller mass, and it may well mean this, then there are inevitable consequences, but this smaller mass would have been the norm had it not been for the mad dash to develop in the 1960s. One can argue that what occurred in the '60s was in fact an aberration. It was not how it was meant to have been and it was not how it would have been, had war not led to the desperate solutions of the technocrats and had the resorts been allowed to develop organically. It has taken fifty years to attempt to right the wrongs of fascistic mass tourism. These attempts should not be criticised. They should be applauded. They are what Mallorca should have been.
Showing posts with label Garden city resorts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Garden city resorts. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Sunday, July 20, 2014
What-If: War and Mallorca's tourism
It's a game we can all play, the what-if game. Ultimately futile, it is nonetheless a game which can be instructive in explaining how things came to be as they are; these things being Mallorca's tourism. It's a game I have been playing again, and the starting-point, strangely enough perhaps, was golf. It was the old course in Alcúdia which set me thinking.
That course was opened in 1934. It closed two years later. Thirty years after it had been opened, Mallorca got what was truly its first golf course. Had it not been for war, there would have been several courses by the time that Son Vida opened. Of that, I think you can be certain. War and what was to follow until Spain began to wake up in the 1950s disrupted the development of tourism in Mallorca, and so my thesis, if you can call it such, is that it was war, as much if not more than the dynamics of the late 1950s, which created the Mallorca of the 1960s and thus the Mallorca of today.
The Alcúdia golf course was part of the planned urbanisation of an area along the bay. Part tourist, part residential, it mirrored other similar enterprises on the island - the garden city resorts of Son Bauló, Cala d'Or, Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. While one cannot and should not ignore the part played by opportunistic entrepreneurs and bankers in the creation of these resorts and while one can also say that there was no obvious all-island masterplan which brought them about, they were nevertheless the consequence of dual philosophies. One was the garden-city philosophy itself, the harmonious co-existence between living space and the environment. The other was that of the fathers of Mallorca's tourism, most obviously Miquel dels Sants Oliver and Bartomeu Amengual at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth.
These two journalists were alert to the potential of tourism for economic development. Indeed, there was a necessity; diversification was called for because of a crisis in agriculture. They saw the potential, so much so that they conceived a tourism for the summer, which ran counter to the generally held view that tourism was a winter phenomenon. This summer tourism may have been one based on the health benefits of the seaside, but it was still a different way of looking at tourism. It was their contributions which were to inform the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board, a body whose own contribution to tourism history anywhere in the world is pretty much without parallel.
There were obviously some powerful business interests that guided the tourist board, but if one looks back at its records during the early years after its founding in 1905, what emerges is a picture of an organisation working with a co-operative spirit and within - to use a dreadful word - an holistic framework. There was little to guide the tourist board. Yes, there were experiences in France, Italy and Switzerland, but the tourist board was working from almost a blank piece of paper and was doing so in creating an integrated industry for an island with its own specific needs and constraints. One of these constraints was land and so, by association, the environment and fragile nature of an island eco-system. There may not have been a scientific environmental perspective back then, but there most definitely was one that was founded on the island's patrimony, its natural heritage. Sants Oliver had it and perhaps crucially so also did any number of individuals from the arts world who were as important to the tourist board's co-operative spirit as the businesspeople. The resorts that emerged in the 1930s were thus in keeping with a guiding philosophy. They sought to balance the needs of construction with those of the island's natural patrimony. But then, war intervened.
It is of course quite legitimate to argue that the many factors of the late 1950s and early 1960s would have conspired to create what was created in any event. There is no escaping the realities of those factors - consumerism, the jet engine, higher standards of living, paid holidays, tour operators and so on. Perhaps it would have happened as it did, but I somewhat doubt it. My argument is that had it not been for war, Mallorca's tourism development would have been organic. It would have taken the creations and attitudes of the 1930s - the garden city resorts, the golf, the awareness of the natural patrimony - allied them to what was evident from the early part of the last century in terms of hotels, predominantly up-market ones, and followed a straighter line in arriving at a different model of tourism. It would thus have been a continuous revision of the original philosophy and one that would have been more sympathetic to that patrimony.
(To be continued tomorrow.)
That course was opened in 1934. It closed two years later. Thirty years after it had been opened, Mallorca got what was truly its first golf course. Had it not been for war, there would have been several courses by the time that Son Vida opened. Of that, I think you can be certain. War and what was to follow until Spain began to wake up in the 1950s disrupted the development of tourism in Mallorca, and so my thesis, if you can call it such, is that it was war, as much if not more than the dynamics of the late 1950s, which created the Mallorca of the 1960s and thus the Mallorca of today.
The Alcúdia golf course was part of the planned urbanisation of an area along the bay. Part tourist, part residential, it mirrored other similar enterprises on the island - the garden city resorts of Son Bauló, Cala d'Or, Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. While one cannot and should not ignore the part played by opportunistic entrepreneurs and bankers in the creation of these resorts and while one can also say that there was no obvious all-island masterplan which brought them about, they were nevertheless the consequence of dual philosophies. One was the garden-city philosophy itself, the harmonious co-existence between living space and the environment. The other was that of the fathers of Mallorca's tourism, most obviously Miquel dels Sants Oliver and Bartomeu Amengual at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth.
These two journalists were alert to the potential of tourism for economic development. Indeed, there was a necessity; diversification was called for because of a crisis in agriculture. They saw the potential, so much so that they conceived a tourism for the summer, which ran counter to the generally held view that tourism was a winter phenomenon. This summer tourism may have been one based on the health benefits of the seaside, but it was still a different way of looking at tourism. It was their contributions which were to inform the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board, a body whose own contribution to tourism history anywhere in the world is pretty much without parallel.
There were obviously some powerful business interests that guided the tourist board, but if one looks back at its records during the early years after its founding in 1905, what emerges is a picture of an organisation working with a co-operative spirit and within - to use a dreadful word - an holistic framework. There was little to guide the tourist board. Yes, there were experiences in France, Italy and Switzerland, but the tourist board was working from almost a blank piece of paper and was doing so in creating an integrated industry for an island with its own specific needs and constraints. One of these constraints was land and so, by association, the environment and fragile nature of an island eco-system. There may not have been a scientific environmental perspective back then, but there most definitely was one that was founded on the island's patrimony, its natural heritage. Sants Oliver had it and perhaps crucially so also did any number of individuals from the arts world who were as important to the tourist board's co-operative spirit as the businesspeople. The resorts that emerged in the 1930s were thus in keeping with a guiding philosophy. They sought to balance the needs of construction with those of the island's natural patrimony. But then, war intervened.
It is of course quite legitimate to argue that the many factors of the late 1950s and early 1960s would have conspired to create what was created in any event. There is no escaping the realities of those factors - consumerism, the jet engine, higher standards of living, paid holidays, tour operators and so on. Perhaps it would have happened as it did, but I somewhat doubt it. My argument is that had it not been for war, Mallorca's tourism development would have been organic. It would have taken the creations and attitudes of the 1930s - the garden city resorts, the golf, the awareness of the natural patrimony - allied them to what was evident from the early part of the last century in terms of hotels, predominantly up-market ones, and followed a straighter line in arriving at a different model of tourism. It would thus have been a continuous revision of the original philosophy and one that would have been more sympathetic to that patrimony.
(To be continued tomorrow.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)