The Saintly Invention Of Santa Ponsa

The fiestas are taking place in Santa Ponsa. Long before it found a place in the general consciousness (or in some instances unconsciousness) for being a resort, its principal claim to fame was for having been where Jaume I and his men disembarked on their mission of Aragonese expansion in 1229*. Reconquest and all that, Mallorca nevertheless offered potential for a mediaeval king with a spot of empire-building to conduct and with a need to keep vassals onside by finding them some nice plots of land. The grand "possession" of Santa Ponsa was created after the invasion.

We all know Santa Ponsa but mainly because it is a resort. But what do we know of the saint - Ponsa, or Ponça to use Jaume's linguistic legacy? We know very little. In fact we know nothing. Consult a list of saints and nowhere on it will you find a Ponsa. She (it) wasn't in any shape, form or legend a saint. She most certainly didn't exist. The name Santa Ponsa has nothing whatsoever to do with saints.

Although the possession (estate) was established in the thirteenth century, the name already existed. It was an Arabic farmstead, though the name clearly isn't Arabic. The origin is open to debate, but owes perhaps everything to prehistoric inhabitants. The Talayotic people of the area are said to have been of the Celtic-Hispanic or Celtic-Ligurian family. (Ligurian, still spoken, covered part of northern Italy and southern France.)

The Ponsa part was at one time Pontia, which suggests Latin but wasn't. Very ancient Indo-European gave rise to words as diverse as "pond" in English and others such as "ponç" and "pont". The latter was Celtic, meaning a word to describe a body of water. It corresponds to something like marsh or marshy place. And that was what Santa Ponsa was - a marshy place.

The Santa element can also be attributed to the Celts. There was a Celtic-Ligurian word "sant". It didn't mean saint, it referred to a wetland or, yes, a marshy place. Santa Ponsa was two times marshy, or so it might seem.

To make matters more complicated, there was a pre-Roman deity called "Ponto", and when this was applied to water it would have been feminised, i.e. "Ponta", as water elements tended to always be feminine.

But the word "santa" is to be found elsewhere in Mallorca and it also means marshy land, while there is a further angle on the Ponsa part. This would again seem to have Celtic roots and was a reference to wetland zones where there was an abundance of poplar trees. It is thought, therefore, that this is the most likely explanation of what is an enigmatic place name.

Over time, and in accordance with Christian religious sentiment, Santa Ponsa would have been fixed as - to use a grand technical term - a pseudo-hagiotoponym: in other words, a made-up saint's name. It has the appearance of saintliness, whereas in fact it owes absolutely nothing to any religious aspect. It was a hydronym, a proper name given to a body of water with or without poplars.

Santa Ponsa is by no means the only place name in Mallorca over which debate has raged as to its origin. Move a short distance down the coast and one comes to Magalluf, for which a common explanation is that it comes from the Arabic "ma haluf" to mean filthy water. But not everyone accepts this or indeed that the root is Arabic. It could be Jewish, and it would appear that back in the fourteenth century it was documented that the mayors of Andratx and Calvia owed money to two Jewish brothers - one was named Jusef, the other was Magaluf (with one 'l'). Ah but, where did he - Magaluf - get his name from?

Whatever the origin of the Santa Ponsa name, it's probably reasonable to assume that Jaume I wasn't agonising over it when he made landfall. Victory was eventually his, the Arabic farmstead became a possession, and the rest - Santa Ponsa-wise - was minor history until Heinrich Mendelssohn and Max Säume started to develop it in the 1930s and then Joe Walsh made it the favoured resort of the Irish in the 1970s.

* The re-enactment of the battle in Santa Ponsa takes place this afternoon from 17.30.

** Photo of the statue of Jaume I in Palma from Wikimedia Commons.

Patrick Of Mallorca

As if you needed reminding, it's Saint Patrick's Day on Tuesday. While Mallorca indulges itself in a saintly ritual of Guinness drinking and the wearing of leprechaun beards, forgotten is the fact that Patrick is not only the global trademark for Irishness, he is also a Catholic saint, albeit one who has never actually been canonised. As such, therefore, he registers on the saintly calendar. 17 March, the day of Patrick's death at the age of 120. Supposedly.

You may not know that Patrick, aka Patricio, is the patron saint of the city of Murcia. Separated by a few hundred kilometres of sea, this patronage does at least lend some added, though rather tenuous, religious boost to a boozy Mallorcan celebration. Patricio never actually made it to Murcia by the way. It just so happened that the reconquest of Murcia coincided with his feast day: hence, the patronage status.

Patricio's association with Mallorca is, let's be honest, altogether more secular than religious, and this association finds no greater expression than in Santa Ponsa, where tomorrow they will have conveniently brought forward the feast day by 48 hours. Saint Patrick of Ponsa is a de facto patron, one for Irish tourism and so for Joe Walsh and the Irish tour operators who discovered the Deya Apartments and other establishments in the early 1970s and colonised a resort in the style of Magalluf for the British (minus the Celtic Brits) and Arenal for the Germans.

It is tempting to think that the Celtic-Santa Ponsa association is of very much more ancient origin, from a time closer to when Patrick was knocking around in the fifth century. Both Santa and Ponsa might have their roots in an old Celtic language - "sant" and "pont" existed in this language and they both referred to bodies of water or marsh. However the name was derived, one thing is for sure: there was never a saint called Ponsa.

Wedged between this antiquity and the modernity of tourism, there is an entirely different story regarding Ireland's association with Mallorca. It is one of migration which was partly the consequence of repression and persecution of Irish Catholics by Protestant Britain, partly commercial and partly engineered.

Oliver Cromwell has to take much of the credit - or blame, if you prefer - for this association. Land confiscation and all-round tyranny drove members of the Catholic elite (those who survived) to seek refuge away from Ireland. Catholic Spain welcomed them. Without necessarily becoming Spanish as such, they were afforded great privileges - both merchant and military.

It was some fifty years after Cromwell died and the Protectorate came to an end that events in Spain were reaching a bloody conclusion which brought about its own repression. Settlement following the War of the Spanish Succession had stripped Spain of some possessions, but within Spain, Felipe V was busying himself bringing opposition to an end and securing for the House of Bourbon all parts of the country. This was to mean the defeat of his opponents in Catalonia and those from the Crown of Aragon, which included Mallorca. Felipe issued the Nueva Planta decrees, Catalonia was subjugated, the Crown of Aragon disappeared.

The loss of those possessions made it important that no more were lost. To the north of Mallorca was - still is - Menorca. The settlement had turned it into a British possession. And if the British had any ambitions regarding other Balearic islands, Felipe wasn't about to hang around and let them realise them. Mallorca was reinforced both commercially and militarily. There was, therefore, a wave of immigration, and among these immigrants were trusted and privileged Irish, loyal to the Spanish crown.

So, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, an Irish "colony" became established. It was never vast by any means but it was to later be added to by another wave of an elite with Irish origins which, again mainly for military reasons, came to Mallorca during the Peninsular War against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.

Of those who came to Mallorca in the eighteenth century was an Irishman who had been born after the period of the Cromwell tyranny (in Kilkenny in 1676). He became a devoted ally of Felipe V and he arrived in Mallorca in 1726 and was installed as the governor and captain-general of the island. His surname was corrupted to Laules. Originally, it was probably Lawless, though there is some debate. But, and in keeping with the current celebrations, his Christian name was appropriate. Patricio. Patrick.

There are of course descendants from the waves of Irish immigration, their names having generally been altered to fit the Mallorcan dialect. And of those one-time O'Neills, O'Ryans or indeed Lawlesses, how many will be now donning a leprechaun's beard and downing a pint of Guinness?

Paradise Regained?: What tourism should have been

(In the previous two articles I have argued that it was war and what followed - economic autarky and then technocracy - which destroyed the original principle of Mallorca's tourism from pre-war times and led to the type of tourism which emerged in the 1960s.)

The technocracy was such that it hasn't ever really gone away. It may be more friendly, it may have a greater appreciation of individuals' needs, of the environment and of markets, but it survives in its current-day form. It is typified by a Balearics tourism minister whose background is as an architect and planner and by a Mallorcan national tourism secretary of state whose specialism is property and its planning. They are representative of the new technocracy, knowledgeable of things but not, one fears, people.

Despite all this, we are seeing signs, I believe, of how uninterrupted organic development might have shaped very different resorts. The current-day technocrats are not blind to the sins of the past, even if they can sin in human terms and in being undemocratic in their biases towards property (hotels versus private accommodation, as an example). They have established a framework for belated, very belated modernisation of mature resorts, those which were the result of Fordist mass tourism. This framework cannot bring back what was lost of the natural patrimony but it can, through a re-conception of resorts, bring back - to an extent - the lost philosophy of the greater harmony of the 1930s garden city resorts. And nowhere is this potentially more evident than in Magalluf.

To take again my thesis about how war shaped later tourism development, Magalluf was a prime example. Had there been more organic development, Magalluf would still have become a resort, but it would not have been as it was to become. In 1959, approval was given for its exploitation, and that exploitation was sudden and disastrous. The environment was just one victim of a model of authoritarian-state diktat combined with virtually non-existent planning regulations and with inadequate, easily swayed, corrupt officialdom. Magalluf was, if you like, the model fascistic tourist resort. It was Fordist mass tourism in extremis. From nothing in the late '50s emerged architectural barbarism. It was the technocrats' wet dream.

Palmanova and Santa Ponsa, though they were both to also fall victim to this barbarism, were, unlike Magalluf, products of pre-war planning. Had they developed organically, they too would have been very different. Santa Ponsa is a better example than Palmanova. You can discern from some of its layout the original garden city principle, and that original principle, similar to Alcúdia, would in all likelihood have spawned a golfing resort of a different style to today. It may be forgotten that there was actually a golf company in Santa Ponsa that pre-dated Alcúdia's 1934 golf course. It was to be decades before that golf vision was realised, and by then it had to vie with the technocratic undermining of the original principle.

Magalluf would in all likelihood have been developed before it was. Like its neighbours there was a similar need for land exploitation, but this exploitation would almost certainly have corresponded with the garden city principles in 1930s' Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. All three resorts would thus have taken on a very different appearance to that which they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The chances are that there would have been a form of mass tourism even with organic development, but the mass would have been smaller and it would have been of an alternative character. It would still have been foreign, but the offer would have been less dominated by foreign culture and concreted vandalism. It would simply have been more "Mallorcan". The transformation of Magalluf, as we are not witnessing because of Meliá's intervention, is, I would argue, along lines that would have emerged had Magalluf been left to develop organically and not been that model fascistic tourist resort. Even aspects of the new look owe something to the 1930s principles: boulevard, green areas, and thus a greater harmony between living space and natural patrimony.

One of the challenges that Mallorca faces is determining what mass should now mean. If it is to be smaller mass, and it may well mean this, then there are inevitable consequences, but this smaller mass would have been the norm had it not been for the mad dash to develop in the 1960s. One can argue that what occurred in the '60s was in fact an aberration. It was not how it was meant to have been and it was not how it would have been, had war not led to the desperate solutions of the technocrats and had the resorts been allowed to develop organically. It has taken fifty years to attempt to right the wrongs of fascistic mass tourism. These attempts should not be criticised. They should be applauded. They are what Mallorca should have been.

MALLORCA TODAY - Irish tourist in Santa Ponsa balcony fall

A familiar enough story. Young tourist (20 years old in this instance) usually from Britain (but this time from Ireland) arrives in Mallorca, goes out and has too much to drink and then falls from balcony of a Magalluf hotel (this time a Santa Ponsa) one. The incident happened yesterday morning at around half past midnight.

See more: Ultima Hora

MALLORCA TODAY - Peguera Oktoberfest to move

The annual Oktoberfest held in Peguera in late September and the first half of October is to move to a different location in Calvià, one in Santa Ponsa. This follows complaints regarding noise that the beer festival creates.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - Irishman dies after Santa Ponsa balcony fall

A young Irishman, variously described as being 19 or 24 years old but named as Daniel Kenny, has died after falling this morning from an eighth-floor balcony at the Verdemar Apartments in Santa Ponsa. It is understood that the fall is not being attributed to balcony-diving, and investigations are ongoing.

The Pirates Of Ponsance

I blame Robert Newton. Did he ever actually utter the line - "belay there, Jim lad"? Probably not. You can go further back - to J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Captain Hook - but Newton's portrayal of Long John Silver was what propelled the pirate into the common Sunday-afternoon-black-and-white-film-on-telly consciousness, thus setting off a trail that has passed through the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Johnny Depp to now a hotel in Santa Ponsa.

Mallorca has long done pirates. Many of its old fortifications were designed with them in mind, not as entertainment but as a means of defence. Actual pirates, rather than pretend ones, remained on the scene until alarmingly recently. There is the marvellous story of the Jolly Roger bar in Puerto Alcúdia which, when it first opened in the early 1970s, was told to take down its skull-and-crossbones flag. Presumably, passing post-Newtonian Silvers (and there were some then) might have mistaken it as an invitation for a spot of pirating.

The island's culture is wrapped up in tales of derring-do involving pirates and their being repelled. The grand entertainment that is the annual street theatre of the Moors and Christians battle during Pollensa's Patrona fiesta is a pirate adventure without the entrance fee. Dragut (Turgut) is often portrayed as a sixteenth-century chancer, a pirate in other words. He was far from being so; he was in fact the commander of the Ottoman navy. But the pirate myth has come to suit.

Santa Ponsa has its own Moors and Christians thrash. But it is not one that has been subjected to piratical revisionism. It's the real clash-of-the-religions thing, in that it celebrates the taking of Mallorca by Jaume I and the defeat of the Moors in the thirteenth century as part of the re-conquest of Spain.

A short journey down the Calvia coast, to Magalluf, and there is the Pirates Adventure, the contemporisation for stage of an island history rich in pirate legend.

Santa Ponsa, without a pirate theme as such, now wants to get in on the pirates' act. It is to be the site for more of this stuff of legend and for its commercialisation. The Gran Santa Ponsa Apartments are to become pirate-themed.

"Complementary things" are needed, so says the head of the local hotel association, in order to ward off the competition from other destinations. Like Turkey, for example. Which is where Dragut came from. There's a coals to Newcastle metaphor lurking in this latest piratisation.

Santa Ponsa, it would appear, is to undergo a thematic transformation. The Gran Santa Ponsa will be followed by other theme hotels, thus, according to the hotel association, securing the support of tour operators in guaranteeing flights in March and November. The pirate ships will fly for longer than they currently do. Will they really? Are the pirates not more for the kiddies? How many school holidays are there in November? Or will there be an out-of-season pirates uncut in Santa Ponsa?

The pirates of Ponsance follow in the wake of the Magalluf tourism-reinvention mothership. One of the hotels in line for the Magalluf makeover is already themed; the modern stone-age family hotel, the Antillas Barbados, where you meet The Flintstones - Pedro, Vilma, Pablo and Betty, as they are usually not known.

From the rubble of prehistoric Mallorcan tourism rises the modern stone work of its new age, and it is one full of pirates. The Euro, fast disappearing into the Mediterranean, locked in chests of buried un-treasure, will be replaced by pieces of eight, always assuming they are required and that the pirates are not all-inclusive.

Theming is all well and good, but doesn't it run the risk of becoming a bit out of date? The pirates thing has been done to death. Or maybe it hasn't been. The Flintstones really do now seem like they're from the stone age.

Where next for the theme hotel, then? Bearing in mind a need for internationalism, it would need to make sense to more than just the Brits (or the Irish in Santa Ponsa). A Big Brother-themed hotel perhaps. An X Factor theme maybe, a sort of Eurovision Song Contest hotel; every night is karaoke night with text voting. Dinosaurs and planets of the apes must surely already be being lined up for hotels across Mallorca.

But for now, the pirates have it, so if you go to the Gran Santa Ponsa and see some bloke with one leg and a parrot on his shoulder, be sure to introduce yourself. "I'm Jim Hawkins." "Belay there, Jim lad."


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Three falls in one night

And it just carries on. During the early hours of this morning, there were three more incidents of people (tourists apparently) falling from or within buildings and structures, the most serious being that of a 25-year-old Briton who fell from a wall by a parking area in Santa Ponsa. The other incidents involved at least one other Briton, also 25, who fell down a lift shaft in Portals Nous; the third incident occurred in Magalluf, a fall into a street.

MALLORCA TODAY - Bar fined for cider bottle being only in English

A bar in Santa Ponsa has received a fine of 500 euros for selling an Irish cider which only had information about ingredients in English, contrary to the requirement for labelling to be in the "official language of the state", i.e. Castilian. Fines for such infractions can be as high as 3,000 euros.

MALLORCA TODAY - Fire at Santa Ponsa hotel

A fire, that originated in the kitchens, has led to the evacuation of 300 guests from the hotel Rey Don Jaime in Santa Ponsa. The fire, which occurred at lunchtime, has left two employees requiring treatment for smoke inhalation.

MALLORCA TODAY - Gaddafi in Mallorca

Today's strange fact, courtesy of the "Diario de Mallorca". Colonel Gaddafi once came to Mallorca and met with the then Spanish president, Felipe González, in a house owned by the banker Miguel Nigorra in Santa Ponsa. The year was 1984. Gaddafi stayed at the Son Vida luxury hotel in Palma.

The meeting was facilitated by the former chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky, who owned a house in Costa d'en Blanes.

http://www.diariodemallorca.es/mallorca/2011/02/24/gadafi-nego-eta-mallorca/648217.html

New For Old: The all-inclusive mixed message

"Mallorca has worked as an example of tourism development except in the case of all-inclusive."

So says Michael Tenzer, a senior director of Thomas Cook. A different company director had suggested that the "battle for the all-inclusive" had ended. It would appear not to have; next year will witness a 10% increase in the number of places Thomas Cook offers which are all-inclusive. In the name of tourism development, one takes it, comes more all-inclusive.

When Herr Tenzer suggests all-inclusive underperformance, he is not talking solely about the volume of AI. There is also the issue of its quality. Never fear. There is always Joana Barceló and her tourism ministry quality inspectorate which has stepped up its scrutiny of the low-grade lager.

Whether the all-inclusive "battle" is over or still being waged, at the same time as Thomas Cook is announcing an increase in its AI offer, the research organisation, the Gadeso Foundation, is reporting that the so-called complementary offer (bars, restaurants etc.) appears "mortally wounded". Every battle has its victims.

It befits a victor to be magnanimous. Thomas Cook is due to roll out a project in Santa Ponsa in 2011 which is designed to take all-inclusive out of the confines of the hotel and onto the terraces of neighbouring bars and restaurants. It sounds a good idea, but how on earth is it supposed to work?

The notion of a sort of mixed all-inclusive whereby guests could go to nearby establishments and still benefit from brandishing their wristbands was flagged up back in March this year. A "nuevo concepto" of all-inclusive was how it was being branded. I understand that such a system already operates in a limited way in Playa de Palma, but there it involves hotels and outside restaurants within the same group of ownership. In March, the reaction to the new concept from the hotel federations, the association of small- to medium-sized businesses and restaurant associations was underwhelming. They couldn't see how it could be viable, given the complexity of administration.

Why is such a system being contemplated? The altruistic interpretation is that tour operators wish to help the mortally wounded bars and restaurants. I can break thee, but I can re-make thee. For all the lambasting of hotels that subscribe to the AI doctrine, it might be considered who have been driving it - the tour operators. One can also interpret the mixed AI as an admission of responsibility for problems that have arisen within the bar and restaurant sector.

A second interpretation is that the tour operators are acting as economic engineers, assuming leadership for establishing arrangements which benefit more than simply themselves and the hotels. Sound social responsibility perhaps, but one based on countering the endless moans of a complementary sector that has done precious little for itself in trying to combat the onward march of AI. If they, the bars and restaurants, can't do it for themselves, i.e. forge relationships with hotels and/or new products, then someone has to do it for them.

Then, however, there is the issue of quality. Anecdotes in resorts such as the AI-abundant Alcúdia or Can Picafort are legion when it comes to holidaymakers seeking out better food and drink than that served up in many an all-inclusive hotel. Notwithstanding Sra. Barceló's army of inspectors, perhaps there is a recognition that some hotels are simply incapable of providing good service. And this isn't totally their fault. They have to work within the constraints of their own economics.

And then there are the guests themselves. True, there are those who are totally disinclined to shift themselves from the poolside. It's the mentality that "Benidorm" captured so perfectly. "Why go outside, when it's all free?" It might remain "free" under the mixed AI arrangement, but it creates an impulse to step outside the hotel walls, even if it would be to just go across the street. There are though many AI guests who don't want to remain confined, and it is the recognition of this fact that speaks volumes for why Mallorca has not developed in terms of AI as Thomas Cook might have liked it to.

All-inclusive in Mallorca both works and doesn't work. And it doesn't work for the very simple reason that there is so much outside the hotel. Neither the island's resorts nor many of its hotels are designed with AI in mind. The symbiosis between the hotels and the outside bars and restaurants and their shared living space are fundamental to the ongoing success of Mallorca. Disrupt this relationship, wound it so badly, and you cease to have resorts. The new concept of AI is something of the old concept of mutual benefit that worked well for so many years dressed up in newspeak.

How this new concept could work, whether it could work is yet to be answered. The practicalities are not insignificant, and quite what benefits the bars and restaurants would derive, and which bars and restaurants would derive them, are open to question. But the concept deserves to be given a go. The experiences in Santa Ponsa in 2011 could be very important.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.