Tales Of The Llevant: Blurred lines

Of the various pioneers of Mallorca's tourism, some became great names and created great dynasties, others did not become great names but their names nonetheless reside in the history of the pioneering tourism years. In a small coastal part of Manacor there was one such pioneer. You will find him referred to as a one-time goalkeeper with Barcelona. He was, but he only played two games. Before joining Barcelona, he was with Real Mallorca, and he was to end his career with Mallorca in 1963. While he was still playing, he opened a hotel in a small coastal part of Manacor where there was no hotel. This was S'Illot. The pioneer, the one-time Barça goalie, was Pere Caldentey Bauzá. He lived to enjoy the fruits of his pioneering, but he didn't live long. He died at the age of 46 in 1975.

There is an error in the preceding paragraph. Though S'Illot is in Manacor, it is also in Sant Llorenç. Pere was born in Sant Llorenç. He built what was originally a pension right by the border between the two municipalities, this border being formed by the torrent of Can Amer. Though Manacor might have claimed the pension as being its, Pere's pension was most definitely in Sant Llorenç. And it still is. The hotel Peymar, nowadays a three-star, was not just the first hotel in S'Illot, it was the first coastal hotel in Sant Llorenç. The Playa del Moro in Cala Millor might have claimed bragging rights where being the first was concerned (1964), but it wasn't, albeit that it, like the Peymar, was only just in Sant Llorenç. Walk five streets up from the current Playa del Moro, and you are in Son Servera.

The Peymar took its name from Pere and his wife Margalida: Pe y Mar. Legend has it that it opened in the 1950s, though there is an alternative version which says that it was 1961. As with the somewhat blurred border lines between municipalities, there are also blurred facts from those pioneering days of tourism. The blurring gets even more out of focus when you factor in that S'Illot is also called Cala Moreia. Things can get even more confusing if you consider the case of the Caves of Hams, not far from S'Illot. Look the caves up and you will find that a "tourism pioneer" was involved in the caves discovery. He was? Pere Caldentey. But not the same Pere Caldentey. He was Pere Caldentey i Santandreu, and he died in 1950, so at a time when the other Pere Caldentey was keeping goal for Real Mallorca.

There was a good deal of rivalry between municipalities when it came to where the real pioneering occurred or didn't. The Manacor wing of S'Illot was hard at it in a 1971 magazine, stating clearly that it was their part which was the pioneering zone. That the Peymar was the wrong side of the stream couldn't obscure the fact that in the 1930s, the Manacor part was where there had been a plan for a coastal urbanisation drawn up.

This pioneering has to be put into some context. There were no houses of any description in S'Illot until 1929. By 1934, there were all of ten dwellings, and by the time that tourism was really looking as though it might become something for the pioneer to get his teeth into, i.e. 1960, there was a grand total of 95 dwellings, almost all of them summer holiday homes. Something that these summer vacationers, and Pere Caldentey come to that, had to contend with was the lack of utilities. Undeveloped coastal areas simply didn't have them. There is the story of the summer holiday homeowners of Magalluf, all half a dozen of them, who chipped in so that they could get some electricity connected. (The electricity company, GESA presumably, saw no point in its putting its own money in as in the mid-1950s it saw no future for Magalluf.) In S'Illot, in 1963, an electricity supply was installed, and this supply does rather draw into question one of the great yarns of tourism pioneering. Enter into the story, Jaume de Juan Pons.

In 1963, so the story goes, he turned up in S'Ilot, took a shovel out of his Seat 600 and started digging. He was to become one of the great names of tourism (the Playa Moreia hotel), but when he first appeared in S'Illot, he said there was no electricity. Well, that's debatable, though it would appear that the electricity was not switched on for the first time until the August fiestas, so the story does all rather depend on when in 1963 the digging commenced. There again, as it is said that the Playa Moreia opened in 1963, when did the digging really start?

Blurred? Just a bit.

A Price On Prehistory: S'Illot

Where do you reckon was the first and most popular "chiringuito" (beach bar) in Mallorca in the 1960s? Playa de Palma perhaps, Palmanova possibly? Neither. It was, or so it is said, in S'Illot, the resort on the east coast that is shared by the towns of Sant Llorenç and Manacor. The chiringuito, which had remarkably enough opened in 1951, was known as Bar S'Illot, so there was nothing remarkable about the name, but it was a genuine beach bar back then as there wasn't anything between it and the beach. There is now, while Bar S'Illot assumed a new name earlier this year - Fifty Seven (and no, I don't know that there is any connection with Heinz).

That the bar should have been as popular as it was back in the day is surprising for two reasons; there was pretty much nothing and no one there and there was an almost complete lack of utilities. S'Illot was back-of-beyond Mallorca and when, in 1963, Jaume de Juan arrived in S'Illot, there was no electricity, no water and no telephone. There were a couple of hotels which ran off generators, to which was to be added Jaume's own hotel. He was honoured a few years ago for his contribution to tourism, having become a co-founder of the Mallorca hoteliers federation, and having shown that, along with the most popular beach bar of a bygone era, S'Illot was at the forefront of Mallorca's early years of tourism.

Why do I mention all this? The reason is to highlight the fact that tourism had humble roots and that it grew up in parts of the island which might have been unexpected. And in S'Illot there doesn't appear to have been any obviously thought-out plan for development in the early 1960s. Jaume de Juan has said that in 1963 he turned up in a Seat 600 bringing with him a shovel. There was a plot available and he got on with it, though one suspects there was rather more to it than a spot of digging.

It's a good yarn, nevertheless, and one packed with nostalgia for the fifty years which have passed since he began his hotel adventure and since the Bar S'Illot, now restored and renamed, was somehow defying its out-of-the-way location to have acquired the reputation it had. It's a yarn which also confirms the fact that there is a whole, largely untold story about Mallorca's tourism, one whose starting-points can be movable. To take S'Illot's as an example, though Jaume de Juan was to become the most celebrated of its hoteliers and the one who created a breakthrough for S'Illot as a resort, in the mid-1950s the first hotel to have opened in Cala Moreia was owned by one Pere Caldentey, a native of Sant Llorenç and, at the time the hotel was being built, the third-choice goalkeeper for Barcelona.

One can't call the people of the prehistoric talayot period tourists, but S'Illot has something of an oddball charm about it that is the result of having, only some 200 metres from the beach, a talayotic settlement. To be honest, you don't tend to get too many talayotic settlements more or less slap bang in the middle of a tourist area, but in S'Illot you do. But, and especially given where the settlement is, the modern day comes firmly into play, this modern day being in the form of land law, one that S'Illot tourism pioneers of the 1960s would not have given a great deal of attention to. In 1976, however, a national law was passed which, when applied to the prehistoric settlement, determined that it was green land liable to have to be expropriated. Over thirty years later, this law finally swung into action, and Sant Llorenç town hall came to realise that it had to expropriate the settlement's land, i.e. it had to pay the owners a market value, and the owners were the ones who pressed for the council to pay. Sant Llorenç is now in for some three million euros which will be paid in instalments. It could have been more, had a court been involved and arbitrated.

It seems bizarre that there can actually be an owner of a prehistoric settlement and that a local authority is legally obliged to hand over a fair old wedge for something it is already managing and which would surely not be subject to any form of development because of other laws. But bizarre is how things often are and how altogether more complex things are compared with the days when Jaume de Juan could take a shovel out of his Seat 600 and start digging.

* Photo of part of the talayotic settlement from the PDF from http://www.infomallorca.net