In The Country: The fiesta rave

Time was when the music of a fiesta was the local band of music's bulbous-cheeked brass, the airy screeching of the mini-bagpipe of the Mediterranean and the indecipherable lyrics of the folk singer. Noise this may all have emitted, but it was noise of low-decibel decency that reflected a general gentility that had been passed through generations to the town squares of Mallorca. By the end of the 1980s, modernity in a fiesta musical style was still a score or so years behind the times. Alcúdia, as an example, could boast an artist such as Victor Manuel, soft-rockily socially conscious but the offspring nonetheless of the safe, non-controversial and bland artistes who once made Playa de Palma's international song festival as leading-edge as the BBC Light Programme was before, in the summer of love of 1967, the BBC admitted that there was such a thing as pop music.

Victor, being something of a name, was herded into the Plaza de Toros, the bloodied sand newly relaid. It was perhaps appropriate that a star should be given an arena capable of holding 4,000 or so spectators. The market square was not designed for such a crowd, but towns' market squares and indeed whole towns or villages which were never designed to stage events with thousands of people were to eventually do so.

A few years before Victor made his successful appearance at Alcúdia's bullring as part of the line-up for the 1989 Sant Jaume fiestas, something had been stirring across the waters of the Balearics in Ibiza. In the 1960s, Ibiza's remoteness was such that the regime put up with the hippies, whose only brushes with the forces of law tended to result from beach nudism or being instructed to wash when a hippy wedding was taking place. Though many of the hippies moved out during the '70s, they left a legacy that burst out musically in the mid '80s. Arguments still rage as to where acid house or rave music originated, but there was no denying that Ibiza was pretty significant. It acquired and still holds a mythical status in popular music culture.

Mallorca, by the end of the 1980s, was playing musical catch-up with Ibiza, and indeed it has never caught up. But Mallorca, as was the case across Europe, had caught the rave bug. The question was - what was to be done with it?

Rather like the BBC had sought to deny the existence of pop music in the 1960s and thus also denied the existence of youth culture, so Mallorca, via its fiestas, sought to turn back the tide. The fiestas, though, if they were to mean anything in this more modern era, had to become more inclusive. Youth needed a voice, youth needed its music, and the market squares thus began to be turned over to a new noise. The bands of music played on and the pipers continued to pipe, but musical youth was also now to be heard, be it rock or more likely dance, as in acid house and any other genre of what has since come to fall under a generic title of electronic dance music.

The squares of the villages and towns both in terms of their size and the proximity of residences were never built for what became the equivalent of raves during fiesta time. Some of these fiesta raves acquired such a reputation that they attracted youth from across the island. The dilemma was though, two-fold. One, the youth culture couldn't be denied. Two, to remove it from the fiesta heartland, the village square, would smack of a sort of fiesta separate development. Nevertheless, and eventually, some town halls had to take action. One was Sa Pobla. Its famed Districte 54 party was banned. It was soon after revived by genial mayor, Biel Serra, in 2011. He was appealing to the kids' wishes and appealed to them not to let him down, which is exactly what they did. Drunkenness, vomiting, some violence all occurred. Serra was rightly angry. Districte 54 is no more.

But one town had, many years ago, appreciated that it simply couldn't cope with the influx of youth. There had to be a location outside of the town. In 1995, therefore, Maria de la Salut gave its blessing to something called Rock 'n' Rostoll (the rostoll part refers to what remains in a field after a harvest of wheat). It turned out to be the perfect solution: a sort of Yasgur's Farm that admitted not a half a million strong but more like half a thousand strong that has grown over the years. There are now two stages - rock and electronic dance - on a finca off the old road between Maria and Muro. Its twentieth edition takes place this coming Saturday. Rave and rock. The fiesta lives on. But not in the square.

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.