The Railway That Never Was: Cala Ratjada

One hundred years ago, on 23 July, 1914, one Rafel Blanes Tolosa presented a plan for a railway line between Manacor and Artà. Over a year later, on 8 September, 1915, "La Gaceta de Madrid", a newspaper which was to eventually become (along with other major cities' "gacetas") the "Boletín Oficial del Estado", announced the bidding for the line. On 12 November that year, the result of the bidding process became known. The concession was awarded to the company S.A. Ferrocarriles de Mallorca. Blanes Tolosa was a director.

Roughly half of the finance came from the Banco de Crédito Balear in the form of a two million pesetas loan (Blanes Tolosa was also a director of the bank.). Work on the line took until 1921. There was, however, one part of the line that was missing and so one municipality that wasn't included in the project. It should have been, but it wasn't. The line was meant to have gone on to Cala Ratjada in Capdepera. It didn't and it never did.

Connecting the railway to the port would have been important, or so you might have thought. Yet, it is a curiosity of Mallorca's railway building that connections with the coast have been all but non-existent.

There was once a line from Palma's port to the Plaça d'Espanya. It closed in 1965. There was a project for a line from Palma to the port in Andratx. It was to have gone to Calvia (village) and then on to Andratx and would have involved the building of two tunnels. The extension to Alcúdia, still spoken about, was scrapped when the Civil War intervened, but the rail line there was considered very much earlier. So much so in fact that there was a ceremony in 1912 for the laying of the first stones of what was meant to have become a station in Pollensa on its route to Alcúdia from Inca. There would have been branch lines to both Puerto Pollensa and Puerto Alcúdia. Quite a few years later, there was another scheme, one which would have seen a railway connect with the seaplanes base in Puerto Pollensa. Elsewhere on the island, there was a project to take a line to Porto Cristo. None of them of course were realised.

Port Sóller is the only place that nowadays has a coastal connection, and even that isn't of course a train as such. Apart from the old station in Palma's port and one also in Arenal on the old line that went to Llucmajor and on to Santanyí, the island's coastline has been totally untouched by rail transport.

There are a number of theories as to why railways didn't extend to the coasts. One is that coastal land was relatively worthless and unpopulated. But when there were ports, and quite successful ones like Cala Ratjada's, this explanation doesn't really add up. A second one has to do with the traditional fear of the coast because of the threat of piracy. By the twentieth century, however, although there might have been the odd pirate knocking around, illegal activity was of a different nature, i.e. smuggling. Again, the explanation isn't strong. A third is financial and logistical, but when promoters often also had associations with banks, the money wasn't necessarily a problem, while the experience of the Sóller train, which required the engineering achievement of the tunnel, demonstrated that obstacles could be overcome.

There is a fourth theory, and it is specific to Cala Ratjada. It has to do with rivalries between Artà and Capdepera and between wealthy landowners. Blanes Tolosa was a wealthy man. He owned a large chunk of Artà. But though he had some aristocratic blood, he wasn't of the higher order of Mallorcan nobility. Capdepera, on other hand, was largely owned by this higher order, and it was one that wanted nothing to do with anything that smacked of the new entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and some lower-order upstart from the next town.

Maybe this was the reason why the railway line never reached Cala Ratjada. Whatever the reason, the line was never built and though it was considered many years later during the time that the Manacor-Artà line existed (the line closed in 1977), nothing came of it. When the railway line was due to have been reopened under the scheme envisaged by the Antich regional government of 2007-2011, Cala Ratjada was again spoken of. But the line of course hasn't been reopened, and it won't be. An appalling waste of money went into a project which had to be abandoned because there wasn't any more money, so the eastern part of Mallorca was denied a new railway and the possibility that it might go as far as Cala Ratjada. It was another familiar story, some will argue. It is the eastern part of Mallorca which is always neglected.

* Photo of train at Artà station from www.baleareslive.com

A No-Hoper: The Artà train

When Francesc Antich became president of the Balearics in 2007, his "big thing" was to be the train. He envisaged augmenting the rail network by re-introducing the old Manacor to Artà line and eventually taking it on to Cala Rajada. A further development was to have been an extension from Sa Pobla to Alcúdia.

Antich's big thing was to prove to be a total and unmitigated disaster, and a costly one as well. The Alcúdia extension fell through because of the political fight between a town hall then dominated by the old Unió Mallorquina and a regional transport ministry headed by the UM's arch rivals on the left, the PSM Mallorcan socialists. The Manacor-Artà line looked as though it wouldn't fall through. As we now know, it has.

One can blame Antich for all the controversy surrounding the abandoned Llevant rail line. Up to a point it might be right to. But it, as with the Alcúdia extension, was meant to have cost the Balearic Government virtually nothing; Madrid was going to foot the bill. There was a good deal of sense with both projects as well as potential advantages in terms of the environment and tourism. Both projects, though, faced stiff opposition, mainly from landowners, and, in the case of the Llevant line, the sums that the Antich government had come up with didn't stack up.

Mallorca's Chamber of Commerce is not a body prone to wishing to undermine investment or development, but it was this body which issued a report in which it said that the volume of traffic that the Manacor-Artà line would have generated would have been only a third of that which the government had considered was required in order to make the line viable. If the Chamber of Commerce could have come up with such a telling and indeed damning finding, how had the government ever arrived at its figures? How could it have ever agreed to the project?

With the value of hindsight, one can style the rail projects as having been typical of profligacy. Yet, they weren't vanity projects and they weren't ones that could be blamed on a regional government spend-spend mentality. The regional government might have got its sums badly wrong, but there was still merit to the plan to extend the rail network. Unlike airports on the mainland that have no passengers because they have never opened, the rail lines would have had passengers; not as many as might have been thought, but passengers nonetheless.

In fact, the volume of traffic might just have been much greater than the Chamber of Commerce had reckoned. A year ago, a report by SFM, the island's rail operator, revealed that passenger numbers on the existing lines had doubled over a ten-year period. As infrastructure projects went, therefore, the Antich big thing might not have been as daft as had been made out.

The current government took the decision to scrap the Llevant line because of a lack of funding. And so what do we now have? Vast areas of land that have already been worked on that are doing nothing and for which nothing is planned. Thirty million euros will have to be found, so claim the environmentalists GOB and a pro-rail line group, in order to compensate builders and landowners. Madrid, meanwhile, is eyeing up what it had handed over and which hasn't been spent. It may well be asking for its money back. I'm not sure if the government has been able to sell on the new trains it bought, but buy them it had; an act of extreme folly, given that there were no lines for them to run on.

Though there was opposition to the line when it was first mooted and when work first started, the Llevant project was right for reasons other than questionable ones to do with passenger numbers and finance. Those who lived locally who expressed their opposition would surely have appreciated that the east-coast rail link would have had a potential economic benefit as well a psychological benefit: an often neglected part of Mallorca would have been receiving investment for once.

Arguably, Alcúdia didn't need the rail extension. Its road link to the northern hub city of Inca had already been greatly improved. In the east, however, the links from Artà to the hub of Manacor are not nearly as good. The train would have improved them. But perhaps it is the distance away from Palma that holds the key to why the Llevant line was scrapped. In Palma, they still hold out hope of finishing the Palacio de Congresos. In Artà and elsewhere in the east, all hope has gone.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

PSOE And The Mallorcan Debt Mountain

Some serious questions need to be answered. The government of José Bauzá may be exaggerating the size of the Balearics debt and laying all the blame at the door of the previous administration, but there were clearly some pretty odd things going on during that administration.

Bauzá hasn't discounted the possibility of setting in motion legal processes if there were irregularities over and above mere inefficiencies at both regional government and Council of Mallorca levels between the springs of 2007 and this year. Recourse to the law does smack of possible vengeance by the Partido Popular. Voices in the party levelled accusations of a politicisation of the legal system in respect of the pursuit of officials dating to its 2003-2007 period of office. There is just a hint of payback.

The Balearics debt has accumulated over years, not just the four years of the PSOE administration. There has been a spend-spend mentality at all levels of government in the islands, including that of the Partido Popular from 2003 to 2007; a fair amount of which spend is still under scrutiny by anti-corruption prosecutors.

However, it was the case that the last administration did opt for a spend budget in 2008 at precisely the time when it could least be met. It may have been unfortunate that crisis took hold, but there is no getting away from the fact that PSOE helped to push the islands into ever deeper debt.

To an extent, doubly unfortunate therefore, the mounting debt was the consequence of a fall in tax revenues brought about by crisis, but fiscal explanations lack the appeal of being "sexy" when compared with the missing millions designed to take a headline-writer's fancy and flabbergast a public.

The International Monetary Fund, as well as barons in Brussels, who have been pressing Spain on the need to reduce the burden of regional debt, must have gasts as flabbered as the rest of us in trying to understand how the rotten borough that was (still is, to be honest) the Council of Mallorca could have spent some 100 million euros of state money, intended for road-building, on grants and paying salaries. Actually, it is quite easy to understand, as sound governance of public finance has long been only a chapter in a textbook and not something put into practice in Mallorca.

There was also the farce of the Manacor to Artà train, now effectively abandoned, into which vast sums were pumped despite heavily conflicting evidence as to how much traffic the railway line would generate. A delicious but sad irony of the work that has seen land ripped up and levelled is that it was the brief of a transport minister from the environmentally righteous PSM (Mallorcan socialists) who later also became environment minister in the PSOE-led regional government. The work on the line paralysed, the damage to the landscape has been environmental vandalism, predicated on a project with a questionable business rationale. How much will it cost to put the land right again, if it ever is?

Going back to the Council of Mallorca, we now have another intriguing example of public financial management. It relates to a consortium known as Eurolocal-Mallorca. What its precise purpose is, is not entirely clear. Ostensibly it is intended to support active European participation in local Mallorcan authorities, which means ... . Well, which means what?

The consortium was established in 2009 and was an initiative of the former president of the Council, Francina Armengol. In its two years of existence there is little evidence as to what it has achieved (perhaps unsurprising given the vagueness of its purpose). It has operated with a budget of 126,000 euros and its director has been trousering 70 grand a year.

Mainly, or so it would seem, the consortium people have spent their time heading off to Brussels. Why? Who knows. But mention Brussels, and who can forget the occasion, in February 2009, when some 40 mayors plus government politicians and others (150 of them in all) headed off to the Belgian capital for a spot of lobbying against the European pyrotechnics directive that Europe had no intention of using to try and ban demons' fire-runs. Ah, those were the days; when public money could be easily spent on a jolly with airline tickets and accommodation chucked in.

The new president of the Council, Maria Salom, is going to close the consortium down. Having also decided to shut another spectacular waste of money, the Council's tourism foundation, one wonders what other bodies are lurking that need disinterring and what other questions will emerge that need answering.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.