Sex, The City And The Island

When was sex invented in Mallorca? Not so long ago, German visitors were being informed by that oracle of all known truths - Bild - that Mallorca was the island of sex. The newspaper was referring to the British, and in particular some carryings-on in Magalluf. Not, of course, that there had ever been any such thing in Arenal. The Germans must have been alarmed at learning that sex was abroad and being imported from abroad; somewhere, moreover, that wasn't Germany. The Germans, if one can generalise, have an almost matter-of-fact relationship with matters of the flesh. Alarm there most certainly wouldn't have been. They helped with the invention.

In the current day, there are few inhibitions, especially when cold drinks have been taken and the hours (long ones) have been made happy to the point of exhibitionist hedonism, notwithstanding Magalluf's attempts to turn back the clock. People of all nations, not least the Germans, know all about sex. If they don't, then Bild can probably teach them a thing or two.

But the current day has a long (comparatively) history. Thirty years ago, Mallorca had attained such a reputation that Ivor Biggun was saving up his money to fly "to the land of the sun, fornication and fun". More than ten years before Ivor (aka Doc Cox) released The Majorca Song, three ladies from Coronation Street had succumbed to certain charms in Palmanova (which was where it was shot). Rita fell for a man with a Jason King moustache, Bet was taken in by a sleaze ball, and Mavis - yes, Mavis - walked on the beach with someone who most certainly wasn't Derek.

The lothario who enticed Rita to abandon a lilo of such immense bulk that it would have been surprising had it been capable of floating was representative of a class whose day was drawing to a close: the picador. It was he - there were certainly never any she variants - who more than most secured the invention of sex in Mallorca.

I have previously considered the picador. An article two years ago, entitled Parasite of Love, did just that. Last month in Pollensa, as part of the town's history course, the picador was revisited. Local historian Pere Salas observed that the picador was associated with cultural change in the 1960s and that the hedonistic image that Mallorca acquired in that decade has unquestionably left its legacy today.

The picador had a further association: Scandinavian - Swedish to be specific. Salas said that there were "legendary" figures from the early years of mass tourism, and Swedish girls and the picadors were among them. Not British, not German, but Swedish. I'm guessing, but the picadors may have found British girls rather more uptight. There again, the pill was about to make its presence known. Regardless of nationality as a target, though, the picador was presented with the previously unimaginable. Local girls had chaperones.

This, in the modern era, marked the invention of sex in Mallorca. But the Swedes were not alone in influencing the development. In 1962, a German actress - Elke Sommer - appeared briefly in a bikini in the otherwise ludicrous propaganda film, Bahía de Palma. There was little, in fact no sex in the city, but the film was sanctioned as a means of showing how liberal Mallorca and Spain were. Which they weren't. It was just that women, from Germany in particular, were alarmed at the prospect of being rounded up if they were wearing bikinis. The film came out only a few years after the mayor of Benidorm had famously persuaded Franco that the bikini had its advantages. And that was at a time when there was segregated bathing as well as no bikinis.

Religion did of course have a great deal to do with things; everything to do with things in fact. Franco, highly conservative Catholic that he was, took exception to the likes of Carnival not just because masks could disguise potential troublemakers but also because of concerns that the people would engage in debauchery.

His attitudes were ones that were centuries old. I cannot vouch for all that happened from the time of the Catalan invasion, but dear old Ramon Llull, born 1232, was someone who saw the error of his lustful ways. When visions came to him, he renounced his faithlessness and found a different faith. He did so to such an extent that he argued the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, undeniably sexual activity but quite removed from how Ramon had once conceived it.

Along the way, and more recently than Ramon, there was, for instance, the provocative Geraldine Leopold and her 1899 trapeze act that had Mallorcan males frothing. But it was the picadors who made the difference, and now no one bats an eyelid if, for instance, a nude model is photographed at Binissalem aerodrome. Though when it came to carryings-on in Magalluf, you'd have thought that sex hadn't previously been invented.

Parasite Of Love: Mallorca's "picadors"

A picador is the horseman who thrusts a lance into the bull during the bullfight. Is he not? He is, but there is another type of picador, one who might possibly be said to still exist but who had his heyday during the years of Mallorca's great tourism boom.

The chances are that, of things you can do over the next few days, you will not be going to the Can March Gallery in Inca on Friday or the town hall in Montuïri on Saturday in order to hear a presentation about a book written in Catalan. It's a shame. As with several other books written about some of the idiosyncrasies of Mallorca during the early boom years, it isn't available in English, but be this as it may. The book in question is by a young Mallorcan historian, Tomeu Canyelles, who first came to my attention when he collaborated with one of Mallorca's leading musicologists, Francesc Vicens, in researching the book "Beatles Made in Mallorca". This complemented a previous work by Vicens, "Paradise of Love", which looked at how pop music and tourism collided in Mallorca in the sixties and into the 1970s. They are two historians who have studied and will doubtless continue to study the ways in which popular culture was shaped and influenced by tourism in the days of innocence and not-so-innocence under the Franco regime. And into this research mix has come the latest work by Canyelles. It is a study of a social phenomenon, one that couldn't have existed without the wave of tourism from countries where attitudes were more liberal than in the Spain of the time. The title of the book in Catalan is "Els Picadors Mallorquins". Its subtitle translates as "seducers and seduced during the touristic boom". "Els picadors mallorquins", the Mallorcan picadors, derived their name not from the bullfight but from the mosquito. A picador is a synonym. You get an unpleasant bite from a mosquito, and the mosquito is a parasite. The picador, it was to become accepted, was a parasite.

So, who was he? You may have already put two and two together. Seducer, seduced, more liberal attitudes, parasite? If not, let's spell it out. The picador was the sleazy, smarmy, greasy Latin lover, the tourist gigolo of legend. He wasn't a myth. He genuinely did exist. And there were few places where he existed in greater number than in Mallorca.

It has been said that the early days of tourism made young Mallorcan men distinctly uncomfortable - probably in more ways than one. They had not previously been exposed to the amount of female flesh that now presented itself. There were many who couldn't handle the cultural and psychological upheaval typified by the bikini once it was legalised. On the other hand, there were many who could handle it, and handling was what they principally hand in mind. And this was a mind firmly devoted to the body and to its pleasures.

The picador's modus operandi was pretty straightforward. Eye up a young foreign girl, use some well-practised foreign phrases, charm her with Latin looks and, with any luck, bingo. The picador's territory was also pretty obvious. The beach was ideal and so was the disco, the latter in some ways better on account of alcohol that was in those days cheaper even than chips and served in measures equivalent to a small bucket.

Once it became apparent, fairly early on during the tourism boom, that this new industry was spawning whole legions of lecherous young men with dodgy moustaches who showered in some concoction that made Brut smell good, moral outrage began to raise its head. The church, never a great fan of tourism in any event, condemned the lack of morality, while, and the reverse of how it is today, British newspapers highlighted the perils of the picador. In the 1960s, the young Mallorcan male was the sexual predator who was worthy of contempt. Nowadays, as we know, the loose morality flies in en masse wearing lads-on-tour t-shirts, heads for Magalluf and gets filmed with its pants down.

However, there was, as with contemporary Magalluf, another side of the coin. Despite the indignant stereotyping by Fleet Street and becoming the target for British comedians and dreadful film spin-offs from sitcoms, the picador had his appeal. Tomeu Canyelles admits that, in some respects, the picador may have actually helped to boost tourism, though by the same token he did very little to give Mallorca a good reputation in the eyes of many, including mostly all other Mallorcans.

The picadors didn't last. Or not in the same way. Many clubs were forced to close because of economic crisis in the mid-1970s, while female attitudes were changing. They were less impressed and less easily won over, while there was also far greater awareness of sexually transmitted disease. The picador story ended at the turn of the 1980s, but it lives on in different ways, and one is Tomeu Canyelles' book.