Where Resort Time Stood Still

Wednesday is the feast day for Sant Pere, Saint Peter, patron of fishermen. The fiestas are, therefore, happening in different parts of the island, not all of them - oddly enough - by the coast. But one coastal place which has more right than any other to claim the fiestas as its own is Colonia Sant Pere.

Once upon a time, there was nothing where Colonia Sant Pere now stands other than dunes, pines and scrub. It came into being in 1880, one of a series of new "colonies" for land development. This was not speculative building or anything of such nature, but purely agricultural, though there was the obvious further attraction of fishing. Some of the colonies failed to survive. One that didn't was Gatamoix, the settlement that the British engineers established for the drying and cultivation of Albufera. Notable among those which did survive are Colonia Sant Jordi and Porto Cristo as well of course as Colonia Sant Pere.

The church that was built was dedicated to Sant Pere, an indication that fishing was to become a part of the economy of this tiny settlement. Nowadays, it's not a great deal bigger, in terms of population, than it was originally: there are some 500 plus regular inhabitants. But it is notable in different ways. Edging towards the north-eastern tip of Mallorca, Colonia forms part of an area that may well be where human settlement on the island was first established.

The evidence for this lies principally with two sites: one is the dolmen burial site in Son Baulo (Can Picafort) and the other is a similar dolmen in S'Aigua Dolça, east of Colonia Sant Pere, that only became truly known about around twenty years ago. It hasn't satisfactorily or definitively been established that these are evidence of first settlements, but both pre-date what is taken to be the Talayotic period, of which there are plenty of examples all over Mallorca and Menorca; Ses Païsses in Arta is one of the best known. An assumption that has been made is that these most ancient settlements were by people who had crossed from Menorca. It may well be correct, as Menorca has signs of even earlier habitation from the third millennium BC.

Colonia Sant Pere, therefore, sits along a stretch of coast on the bay of Alcudia that is rich with prehistory. To its west is the necropolis of Son Real, a burial site that is of more recent vintage (all things being relative) than the dolmen sites: more recent by around a thousand years. It is also a coastal area with very little development.

Arta, of which Colonia is a part, is peculiar in that it stands out among all the coastal municipalities that run from Alcudia around the north-eastern tip and along the east coast because of its lack of resort development. A reason for this is surely its mountainous terrain; Arta has more in common with municipalities of the Tramuntana than with its neighbours when it comes to beach tourism. While it has its coves, there are really only three obvious beaches: Colonia's is one and the smallest, Cala Torta is another and the third and largest is Sa Canova, which lies between Colonia and Son Serra de Marina.

This neighbouring development, part of Santa Margalida rather than Arta, has its own peculiarity: plenty of residential properties but no hotels. It is a place which, together with Colonia, conspires to make this part of Mallorca an area where time seems to have stood still. Not completely of course, but it is an area that is a world away from Can Picafort and Cala Ratjada to either side. There is a sense also of the less than conventional, and not just because of the naturist beaches of Sa Canova and Cala Torta, Colonia's naturist hotel (the only one on the island) and the ambitions that Colonia has for being a dog-friendly tourist destination. As befits the mysterious nature of the prehistory, Son Serra was once the location for a "didgeridoo encounter". It took place six years ago in a wooded area near to the Talayotic site of Cova de sa Nineta. All pretty alternative stuff.

And alternative adequately describes this part of Mallorca. It is redolent of an era before giant resorts. Even now, it's stretching things to describe Colonia as a resort, although it is the only one that Arta can claim to have. Quiet it may be, but on Wednesday there will be the bangs of fireworks for Sant Pere. Not quite enough, though, to waken the dead of all that prehistory.

* Photo of Sa Canova from Wikimedia.

The New Grand Tour: Mallorca's culture

Mallorca has some remarkable old buildings, some of which are barely discernible as buildings any longer. From the enormous imposition of Gothic churches dominating village centres to the majesty of mansions or monasteries in urban, rural and mountain locations and to the mysteriousness of the constructions of antiquity, within the smallness of Mallorca there is a vastness of architectural and archaeological heritage. It is patrimony of which the island is proud and yet which it has struggled to inform the wider world of. Culture and so cultural tourism feature high on priority lists of the regional government, the island's council, the town halls and the hoteliers federation, now committing itself to collaborative promotion of this grand collection, but somehow it is a collection, with the stories to be told, that can seem lost amidst the diverse and rich history of Mediterranean culture.

Though there is on Mallorca a collision of that culture, it is one, even with its ancient relics, that is of lesser antiquity. It is the lot perhaps of Mallorca and the Balearics that they are and were in the western Mediterranean. Most of what really mattered in Mediterranean culture occurred elsewhere and much earlier. The grand civilisations of prehistory were not western ones, and when the civilisations of more modern times arose, there were not, despite the claim of Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century, great Mallorcan seats of learning, just as there were not the architectural manifestations of imperial power or mercantile domination.

The first nineteenth century Mallorcan tourists of popular legend - Chopin and Sand and then the Archduke Louis Salvador and his friends - have assumed the importance they have because they were unusual. For a member of the nobility, Mallorca was a curious choice for the Archduke. Europe's noble class had chosen to ignore Mallorca (and indeed most of Spain) when indulging its youthful development on the Grand Tour. Where the Mediterranean was concerned, Rome and Venice were stopping-off points, destinations of the one-time great civilisations, of the arts, of culture as it was being defined. Palma wasn't even on the map. An island such as Mallorca was thought not to have anything to offer the culture-seeking bourgeoisie and aristocracy.

Culture, in a Mallorcan sense, was thus never given great prominence. There was no history, so to speak, to Mallorca's history. When tourism truly burst out, it was on to a whole new and artificial civilisation: that of the coastal resort. Yet in the first half of the last century, the focus of attention for tourism had been the island's heritage - natural and manmade. The routes for excursions in the years before the Civil War were to Valldemossa, Deya and Soller, or they were to the Caves of Drach, where a concert would feature as well. For eleven pesetas (thirteen on Saturdays), the Mallorca Tourist Board arranged these trips which left Palma at 9.15am every day of the week.

But while they went to sites like Miramar and Son Marroig, they didn't take in the real antiquity of the island, and that was because most of it hadn't been discovered or hadn't been excavated to a sufficient extent that there was something to see. The work on the Roman city in Alcúdia only started in the 1930s, for example.

There was greater antiquity being overlooked, and it is the one that has the mystery not just because of the strangeness of the remains but also because of precise timing. Mallorca's Talayotic period, from around the end of the second millennium BC, is a subject chewed over and debated by the archaeologists. These sites are now of immense interest and activity. Sa Galera, the small island off Can Pastilla, may date from as early as 1440BC. The dolmen burial sites of Son Baulo and near Colonia Sant Pere are thought to be older: pre-Talayotic. Another settlement - Ses Païsses in Arta - is a constant source of investigation. When was it actually created?

This cultural heritage, both prehistoric and modern, is being given greater accessibility and not just because of guided tours. Something has been borrowed from the days before the war when there were concerts at the Caves of Drach. Throughout this summer, there have been concerts in the gardens of grand buildings in Palma - La Misericordia, the former Convent of Santa Margalida (now the military history centre). There have been concerts at the fort in Cala Egos, at the Gràcia sanctuary in Llucmajor, and there are also concerts at Ses Païsses. There is one this evening by the pianist David Gómez.

Culture has, in a sense, finally arrived and it is doing so through a collision of diverse aspects of culture - music, art, architecture and archaeology. It's taken a long time, but Mallorca is now finding itself part of a contemporary grand tour, and people are discovering that the island does, after all, have a great deal to offer.

Discovering Prehistoric Mallorca

There is no precise time placed on the first permanent settlements on Mallorca. The Talaiotic culture which arose from around the end of the second millennium BC is, wrongly, sometimes taken as marking the origins of permanent inhabitation, but understanding how permanent the population was prior to this is open to debate. Mallorca was certainly an island where there was short-term occupation from the time when the Mesolithic period (in the western Mediterranean) was crossing over into the Neolithic, otherwise known as the New Stone Age, or, if you prefer, at a time roughly a thousand years before the start of the Copper Age. This would place the first inhabitation of the island at around the sixth millennium BC.

There are different theories about the Talaiotic culture and its emergence, but there is little doubt that there was a settled population which was to develop the Talaiotic culture, the evidence of which is to be found all over Mallorca, as with the talaiot stone structures of, for example, Ses Païsses in Artà. When this pre-Talaiotic settlement began is the mystery, as the archaeological evidence of earlier settlement is - so to speak - thin on the ground.

It is reckoned that the earliest construction on Mallorca is the dolmen burial chamber of Son Bauló in Can Picafort. It was unearthed in 1961 and then given a proper examination in 1964. The remains of five individuals were found along with items of stone, flint and pottery as well as a hammer. The dolmen isn't Talaiotic. It comes from a time before. Researchers say it was constructed around 1700BC, so in the earlier part of the second millennium BC, a few centuries before the Talaiotic culture is calculated to have genuinely started.

The dolmen remained the most important find in terms of antiquity until another dolmen was found in 1995. One says found, but the remarkable thing about this other dolmen was that it was known about but had not been publicised. The story goes, and it is a true one, that in 1995 there was concern for the future preservation of the Son Bauló dolmen. This was because the Can Picafort industrial estate was being built right next to it. The press latched onto this and, lo and behold, someone stepped forward to say that he knew of the existence of another dolmen. This someone was a geologist named Lluís Moragues. He contacted a journalist who had been writing about the Son Bauló dolmen. They met, they went to the site and bingo, there it was - just like the structure in Son Bauló. Its location was in woods close to the Cala des Camps east of Colonia Sant Pere, i.e. in Artà. The place is known as S'Aigo Dolça (meaning fresh water).

Moragues had known about the dolmen because an archaeologist had sought permission to undertake excavation work at the site. Photographs of this site had been sent to the regional government along with an explanation that a potentially important archaeological discovery might be made. It wasn't certain that this would involve finding a dolmen, but the permission to dig was ignored: officialdom was not interested. So Moragues took a further look anyway, and he held the secret of the S'Aigo Dolça dolmen until he shared it in 1995.

It seems extraordinary that the government's culture ministry should have displayed such indifference to what turned out to be a discovery comparable to Son Baulo and so evidence of the first concrete (not that concrete was involved) sign of early Majorcan civilisation. With such a big thing now being made of the island's cultural heritage and its significance for tourism, it seems doubly extraordinary.

A point about the two dolmen, which are separated by a distance of roughly ten kilometres, is their location on the north-eastern coast. In Menorca there are various examples of dolmen, which raises a question. Had the first genuine settlers on Mallorca crossed from Menorca? Maybe, though as arguably the best example of a dolmen is in Formentera, then perhaps not. The truth is that no one knows when the first permanent settlers arrived. But the fact that the two dolmen are close by and are so also near to the large and unique necropolis of Son Real in Can Picafort (which came later, as it is Talaiotic) might suggest that this north-eastern part of Mallorca was the main centre of population for several centuries.

But, as I say, there is evidence of the Talaiotic culture all over Mallorca, and officialdom is now much more aware of the importance of this prehistory than it might once have been. This weekend, as an example, they've been staging an "Ancient Mediterranean Festival" in Can Pastilla on the opposite side of Mallorca to Can Picafort and Artà. On the small island of Sa Galera off the Caló de Son Caios the site of a Talaiotic settlement has been excavated. Discoveries there suggest it might date from as early as 1440BC. It was subsequently redeveloped by the Phoenicians and the Romans, but if its prehistory can indeed be traced to 1440BC, then it would be one of the earliest examples of Talaiotic culture or of the transition to this culture.

* Photo of Sa Galera is taken from the programme for the Ancient Mediterranean Festival.


Index for May 2015

Balearics election - 24 May 2015, 28 May 2015, 30 May 2015
Balearics public services underfunding - 7 May 2015
Bauzá vs. Rodríguez - 9 May 2015
Bonet de Sant Pere: Duke of Swing - 17 May 2015
British election - 6 May 2015
Bullfighting - 12 May 2015
Capdepera mediaeval past - 10 May 2015
Chiringuitos - 23 May 2015
Costitx bulls' heads - 5 May 2015
Day without music - 19 May 2015
Education in Mallorca and foreign pupils - 14 May 2015
Elections Mallorca - 16 May 2015
ITV (Spanish MOT) test - 27 May 2015
Magalluf, Playa de Palma and promises of improvements - 18 May 2015
Minority governments: Andalusia and Balearics - 11 May 2015
Municipalities and elections - 20 May 2015
Music festivals in Mallorca - 25 May 2015
Nixe yacht - 2 May 2015
Playa de Palma police - 13 May 2015
Politics of Mallorca's tourism - 8 May 2015
Prehistoric Mallorca - 31 May 2015
Seasonality - 22 May 2015
Sineu fair - 3 May 2015
Too many interests in Mallorca's resorts - 4 May 2015
Tourist tax - 1 May 2015, 15 May 2015
Tramuntana mountains - 29 May 2015
Voting and foreign residents - 21 May 2015