Mallorca's Punxsutawney Phil

On balance, it was probably as well that Punxsutawney Phil didn't emerge from his burrow on 2 February on this fair isle. Apart from having run the risk of encountering some creepy-crawly things creeping and crawling from their own dens, Phil would have been scared half witless by the shadow he would have cast. Winter in Mallorca, almost totally absent, would thus have been assured. Winter weather, in Phil prognostication terms, would have started and be due to last for six weeks, which is about when spring is supposed to begin anyway.

The strong shadow cast because of the bright winter sun in Mallorca would have certainly perplexed Phil, but any forecast he may have offered would have had to have been considered in the context of his abilities as a weather animal. Experts say that Phil isn't terribly good at his job; not much better than some seaweed. But Phil would have got it right in one respect. Everyone would have been and was talking about the weather. Again. And about what the weather should mean (but doesn't) for Mallorca. Again.

In these days of online weather forecasting and data archiving, Phil might have been expected to have been stripped of his meteorological role by now. That he retains it - indeed that he has been able to expand it through global recognition - is something for which he owes Bill Murray a large debt. Not only did Phil attain international fame for his forecasting, he gave a whole new meaning to being a groundhog. 

Mallorca, lacking a Phil as such, does have its over-and-over Groundhog Day elements. Well, one notable one, the casting of the reflection of the Cathedral's eastern window on to the western wall in making its rosette piece of eight. Every year it's the same at the same time: Bill Murray could set his clock by it and never be able to break the routine. Forever and ever: same time, same day, same place.

In general religious terms, Phil is a product of Candlemas (which bred the groundhog legend), with its own symbolic repetition. Forty days after Christmas, it falls close to the start of another forty days, those of Lent. Everything seems to come in packages of forty, always repeating themselves and including (almost) Phil's six weeks of extended winter.

There is, however, one other significant repetition on Phil's day. A birthday. Strangely, it isn't one that receives a great deal of attention. Strange, given whose birthday it was. For 808 years this birthday has been celebrated. Or should be. Each year, the same as every year on 2 February. If there is one person in Mallorca's history whose birthday might be deemed more significant than anyone else's, if there is one person about whom the island's entire history can appear to revolve, then it is the 2 February birthday boy: King Jaume I, born in Montpellier in 1208.

That Jaume would now be, had he been capable of mortality, 808 should not disguise the fact that despite long, long being no longer of this Earth and this earth - Mallorca's - he can still seem to be alive and kicking. When you are, as he was, as significant an historical figure, then his shadow might be expected to cast a long shadow. It is one, however, that can give the impression of having caused 808 minus 21 years of extended historical winter. A springtime of renewal, a shedding of centuries ago, can constantly seem elusive. The repetition requires never abandoning the winter of the past. Instead, there is a retreat to the den of ancient familiarity.

In some respects, though, it is good. Identity hewn from the relics of the thirteenth century implies continuity, a valuable resource in a highly movable modern society. On the other hand, it can be less good. It breeds an obsessiveness, from which is derived a great deal of the constant repetition for a culture nuancing its existence on the basis of one important moment in time. And this breeds the counter-obsessiveness, that of styling this existence in ways that dispute the legacy.

It would be grossly exaggerating things to imply that Mallorca lives by some form of Jaume cult, but it is really only through an appreciation of Jaume and all that that some of the modern day makes sense (or doesn't, depending on one's view). Perhaps it boils down to the fact that, despite a rich history, Mallorca's history is limited in terms of seismic events. Accordingly, this limit has created giants of the past that are unshakable and in a constant state of repetition.

Anyway, to return to the more mundane. If it's cloudy on 2 February next year, we will be assured of an early Mallorcan spring. But whatever the conditions, there'll be one thing being discussed in addition to the winter weather. It'll be another winter topic. Every year. Same time. Same place.

Feudalism: Alive and kicking in Mallorca

After King Jaume I and his not so merry men had finished slaughtering much of the population of Mallorca following the thirteenth-century conquest, they ran up against a slight problem. Land was all well and good, but less so if there wasn't anyone to work it. The scale of the slaughter suggests that half the population of the island - put at some 50,000 - was wiped out. Of those who survived, the majority were Muslim converts. Otherwise, there were still some Christians, descendants of the population at the time of the Muslim occupation three centuries before.

In terms of society, the story of the immediate aftermath of the conquest can be styled as a combination of slavery and feudalism. The slaves were the survivors of the conquest, whose numbers, limited as they were, needed to be added to by inward migration, principally from Catalonia, for which incentives of privileges were granted. Privileges or not, the new Mallorcan workforce was subject to the organisational system - Jaume's system of feudalism.

There wasn't one definitive system of feudalism in Europe, but the variants followed a basic principle usually attributed to French nobility, e.g. William the Conqueror. It was a system of privileges, at the heart of which were rights to land extended from above to those below - as in lord to vassal, for example - and which involved a form of mutual protection: the lord would protect his vassal, and the vassal would fight for the lord.

Feudalism is generally considered to be a system of mediaeval times, and indeed its practice in Europe had largely disappeared by the fifteenth century. In Spain, on the other hand - or more accurately in the lands of the Aragon crown - the system of feudal barony, a hangover from Jaume, wasn't to be ended until the early nineteenth century and even then, though legal rights were abolished, property rights weren't.

Earlier this year, the heirs of the Marquis de la Romana informed owners of 125 properties, such as those in Paguera for example, that the "alou" ("alodio" in Spanish) was still applicable. This is a charge payable on the transfer of ownership of a property, and this alou goes right back to the days of Jaume I: it is a mediaeval tax, founded on the principles of Jaume's feudal system.

Under a Balearic law of 2010 the alou was addressed, and ultimate landowners, almost invariably descendants in some form or another of those who engaged in the land grab and distribution that Jaume had facilitated in the thirteenth century, were given five years to renew the alou. Those who didn't wish to simply had to inform the Land Registry, and the tax - hugely anachronistic that it was - would no longer be applicable.

At the time this law was introduced, the president of the Balearic Academy of Jurisprudence explained that it had served a useful function - in the thirteenth century. It was a legal concept linked to the conquest but also to the need for repopulation. But it was, nevertheless, a legal concept that was almost 800 years old.

The law was expected to have seen the withdrawal of the alou in 2013, and there were owners who decided to scrap it. But not all. Later that year, a couple, Xus Sastre and his wife Beatrix, won a court battle after they had been pursued for the payment of 2% alou for the purchase of a house in Es Pil-lari in Palma. The demand, which amounted to 1,800 euros, came from the Marquise de Campo Franco. The couple argued that they had never heard of the tax, though when it came to formalising the purchase, a notary observed that there was a freehold but advised them that the alou would not be charged, as no one bothered demanding it.

The couple, though they won the court case, took the matter further. They raised a petition through Change.org for the eradication of this example of feudalism that had no place in a democracy. How could standards of the thirteenth century still be allowed to apply? The Romanas and the Campo Francos would doubtless argue that they could apply quite easily.

The Més party, though, asked the same question. At the end of 2013, the petition having raised 12,000 signatures, a Més parliamentary deputy said that his party would seek to have the alou abolished for good. It was a "feudal anachronism", and the 2010 law hadn't gone far enough. But if Més were to now introduce a law (and one would think that they and especially Podemos would do so), it would be too late for the airports authority Aena. A court has decided that it must pay an alou of 70,840 euros for having put to use land that was expropriated at Son Sant Joan airport in the 1960s.

Jaume I's legacy is great, and it lives on in some most peculiar ways.

Twelve Hours Of A Mallorcan New Year

New Year in a Mallorcan style. The bells will ring out, fireworks will go off, the cava will pop, the twelve grapes will be scoffed and DJ Deejay will prepare the decks for a sound avalanche erupting with 1980s nostalgia into the night skies of town centres. There is nothing specifically Mallorcan about this. The grapes are Spanish grapes. Tradition they may be, but they owe everything to the pursuit of commerce and to early twentieth-century vine growers in Alicante who picked up on what was then a recent but not widely followed practice and saw it as an excellent means of selling grapes from what had been an abundant harvest.

The grapes might be said to bring luck, but on New Year's Eve 785 years ago luck had run out for the Arabic occupants of old Madina Mayurqa. Jaume I of Aragon and his band of land-hungry followers from the mainland took what was to eventually be called Palma, completed the conquest of Mallorca, introduced Catalan and thus paved the way for 785 years of squabbles, primarily those to do with Catalonia and language.

It isn't everywhere that can tag the birth of nationalism onto its New Year celebrations. In Mallorca they can, assuming that is, that one adheres to a notion of nationalism as it applies to a small island in the Mediterranean which isn't a nation. But, and as is evident from a book by Antoni-Ignasi Alomar i Canyelles, 31 December is the date on which Europe's oldest national fiesta takes place. Its title says so: "L'Estendard, la festa nacional més antiga d'Europa". 

The fiesta (or festival) of the standard - the Catalan-Aragonese flag flown by the conquering army of Jaume I - is only truly celebrated in Palma, but as it is supposedly also a "national" event, there are mini-celebrations in the villages of Mallorca in the days before 31 December. Thanks to the Obra Cultural Balear, promoters of all things Catalan heritage, the festival has gone on tour. This evening, as an example, there will be a festival of the standard in Campanet.

It has become a fiesta that for some, as the title of the book suggests, is an occasion to assert Mallorcan nationalism, but over its centuries of celebration it has been interpreted in different ways, has been repressed and has gone through one lengthy period of decline, which followed the end of The War of the Spanish Succession and the passing of the Nueva Planta decree of the Bourbon King Philip V that dismantled the Crown of Aragon (of which Mallorca was a part) and did away with much of the associated ceremony. There still was a ceremony for the standard but it was far from being what it had been. It was hijacked by what some contemporary writers refer to as the "Bourbon occupation". In other words, it was made a "Spanish" celebration. So much so that the sermon - the fiesta has always been part religious, part secular - was delivered in Castellano, which mostly no one understood.

This decline continued through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. During the Second Republic from 1931, the fiesta was repressed. It was considered symbolic neither of Mallorcan nationalism nor as an extension of Catalan nationalism (the somewhat mythical notion of the Catalan Lands) but of Spanish conservatism and monarchism. It was, curiously enough, during the Franco regime that the fiesta started its comeback. Though the regime looked upon it in the same way that the Bourbons had - as a means of incorporating Mallorca into Spain - something rather odd was added to the celebration in 1965. This was the reciting of the poem "La Colcada", written in 1861 by the Mallorcan Pere d'Alcàntara Penya i Nicolau. It was odd because the poem alluded to how the fiesta had once been before the years of decline started by Philip V (of whom it might be said that Franco was something of a political descendant) and so to the days when the fiesta was marked by its grand procession of knights on horseback. Its opening line recognised that "as no one knows the story of our great King James", the poem would have to tell the forgotten story of the festival of the standard.

Now very much fully restored, the festival has become an occasion when divisions reflected in its varying interpretation and treatments over the centuries come to the fore. For the left-wing nationalists (who strangely might be deemed to be heirs to the Second Republic which had been against the fiesta) there are those cries of nationalism: history and politics are never far from the surface in current-day Mallorca. But for most people the fiesta is just that, a fiesta, a celebration. On New Year's Eve at midday in the Plaça de Cort the "La Colcada" poem will be read. Twelve hours later, the bells will ring out, grape growers will be rubbing their hands and the DJ (Juan Campos) will take over. A difference of twelve hours which sums up a Mallorcan New Year.