Curiosities In The Sky: Mallorca and airplanes

The tale was once told to me by the then very old man who could recall the planes of Alcúdia. He spoke of different aircraft - the seaplanes that came from Marseille and those of the Civil War Italian fighters, who used the improvised landing strip built on what had briefly been Mallorca's first golf course. Aviation history in Mallorca is associated with seaplanes, more famously at the Puerto Pollensa base, with Son Bonet, where the Italians were also based and which was to become the original airport for tourism, and with Son Sant Joan, now the most profitable airport in the Spanish network.

The first airline was Aero Marítima Mallorquina, and as the name suggests it operated seaplanes, the principal purpose of which was for carrying post between Palma, where the planes landed by the port, and Barcelona. It was founded in 1921. Thirteen years later, another airline, Aero-Taxi de Mallorca, became the first which catered for tourists. However, aircraft and tourism had a rather longer association. In 1910, the Chamber of Commerce, alert to the possibilities that tourism might offer Mallorca, organised an exhibition of Balearic produce and a week of sports activities. There was a further attraction: the first airplane that the people of Mallorca would have ever seen.

The plane was a Blériot XI. Its pilot was the Frenchman, Julien Mamet. This monoplane was essentially in kit form. Mamet travelled by boat from Barcelona to Palma, accompanied by the disassembled Blériot. On 28 June at the Balearic Hippodrome near Pont d'Inca, invited dignitaries witnessed the first flight over Mallorcan land. The next day the public were allowed in. There was applause as the monoplane took to the skies. But the applause was shortlived. The plane crashed, Mamet suffered only minor injuries, but a third flight was cancelled and Mamet left Mallorca and never returned.

Six years later, a pilot from Santander, Salvador Hedilla, became the first to fly across the sea from Barcelona. The monoplane took two hours and sixteen minutes to make its journey. And in 1921, Miquel Colomer from Barcelona gave flying exhibitions in an Aviatik biplane at both Son Bonet and Son Sant Joan. For the princely sum of four pesetas for a fifteen-minute spin, punters were able to take to the air themselves. Colomer was involved with that first airline - Aero Marítima Mallorquina. On what was a test flight in April 1922, Colomer's seaplane crashed into the sea between Palma and Barcelona. His body was never recovered.

Those magnificent men in their flying machines of the early twentieth century provide just some of the curiosities in Mallorca's aviation story. But as curious were planes which had ceased to be planes and which were converted. These were the "disco planes" of Mallorca. They didn't actually fly of course - and let's hope no bright spark has the idea to replicate the current-day party boat with the party airplane - they were on terra firma and the first was created in Porto Cristo.

In time for the summer season of 1976, the Discopub D-3 opened for business. It was a converted Douglas DC-4 propeller-driven aircraft. It was found at Son Sant Joan, having been taken out of use the previous year. Actually transporting the plane from Palma to Porto Cristo by road seemingly ended up costing more than the plane itself had, as it had to be taken apart and then put back together again. Nevertheless, the disco in a plane proved to be a great success.

For some four years all went well until rumours started to surface. They suggested that the disco was doubling as a brothel. Less than salubrious types were said to have got involved. The owners took the decision to close it, and the disco plane was left where it was, all but abandoned. But not quite. It became attractive to vagrants. In August 1983, tragedy struck. A fire broke out. A homeless man lost his life. The burnout plane was eventually removed.

Undeterred by the experiences in Porto Cristo, someone in Magalluf had the idea for another disco plane. Getting an accurate timeline on this plane's existence has proved quite difficult - perhaps there are those who remember it - but it would seem to have been plonked in Magalluf at the end of the 1980s. It was a Douglas DC-6, which had apparently been purchased for 100,000 pesetas, and the disco was called, so it would appear, Bertorelli's Bar. It wasn't a great success, lasting only some five years. It ended up looking an eyesore and was ultimately broken up and disposed of.

The adventures with the disco planes are unlikely to be repeated, but adventures they were, just as Mamet and others had engaged in their early adventures and had amazed the local people, who had probably been equally amazed to have one day found a plane doubling as a disco.

Photo of the Magalluf disco plane, found in an edition of "Entre Tots" magazine, 1993.

Support Your Local Magazine!: Porto Cristo

Porto Cristo, famously, has six names. Legally, because the Balearics High Court ruled as such in 1990, the name is Porto Cristo, but there remain pretenders to the name, even if one of them is merely a combination of Porto and Cristo, i.e. Portocristo, while a further one which isn't one of the six, a hyphenated Porto and Cristo, can also be used. According to the High Court, that is.

Most towns and communities in Mallorca do not have such a controversy. They know their names and no one makes a fuss about alternatives. In Manacor, the municipality of which Porto Cristo is a part, the controversy continues to bubble under the surface. It may all be a bit daft, given that most of the world appears to accept that Porto Cristo is the name and isn't in the slightest bit interested in alternatives, but such a controversy is the very stuff of local communities. Isn't it?

Well actually not. It would appear that very few people in Manacor are that bothered either. The ones who are mainly concerned are on the town council, camps divided along Porto and Cristo separationist and Portocristo combinationist lines. In the bars and cafés of Porto Cristo, they are talking about other things; pretty much anything other than that what the name of the place should be.

An indication of how little the general populace appears to have been affected by this toponymic topic can be found in the local magazine. Stubbornly it is called "Porto Cristo". It always has been "Porto Cristo" and was before the High Court was brought in to arbitrate 24 years ago. When the debate as to the name was raging at the town hall this time last year, the magazine totally ignored it. There were more important things to report on, mainly the Sant Antoni fiestas and the 125th anniversary of Porto Cristo. And yes, it was Porto Cristo. The winning logo for the anniversary had the words separated, there was no combination to Portocristo and there was certainly no suggestion that the anniversary might have been in the name of Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme (sort of the late nineteenth century original name but even then not really because Porto Cristo is much older) or that the magazine should change its name (there wouldn't have been much room left on its front cover if it had done).

The magazine, with its December issue, reached a landmark of its own. This was its 300th edition. It first appeared in 1983 and is a local publication with one of the longest histories of continuous publication on the island. As with other local publications - there are (or were) 38 others - it comes under an umbrella organisation, the Associació de Premsa Forana, which represents magazines and newsletters across Mallorca.

Part of the motivation behind the magazine's launch in 1983 was to establish a mouthpiece for a distinct community - that of Porto Cristo - detached from the machinations of Manacor town hall and the dominance of the town of Manacor. The magazine aimed to create a sense of Porto Cristo being its own "pueblo", and, physically removed from the town by several kilometres, it was following or perhaps leading a tendency for coastal resorts to establish their own identities. Something similar has occurred elsewhere, for example in Can Picafort. Separated from the town of Santa Margalida, it has its own magazine, unsurprisingly entitled "Can Picafort", and its own political organisations.

But, and in common with much print media, things aren't easy nowadays for a local publication. Whereas it might once have received some financial assistance, it no longer does, while advertising is that much more difficult to attract. It is a publication which serves something in the region of 7,500 people (approximately the population of Porto Cristo), though it does also reach out to smaller coastal parts of Manacor. The market isn't that great, therefore, while social media and internet make much of its stock-in-trade - photos of fiestas, sporting events etc. - potentially redundant because they have already been posted onto Facebook or what have you.

It is easy to suggest, therefore, that a publication such as "Porto Cristo" is an anachronism, but in the 300th issue the local historian Sebastià Serra said: "If a magazine disappears, the village loses an important link with reality and the everyday. If a publication dies out, then the collective memory of the people also dies out."

This may sound idealistic but even in today's environment there is a tangibility and a connection that a physical publication can make which web technologies cannot. And where the less idealistic is concerned - the hard-nosed need for advertising revenues - it might be borne in mind that there is much research which shows that local content and advertising, be they online or print, have a higher level of consumer trust than other forms. There is life left yet in the local publication, whatever its name.

Photo: The first issue of "Porto Cristo"; taken from the cover of the 300th issue, http://www.portocristo.org/

The Town With Six Names

Toponymy is a top topic in Mallorca. Place names, for the most part, are place names and they tend not to change or to be open to change. They are also usually not a matter of controversy. In Mallorca, however, toponymy is a favoured topic of conversation among the political, the geographical and the linguistic classes. Occasionally, it spills over into general conversation, as with, for example, the debate as to a possible change of name for Magalluf or the quite absurd arguments as to whether Palma should have become Palma de Mallorca (which it now has). The politico-linguistic arguments are more usually confined to the use of Catalan or Castellano. Though the regional government appears to have quietly forgotten about its insistence on place names being in Castellano, one can't rule out the possibility that it might remember that it was going to insist on this, and so cause another wholly unnecessary row. Should, for instance, Pollença always be Pollensa and so in Castellano rather than Catalan? As if, quite honestly, it makes any difference.

There is one place name in Mallorca that inspires greater discussion, greater controversy and greater argument than any other. I say one place name, but there are at least six alternatives. The world, generally speaking, knows Porto Cristo as Porto Cristo - two words - but this would be far too simple. There is a strong lobby for it to be Portocristo, while it is also referred to as Porto-Cristo (hyphenated). The lesser claims are for Cala Manacor, Port de Manacor and Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme, each of them with their own pedantic supporters who prefer relative toponymic antiquity over modernity.

To start at the beginning, the original name when the fishing village was founded over a century ago was Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme. Cala Manacor, as a geographer at the university argues, is the "genuine" toponymic name for the simple reason that it was a "cala" in the municipality of Manacor. However, the same geographer points out that Port de Manacor is also a "genuine" name because this described (and still does) the urban centre (such as it would have been). All of which is very interesting but doesn't explain how Porto Cristo or Portocristo or even Porto-Cristo ever came to be the name. Or names.

But Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme wasn't the original name. It was one invented in the late nineteenth century when Manacor town hall agreed to a project to build houses in what, historically, had been known as Porto Cristo (two words). This name goes back to the thirteenth century and came about because Italian fishermen took refuge from a storm and came with images of Christ and the Virgin. So, defenders of Porto Cristo are even more steeped in the defence of antiquity than the johnny-come-latelys who would put in a bid for Cala Manacor, Port de Manacor or Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme.

You would think that this thirteenth century heritage would be enough to stop any argument, but you would of course be wrong, and the body which helped to make matters more complicated than they might otherwise have been was the regional government. In 1988, in attempting to arrive at some harmonisation as to place names, the government proposed calling Porto Cristo (two words) Portocristo (one word). Outraged, certain politicians in Manacor argued that Portocristo (one word) was a false toponym borrowed from other one-word "portos" on the island (e.g. Portopí). As a consequence of all this, the Balearics Supreme Court got dragged in to arbitrate. It said that the name should be Porto Cristo but suggested that it could also be a hyphenated Porto-Cristo, which wasn't, with hindsight, a terribly useful compromise, if compromise it had indeed been intended to be.

This decision by the court was taken in 1990. Twenty-three years later, the matter keeps cropping up, as it did recently during a debate at a meeting of Manacor council. The reason why it keeps cropping up is because the Porto Cristo versus Portocristo camps won't let it drop and because there are still any number of anomalies as to the spelling. While university experts have argued the case for Porto Cristo, there are those who argue the case for Portocristo, as in fact they had back in 1988 when advising the government. Political parties in Manacor are now lined up behind the two names (and perhaps the hyphenated third), but at least one local politician has conceded that it is about time the whole ridiculous matter was laid to rest. But then he supports Portocristo.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Porto Cristo bridge must be demolished by 26 September

The Balearic Supreme Court, which had already ordered that the Riuet bridge in Porto Cristo be demolished but which bowed to representations that it should not occur during the tourism season, has decreed today that it must be demolished no later than 26 September.

On The Road Again: Road and building works

It will come as a surprise to you, I realise, but there are some things I don't know about. And there are some things that are so terminally dull that I have absolutely zero desire to find out about them. In the normal course of journalistic events, I might be prepared to research, but when it comes to the science of surfacing roads, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to disappoint you.

This said, I do seem to recall that when there was some disgruntlement with road surfacing occurring in Palma that wasn't taking place in winter, the argument went that the work needed to be done when the weather was warm, or indeed stinking hot. Is there some scientific sense to this argument? Quite possibly there is, and as I haven't a clue what I'm talking about when it comes to road surfacing I'm not about to say it's rubbish, except to wonder why some road surfacing is therefore done when it isn't stinking hot.

All this leads me, or would do, had I been able to get along the roads leading to them, to Alcanada and Barcarès in Alcúdia. I was able to get into the bustling heartland of Alcanada the other day, but only by taking a detour through the narrow and twisty lanes that pass for roads that aren't the main road, which was being resurfaced. Fortunately, Alcanada is that far off the beaten track that it has only one hotel and a couple of apartments complexes, which means only the occasional coach. Unfortunately, I encountered it. On the narrow and twisty lanes.

Despite recalling the it-must-be-hot-to-resurface-roads propaganda, it did occur to me to wonder why they were doing this just as the summer really hots up and more tourists arrive. I wondered the same thing when I found the road to Barcarès blocked by the huge leviathans that are road-resurfacing machines. Unlike Alcanada, there isn't really an alternative route, so I gave up. It can wait for another day, or year.

Much work in tourist areas is verboten during the tourist season, except, it would appear, road works. Building work is meant to cease. But it doesn't always cease. Special dispensation can be granted to extend it to mid-June. This was, for example, the town hall's fallback position in Puerto Pollensa when for a time it looked as though work on the church square and roads off might indeed stretch well into the season.

Now beyond mid-June, the poor people of Portocolom have discovered that building works, with the attendant noise and mess, are continuing. Despite being verboten, the town hall has seen fit to stop only one of some ten separate works.

Along the coast from Portocolom, in Porto Cristo they are about to prove that whereas putting things up in summer might be outlawed pulling them down isn't. The Balearics Supreme Court has decreed, in its infinite wisdom and once and for all, that the Riuet bridge must be demolished. As in, well, any time now. The "indignados" of Porto Cristo, many of its population, have had a day out to Palma in order to protest outside the court building. Demolition is a bridge too far. The bridge over the river why (now).

Demolishing the bridge now is about as absurd as having closed it for the summer. It was after all built in the first place in order to counter the traffic chaos in Porto Cristo, so now they've decided to add to it even further. One suspects that members of the Supreme Court have weekend holiday homes elsewhere, such as in Andratx or Soller, i.e. about as far from Porto Cristo as you can get in Mallorca.

Though knocking the bridge down now is plainly daft, I do have some sympathy for building things up in summer, so long of course as it's nowhere near my backyard. Suspending work for six months at a stretch seems like an incredibly inefficient thing to do, to say nothing of the complications it can cause in terms of employment and financing.

But the suspension of works encapsulates, as do road works in summer, the dilemma of tourist areas in Mallorca - that of attempting to reconcile tourism with the normal course of infrastructure development and construction. Tourists, quite naturally, have no wish to listen to drilling or to watch a bridge falling down, but much of this work is done because of tourism. It is the endless quandary; that of balancing the needs of the temporary visitor with the requirements of working towns. It is the latter that the tourist is perhaps too often unaware of; that where they stay are towns, just like the ones they live in.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Porto Cristo bridge to be demolished

The Balearics Supreme Court has ruled that Riuet bridge in Porto Cristo, closed for some months, must be demolished within seven days. The demolition, originally ordered last year, had been put off and property owners who had been affected (for many years) by the proximity of the bridge were to be awarded compensation. But Manacor town hall now faces the almost inevitable, of having to pay some one million euros to bring the bridge down. It also faces the problem of what to do with the services that run across the bridge, such as electricity cables, and of doing this right in the tourism season.

MALLORCA TODAY - The cave wars of Porto Cristo

A huge blue poster advertising the Caves of Drach is the latest manifestation in the "war" between the Caves of Hams and Drach in attracting visitors. The town hall has said that no permission has been given for the poster.

A Troubled Bridge Over Water: Porto Cristo

Manacor's mayor, Antoni Pastor, has bowed to the inevitable. The bridge in Porto Cristo, the "puente del Riuet", will come a-tumbling down. With its demolition, a chapter will close (though don't bank on it) that can be traced back to 1968 and the antecedents that led to the bridge's construction being started in 2003. Pastor, increasingly under personal pressure caused by his being fined for not complying with the order for the town hall to get on with demolishing the bridge, has fought a populist corner to keep something that not everyone in Porto Cristo will be sad to see go.

There have been protests aimed at preventing the bridge's demolition, and the publicity that these have attracted have deflected attention away from the fact that homeowners were directly affected by waking up one day to find a damn great bridge outside their windows.

These owners have had to endure noise and loss of light. They have had to pay for double glazing to try and shut out noise but have also had to keep windows shut during the summer. They have had to keep lights on all day. They have seen the value of their properties drop by some 90%. They have lived with the permanent fear that an accident might end up with a coach parked in a living-room.

The lawsuits have been many, the compensation has not been that great, the cost of pulling the thing down will run to around 900,000 euros, not much less than what it cost to put it up in the first place.

Manacor town hall, faced with footing the bill, had argued, among other things, that the bridge was not illegal, as has been deemed to be the case by the Balearics Supreme Court. It was built under an agreement between the town hall, the Council of Mallorca and the regional government, and yet it (the town hall) is expected to have to pay for it to come down.

With some justification, the town hall has a right to feel a bit miffed, not just because of the cost but also because of an absence of support from the other authorities, notably the Council of Mallorca. There is some debate as to whether the bridge is or isn't included in its plan for "carreteras". In 2009 the then director for the island's highways announced that it was. In theory, this should have put an end to the whole conflict, but now it would appear that it isn't included in the plan. The likelihood exists that a new bridge will have to be built.

The saga of the bridge is utter madness. At a combined cost of two million euros, that for building it and then knocking it down, Porto Cristo will not have a bridge, other than an old one that is inadequate for purpose. Until such a time as a new one arises, if it does, there will be congestion, and in the short term there will be chaos as the demolition work will carry on into the tourist season. And if a new bridge is built, it will cost God knows how much and be proceeded by the predictable and lengthy arguments that will themselves attract cost and delay.

What makes the bridge's demolition all the more absurd and costly is that services - water, sewage, phones and electricity - will all have to be diverted. This alone will amount to a quarter of a million euros. But the absurdity is heightened further when one considers quite why the bridge was built as it was. The result of this was, as should have been obvious, the impact on residences; an impact that led the Supreme Court to order the demolition.

One of the main reasons for the bridge being built was the traffic jams and the difficulties that coaches, heading for the Caves of Drach, had in negotiating the roads. These difficulties will return, making Porto Cristo once more a traffic nightmare in summer.

The homeowners will be pleased and so they should be. The past few years have been intolerable, but in a way, other than just because of the alleviation of traffic problems, the bridge should be allowed to stay. To stay as a monument. A monument to the stupidity that will mean it costs much the same to pull it down as it took to put it up.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Strange Town: The strange case of Porto Cristo's name

The question as to the correct usage of local place names is rarely a case of being correct or incorrect, simply (simply!?) a case of Catalan versus Castellano. Hence, one has Port de Pollença versus Puerto (de) Pollensa and Port d'Alcúdia versus Puerto (de) Alcúdia. Oh, that the usage should be this straightforward. Consider, if you will, the case of a resort on the east coast of Mallorca. It is commonly called Porto Cristo. Indeed, this is how pretty much everyone knows it. However, the correct name of the resort has been open to debate for years, and still is.

"The Diario" yesterday pointed out that there are five possibilities: Porto Cristo, Portocristo (all one word), Port de Manacor, Cala Manacor or Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme. You can also toss in a hyphenated Porto-Cristo, if you are inclined to do so.

Apparently, the original name was the Colònia mouthful one, so we should probably be grateful that there aren't many batting for it to be reinstated. This took its name, one assumes, from the church in Manacor, so was the "colony" of the church. The port or cala of Manacor are obvious, or will be to those who know that Porto Cristo is Manacor's resort, in the same way that Puerto Pollensa is Pollensa's. So why isn't it Port de Manacor (or Puerto de Manacor, if you prefer the Spanish)? For some reason it just fell out of common use, but this doesn't explain how it came to be Porto Cristo.

There are other "portos" in Mallorca, and it is a word that has confused me. It is neither a Spanish nor a Catalan word. I have assumed that it came either from Portuguese or Italian. According to a professor at the university in Palma, Portocristo - one word - is an imitation of other portos on the island and is a "false" adaptation from the language of the Mozarabés, the Christians who lived among the Muslims during their reign in Spain (there are now only some 2000 families said to be Mozarabés).

None of this, however, gives an answer as to how the name came to be adopted, other than one arrived at for religious reasons, and gives rise to the confusion as to what the place really should be called and to competing linguistic, cultural and political opinions as to what it should be. Twelve years ago, the matter received adjudication - in the Balearics Supreme Court, believe it or not. And it reckoned that it should be Porto Cristo, with two words and not Portocristo. Notwithstanding the court's decision, the confusion still exists, as does the debate.


More toplessness
The arguments over women removing their tops on beaches seem pretty daft, but they risk becoming an absurd diversion when there are matters of rather greater importance to be considered. As alluded to yesterday, they can be seen within the context of a far wider clash between conservative, Catholic Spain and today's liberalism. There is another organisation which is strident in its calls for women to cover up. This is a far-right group called "Hazte Oír" (which translates as make yourself heard). It has handed in a petition to the Balearic Government, calling for there to be a ban. The petition does not seem to be that strong; it's nothing on the scale of the petition that led to the bullfighting ban in Catalonia: some 700 families support the proposal, according to the report in "Ultima Hora".

If you go to its website (and it is quite an impressive one), you will find a whole load on the usual suspects of subjects, abortion for example, and there is a headline for something termed "Playas Familiares 2010". In this, exactly the same words as used by the family policy institute can be read. These bodies, one has to conclude, are all part of the same thing - a movement of the Catholic far right. The toplessness argument is petty, but there is something altogether more serious lurking.


QUIZ:
Yesterday - The Style Council. The best thing they ever did. Worthy of a youtube embedding ... And "strange town" - continuing a Weller theme.





Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.