The Legend Of Sineu's Port

One can only but imagine that 102 years ago the good folk of Sineu who were able to read might have been surprised by an article that appeared in Anales de Sineu. The title of this article was "Sineu Port de Mar?" The article attempted to answer its own question, though not with entire satisfaction.

The idea that Sineu was once a sea port had been floated, so to speak, almost one hundred years before. The article in the 1915 Anales de Sineu recognised that in 1825 there would have been some incredulity at the thought that the sea used to lap near the village centre. A drawing with the article demonstrated the apparent absurdity of the notion.

It was apparently a Doctor Beuth-Schinkel who had raised the possibility. In 1825 he had come to Mallorca on a study trip, and when he wrote up his findings, he was to declare that Sineu would have had one of the most beautiful ports in Europe, albeit he couldn't give an exact time as to when this port had existed.

Sineu is one of the places in Mallorca which lays claim to being the island's geographic centre. As such, and even allowing for changes to Mallorca's topography and the land's relationship with the sea, the potential for Sineu having been a sea port seems frankly preposterous. This, it would seem, is what people thought in 1825 when Doctor Beuth-Schinkel presented his evidence. By 1915, they were beginning to wonder if he might have been right but certainly weren't convinced.

There are some sea fossils near to the monument to the cyclist Francisco Alomar. This was one source of the evidence. Another was the fact that there were names such as Cas Mariner and Can Barques. But was any of this irrefutable proof?

The article from 1915 states that Karls Beuth-Schinkel was an expert in natural sciences and an official from the Kaiser's court. This was presumably Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. But who was this Karls Beuth-Schinkel? One allows for a possible error in the Christian name - Karl rather than Karls - but I have been unsuccessful in tracing him. There was a Karl Friedrich Schinkel from that era, and he was a highly eminent architect. He was a good friend of Peter Beuth, who was a minister in the Kaiser's government. There is nowadays a Beuth-Schinkel Museum in Berlin.

Neither of these - Karl Friedrich Schinkel or Peter Beuth - fits with this Karls Beuth-Schinkel, who is thus someone rather mysterious. In fact his very presence in Sineu is drawn into question by the 1915 article. There were no official documents of the time to suggest he was in Sineu, and there surely would have been, had he been from the Kaiser's court. As to whether he might have been a resident for any time, there was likewise no reference to his name having become established. Elsewhere in Mallorca there was, says the 1915 article, hardly anyone with this name. But by saying that there was "hardly anyone" doesn't rule out the possibility that there was someone.

A question that arises, though, has to do with the mention of Cas Mariner, Can Barques and others. This must have meant that he had indeed been in Sineu. Well, not necessarily. He could have studied the names in some way that hadn't required his having been in Sineu or indeed ever having set foot on Mallorcan soil.

The conclusion one has to draw is that Karls Beuth-Schinkel, if indeed he ever existed, had come up with a fantasy or a hoax. If the sea had really reached as far as Sineu, it's reasonable to suggest that we would by now know about it. There would also be evidence of the sea having been as far inland as, for instance, Santa Margalida or Llubi. And there is absolutely none.

In Roman times, which is from when we first have a true appreciation of Mallorca's geography, the sea did encroach, but not by much. In Alcudia, any possible remaining evidence of the Roman port gates is believed to now be buried under development in Puerto Alcudia.

The sea port of Sineu has to be a fiction. Karls Beuth-Schinkel may have been a fiction. Nevertheless, a 2009 document "Sineu, vila de llegenda" refers to the port. But such is the stuff of legend.

There is, however, a possible slight twist to the tale. The story about the port had apparently first appeared in a weekly publication entitled La Aurora on 18 December. The editor of this would seem to have also been the editor of Anales de Sineu who had originally suggested that the article should be published a bit later - on 28 December. And 28 December is Spain's equivalent of April Fools' Day.

The Bragging Rights Of May Fairs

Neighbours enjoy having bragging rights over one another. They are nowadays more commonly voiced by the ordinary citizen than by officialdom. Town halls search for cooperation whereas once they were only too willing to attempt to get one over their neighbours.

In the case of Inca and Sineu, it's not been much of a contest for years. Inca, built on leather and in a more strategic location, courtesy of being to Sineu's left, grew to what it is, one of the small number of municipalities in Mallorca that might vaguely fall into the category of being large (all things being relative). Sineu, more easterly, had no such strategic place in the scheme of things. Moreover, it retained an essentially agrarian economy, lacking what ultimately became Inca's diversification into the high end of the leather trade and its export.

The two towns do, though, share a common heritage: that of the fair. In bygone times, the fourteenth century, they acquired a duopoly over fairs in the "part forana" (anywhere but Palma, then known as Ciutat de Mallorca). They guarded this duopoly jealously, while at the same time being rivals in claiming which town had the better fair. Quite some time later, Inca triumphed. It would have been called it earlier, but 1807 provided the first record of its Thursday fair in autumn being "Bo". Sineu didn't have such goodness to brag about.

Nevertheless, and because it suited the two towns to have done so, they sought to maintain their duopoly against a new rival - new in the sixteenth century, that is. Llucmajor wanted a fair of its own. The town was to entreat the Holy Roman Emperor, Carlos V, to grant it one. Inca and Sineu consulted their lawyers, thus proving that the current-day dominance of the judiciary being required to arbitrate on absolutely everything in Mallorca, was an already well-established process getting on for five hundred years ago.

Despite the lawyers, Carlos sided with Llucmajor. Holy Roman Emperors were not for crossing. Carlos never set foot on the island. His troops did this for him on the rare occasions when the Empire remembered that Mallorca was a component, such as - and most notably - when the imperial forces crushed the Germanies uprising. Llucmajor thus got its fair, and the town has, for the past 474 years, being telling anyone who cares to listen about its victory: its own bragging rights.

Before Llucmajor muscled in on the fairs' scene, Inca and Sineu had been attracting the island's farmers and artisans to its grand fairs - basically, markets that were bigger than normal. And it is the longevity of the fairs which still arouses some rivalry. Which of the two towns stole a march over the other?

Sineu's fair took place yesterday. It is considered to be the older of the two. The town can point to documentary evidence that 1318 was the year when it started. But in a sense, it's all a question of definition. Inca can demonstrate that its market was earlier than Sineu's - by around forty years. Market? Fair? They were essentially the same insofar as they were occasions for trading.

Eventually, Inca was to allow Sineu to stamp its own mark over the May fair. At the start of the last century, Inca's Dijous Gros was dropped: it was revived a few years ago. The autumn Dijous Bo had become the pre-eminent fair in the calendar, and Inca let everyone know that it was, including Sineu. What one can probably say with certainty, therefore, is that Sineu's is the oldest, uninterrupted May fair. It will be 700 years in 2018. The ballyhoo will be significant.

The two May fairs, somewhat inadvertently, contributed to a legend assigned to another neighbour of Inca's, the small village of Búger. It own fair was also yesterday. It is not on the scale of Sineu or Inca's Dijous Gros (which is this Thursday), but then you wouldn't expect it to be. Sineu may only have a population some 2,500 or so greater than Búger, but those 2,500 make a hell of a lot of difference in fair terms, plus Sineu has all that history on its side.

The Búger fair is the Jai, meaning old person but specifically the figure of a grandfather. The Jai of the modern day appears on a cart and dispenses sweets to the village children. Back in the day, though, the Jai (and Mrs. Jai) would return to the village with their cart full of goods from the Sineu and Inca fairs, and supreme among the goodies were shoes for the kiddies. So the two fairs contributed to the story of the Jai. A question is, though, which fair provided more shoes? Aren't they Inca's bragging rights ... ?

Much Ado About Everything: Weird Fiestas

The word fiesta is said to have first entered English (American) usage in 1844, though an almost identical word - "feste" - cropped up in Middle English from around the second half of the twelfth century. Some two hundred years later, Geoffrey Chaucer used "feste" in the context of Troilus's love for Criseyde. A hundred or so years before Chaucer, the Italian Dante Alighieri had used "festa". Both had connotations of earthly joy and heavenly happiness and both, naturally enough, were rooted in Latin.

The word was thus common to various languages, but in English it took a specific route and was to become "feast", as in saints' feast days. Chaucer's notion endured but only up to a point. There was joy and happiness on account of the celebration of a saint but any raucous element of such celebration was to die out. In Spain and Spain's colonies, however, the linguistic modification of "fiesta" was to take Chaucer and Dante's usages to whole new levels: heavenly happiness for the saint but a hell of a lot more joy for those still on Earth.

While American English was apparently infiltrated by "fiesta" 172 years ago, it is probably fair to say that for most British English speakers it wasn't a word to gain a great deal of currency until the Ford Motor Company offered one and the British headed for sunny Spain. Now well embedded in British English, a translation, as in party, doesn't do "fiesta" justification. It has its specific connotations that transcend a mere party.

Just as culture can reinvent meanings for words or give them additional nuance, so the things the words refer to can undergo transformation. The fiesta is very much a case in point, and "much" is even more to the point.

Time was that fiesta traditions in Mallorca determined that these traditions should not be tampered with. Demons are a prime example. Long ago they were allowed out only once a year and only in one place - Sa Pobla for its January fiestas for Sant Antoni. Despite traditionalists frowning on the spread of demons, fearing the tradition would be diluted, they did of course spread. Much later, when demons in Catalonia started brandishing tridents that whirled, made a heck of a racket and spat copious amounts of fire, the Sa Pobla demons swiftly followed suit. As did numerous other demons' gangs. The current "correfoc", an invention of the late 1970s, was thus born. Everyone was very joyful that it was and remain very joyful.

Fiestas in Mallorca haven't stagnated. Their developments do owe something to tourism in that they were decades ago looked upon as a means of attracting ever more tourists, but that touristic aspect has been superseded by the recognition that, above all else, fiestas are for local communities and are expressions of these communities. In line with this, there has been a process of reinvigoration and further transformation that is something of a social phenomenon.

Behind this are the young of Mallorca. Tempting it might be to suggest that new "fiestas" within fiestas are designed principally as excuses for drinking, but such temptation does no justice to the reclaiming of fiestas and indeed to a contemporary adaptation of traditional ways and customs. Accordingly, you have, among others, the almond-shell altercation of Petra, the grape battle of Binissalem or the melon mess of Vilafranca. And then you also have Sineu's Much.

Linguistically it might be nice to think that they'd dropped the "o" from "mucho" and adopted the English "much". Nice this might be, but it would be completely wrong to think this. Much (or "Muc") is a reference to a mythical bull which appears in the Mallorcan folk tales which the Manacor-born folkloricist Antoni Maria Alcover collected and began publishing some 130 years ago.

The tale of the Muc is characteristic of stories of giants, treasure and odd beasties and characters that Alcover compiled. Its setting is the "Puig de Reig" between Sineu and Sant Joan. There is treasure, the sipping of olive oil that has to be kept in the mouth while walking round the hill three times and a bull with candles on its horns who will guide whoever manages not to swallow the oil to the treasure. That's it in its basic form. There's a great deal more.

The Muc/Much fiesta started in 2004. Since then, it has grafted on all manner of elements in acquiring the status as, to use local parlance, the most "friki" of all summer fiesta events. It starts at 10am and goes on all day (this Sunday), and it is legitimate to say that it is freaky or downright weird. It also attracts people in their thousands.

Fiestas take on new meanings but at the same time they can invoke the spirits of long ago and the superstitions and tales of folklore about which Chaucer knew a thing or two.

The Town Which Time Passed By

We may be three years away, but one can presume that in early May 2018 they'll be making a fair old song and dance in the old town of Sineu, and the reason will be the spring fair: it will be seven hundred years since the first one took place. Sineu's fair, considered to be the most important of the Mallorcan spring, holds a very special place in the island's history. It can definitively state that its first fair was held in 1318 and so can claim to be the oldest in the island's "part forana", i.e. anywhere which isn't Palma. The citizens of Inca might take issue with this claim, but as they cannot - because of a lack of accurate documentation - state unequivocally when their spring fair started, Sineu holds the crown. Each early May, therefore, Sineu reclaims an ancient status as the unofficial capital of the "part forana", one that had more official status because of the one-time palace of the kings of Mallorca: having been a Moorish building, it was redeveloped in the early fourteenth century.

Sineu's royal patronage from those times was both usual and unusual. The usual part was that it was one of a number of "royal" villages established by King Jaume II in 1300. The unusual was the fair. Holding one required the granting of royal privilege. Only Sineu and Inca were given this, and the two towns - rivals up to a point - jealously guarded this privilege for nigh on 250 years until Llucmajor, petitioning the Spanish king, was also given the right to have a fair. Even in those days, however, its challenge wasn't straightforward and required the intervention of the courts. Sineu and Inca filed a lawsuit but eventually lost: the tradition of seeking legal redress in Mallorca is as much of a tradition as the island's fairs.

One of the odd things about Sineu is that, despite this old importance, it didn't become one of the large towns in the "part forana". Even now, its population doesn't stretch to 4,000 inhabitants and so is roughly a tenth of that of Llucmajor, which is larger than Inca by around 6,000 residents. Maybe, however, it has been a blessing: Sineu doesn't have some of the ugliness of the industrial developments of the larger towns. Nevertheless, it is a matter of conjecture as to why its development was arrested. It is, after all, right in the very heartland of Mallorca, even if its claim to provide the geographical centre of the island has, once and for all, been dismissed: geographers have established that this is in neighbouring Lloret de Vistalegre. Perhaps, however, it is this centrality which was the issue. Inca was on the route from Palma to the port of Alcudia, not so far to the north, while Manacor and Llucmajor were both similarly closer to ports.

There is some substance to this theory and it is provided by documentation from the very early days of Mallorca's tourism at the start of the last century. In 1908, the Mallorca Tourist Board considered a number of projects for the improvement of the transport infrastructure. One of these involved the building of a "carretera" (main road) from Sineu to Alcudia. However, even once this was indeed built, it was not direct as it had to pass through Maria de la Salut and Santa Margalida. Quite simply, Sineu's location was not terribly advantageous.

Likewise, in tourism terms, Sineu was all but neglected. Casting an eye over the annals of the tourist board up until the outbreak of the Civil War, there is no mention of the town, other than when the need for the road cropped up, and this oversight included the fair. One of the earliest initiatives in tourism development (from the 1920s) was that of promoting fairs and fiestas. Sineu's, it would appear, was not one of them. Consequently, and with coastal and mountain tourism having become the fads of the pre-war years, Sineu, minus burgeoning industries such as those of Inca and Manacor, remained firmly wedded to its agriculture.

And it is this farming tradition which forms the basis for today's Sineu fair. It is a tradition associated with most of the island's spring and autumn fairs, but in Sineu it is absolutely central, as befits a town with its central, rural location. It is a fair which represents the peasant economy of old Mallorca and one which, in terms of authenticity, has few rivals. It is a fair of former times that celebrates the agriculture of Mallorca's plain: a celebration that goes back almost seven hundred years.

The Madness Of King James

The town hall in Sineu has been given the green light by the Council of Mallorca's heritage commission to locate a statue of King Jaume II (James II) in a place in the town in which it wasn't previously located. In May 2011 the statue was put up in the church square. Soon after, it was removed. The new location, according to a town hall technical report, "permits a view ... of the image of the king ... which does not impair views of any specific buildings and their historical and aesthetic values or interfere with special environmental values". Which is a longwinded way of explaining and admitting that the previous siting had impaired such views and interfered with such values.

The day after the statue was inaugurated, the Council let it be known that it considered the decision of the town hall to locate it where it was to be "very serious". The town hall had not been given permission by the Council for the siting of the statue, which violated regulations regarding the town's status as being in the "cultural interest" and in particular the church of Santa Maria. The town hall went ahead anyway, in full cognisance of the fact that it did not have permission.

The story of the statue might appear to have only been an example of how competing bureaucracies in Mallorca (the Council and the town hall in this instance) can go mad, pull in opposite directions and do things which contravene some arcane regulation or other. There was, however, very much more to it.

Jaume II plays a significant part in Sineu's history, as it was during his reign that the conversion of what had been the palace of the Emir Mobaxir into the Palace of the Kings of Mallorca was undertaken. On this count, plus the fact that it was Jaume II who had granted Sineu the status of a "royal village" in 1300, there should be little debate as to the merit of there being a statue to him. There was debate, however. And it was more than just debate. It had nothing to do with where the statue was sited or with whether there was permission or not; it had everything to do with conflicting attitudes towards Jaume II, and on 29 May 2011 these attitudes spilled over into a physical conflict.

At the ceremony, members of the anti-Catalanist Círculo Balear, who hadn't been invited but went anyway, unveiled a flag with three red bars. This was, if you like, a red-bar-too-few rag to the bull of Mallorcan nationalist sentiment; the official Mallorcan flag has four red bars in accordance with the original flag of Aragon and so King Jaume I. Insults flew, there was some jostling, and the police had to intervene. The Partido Popular, which had won five seats at the previous week's municipal election and was on the point of resuming its leadership of the town hall, initially attached blame for the incidents to "radical Catalanists" but then backtracked somewhat by also criticising the members of the Círculo Balear.

So, what had all this been about? Jaume II, for certain Mallorcan nationalists, is not revered in the way that Jaume I is. Despite having been crowned the first true king of Mallorca, Jaume II does not compare with the old man because it wasn't he who conquered the island and who introduced Catalan culture. Moreover, Jaume II was none too fastidious when it came to flags. He had different versions, one with three red bars (as flown by the Círculo Balear) and even one with only two bars. As such, therefore, he was betraying the legacy of the original flag, the "senyera". The left-wing nationalist Sineu Independent party was indignant about there being a statue at all: Jaume II did not represent Sineu, it said.

Nevertheless, there is the peculiarity that it was a nationalist party, the Unió Mallorquina when it was in charge of the Council of Mallorca, which established Mallorca Day on the anniversary of Jaume II's coronation in 1276. The conflict in Sineu in 2011 was styled as one between "nationalistas" and "españolistas", the latter personified by the anti-Catalanist Círculo Balear. Yet, the very fact that a nationalist party might have felt it appropriate for Jaume II to be the pretext for a Mallorca Day confuses an argument about the very origins of this nationalism.

Much as history is important and much as events of the thirteenth century moulded Mallorcan culture and heritage, the conflict in Sineu revealed just how mired current-day society can be in this antiquity. Should it really matter that much? To some it obviously does, but to others it seems crazy to constantly relive a long-ago past. And so what will happen when the statue is placed in its new location? More of the same probably. Madness.

The Slaughter Of The Pig

On 19 June 2009, the regional government's health ministry issued a decree related to the sanitary control of pigs destined to be consumed privately. It was, said some, the death of what Antoni Maria Alcover, the famed philologist of Manacor, had defined in the dictionary of Catalan dialects as "the act of killing, above all ... of most animals". This act, defined in the dictionary as being a feminine noun, was "matança". Objectors to the decree took exception to rules being laid down for a long-established tradition: the wintertime slaughter of the fattened pig.

If you care to look at Mallorcan town hall websites, you will find that there are rules for this slaughter. In 2009 not all town halls were complying because, so they said, they hadn't been informed of the decree. One town hall which was complying was Sineu's. Five years later, and as with all well and truly informed town halls in Mallorca, it instructs the local citizenry that a slaughtered pig has to be given a bill of health by a vet. The animal has to have a mandatory trichinoscopic examination to check there is no trichinella parasite, the so-called pork worm. Old habits were dying hard in 2009. They didn't have such examinations in our day; that was the kind of reaction. And maybe they didn't have trichinosis disease which, at its most extreme, is fatal; death can occur within ten days of eating infected meat.

The matança (plural matances) is traditionally a gathering of family and others to perform the slaughter of a pig which has been fattened since early spring and to then prepare the pig in all manner of ways. It is a tradition that goes back over the centuries. The pig's products could sustain a family for months, and these products were to include the sobrassada. It benefited from the preservative nature of the "paprika tap de cortí" and was to become, along with other types of charcuterie, a mainstay of traditional Mallorcan cuisine.

The matança is not nowadays widely practised. Or at least the reported number of matances which this year have been subject to veterinary examination would suggest this to be the case; just over 500 inspections have been carried out. Nevertheless, and as with so many other Mallorcan traditions, there is a custom to be honoured and to be perpetuated. Which is where the town of Sineu comes into the equation. Today is the Fira de Ses Matances de Sineu, and central to the fair is a demonstration of what to do with the pig once it has been slaughtered (in an abattoir). Not a single part of the pig goes to waste - every piece of meat, the blood, the offal, the organs, the trotters, the fat are processed. It might all sound a bit gruesome, but then this is how it once was. There was no place for squeamishness when sustenance was needed, and it didn't matter that the pig had become more or less a part of the family. It might be noted that once upon a time pigs were essentially domestic animals rather than animals for farming. The production of meat was concentrated more on lamb and goat before an explosion in the cultivation of fig trees in the nineteenth century gave rise to far greater levels of pig farming; the fig is very fattening.

Tradition decrees that the slaughter of the pig doesn't occur until 11 November (Saint Martin's Day) and that it is more likely to occur nearer to Christmas time and so provide dishes for the festive period. Though the pig is the animal most commonly associated with the matança, it doesn't have exclusive rights on the slaughter; turkeys, for example, are also fattened and go towards the making of those festive meals.

The matances fair in Sineu is a recent innovation. It started in 2003 as a theme to be appended to the Fair of Saint Thomas, he who was the doubting Thomas of biblical fame. His day, as in the anniversary of his death, isn't in fact until next Sunday. But what's a week when there's a fair to be held? The second Sunday of December is Thomas's day in Sineu, and as part of the fair today there will also be a contest for the largest pig. Mallorcan fairs love a how-big-is-something competition, and last year the winning pig (the regular pink variety) weighed in at 315 kilos. There is a separate contest for the largest black pig as well.

So, in Sineu today it is all about the pig. If you prefer not to watch the demonstration put on by the pork butchers, there are plenty of gastronomic treats to sample; mostly all of them of course of pig origin and with the sobrassada taking a starring role. On balance perhaps, an event that vegetarians might prefer to give a miss, but an event which, nonetheless, is a celebration of how Mallorca once was.

Saint Luke And The Fairs Of Inca

Inca, the administrative and legal centre for the north of Mallorca, stages the first of its four autumn fairs this weekend. But how was it that Inca came to have these fairs?

The town, along with Sineu, were granted royal privileges in the fourteenth century to stage fairs in the "part forana", i.e. outside of Palma. Historians say it is not possible to determine exactly when these fairs started, but as Sineu can place a date on its May Sa Fira to 1318, they would date from more or less the same time. Indeed, Inca did apparently at one time have a spring May fair but, because the two towns operated a form of duopoly, the decision was made to switch Inca's fairs to the autumn. Inca's importance as a commercial centre, which was the case in the years after the Catalan conquest, partly explains why there are four fairs, but that's not the whole story.

The first fair was, in mediaeval times, held on the feast day of Saint Luke, which is today, 18 October. The second and third fairs took place on the two following Sundays, while the fourth, which was to come to be known as Dijous Bo, was not permitted to be held on a Sunday. That was because it was the day to celebrate Santa Maria la Major. It was moved to the Thursday and in the process created additional excitement, greater participation and what was eventually to lead to its name. There is an old expression - "quin dijous més bò - what better Thursday. The name Dijous Bo may well have been around for much longer, but a documented record of the name appeared for the first time in 1807.

The fairs still follow this pattern but not quite. In 1542 the town of Llucmajor petitioned Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, to be allowed to hold a fair. Inca and Sineu were having none of it and so they took the matter to court. They lost. In 1545 Llucmajor held its first fair. The problem was that, in addition to a breaking of the duopoly, its fair was going to clash with Inca's first fair. It would in fact be a series of markets from the feast day of Saint Michael (29 September) up to and including Saint Luke (incidentally the Catalan name Sant Lluc plays no part in Llucmajor's name, that has to do with an ancient word for forest). Inca, therefore, compromised and moved its first fair to the first Sunday after Saint Luke, which is still the case. Though there are events for the fair in Inca today, the main day is most certainly tomorrow - the first Sunday after Saint Luke.

The Middle of Nowhere: Mallorca's middle

The village of Meriden in the West Midlands may only have a population that is slightly greater than 2,500, but the good folk of this village used to be able to boast something that no other folk in England could. They lived in the geographic centre of England. Then one morning not very long ago, the Meriden folk woke up and found that their sleepy village (one assumes it is sleepy, as cliché tradition demands that a village is) was no longer the centre of the English universe. The centre had been moved some eleven miles away. What's more it was no longer in the non-traditional county of the West Midlands but in an altogether more traditional county, Leicestershire. Boffins at the Ordnance Survey had determined that a field at Lindley Hall Farm in Fenny Drayton, Leicestershire was the geographic centre. How the good folk of Meriden must have wept and feared for their property values. And what were they going to do with the memorial which declares Meriden centrality?

There have been other pretenders to the centrist crown of England. Morton in Derbyshire is one such place, but there can now no longer be any debate or rival claims. Fenny Drayton it is. And just as the Ordnance Survey has decided that a field in the middle of nowhere is the English middle, so the Universitat de les Illes Balears, Eptisa (a company which undertakes map-making on behalf of the islands) and the National Centre for Geographic Information have all agreed that Mallorca's geographic centre is also in the middle of nowhere - in the common woods (Sa Comuna) of Lloret de Vistalegre.

The good folk of Lloret - the "lloritans" - can now, once and for all, thumb their noses at the pretenders in the next pueblo. Sineu, often and erroneously referred to as being the geographic centre, can now only claim to be slightly off-centre, and as a consequence many a website is going to have to update its information, which will be more than slightly inconvenient. There was an advantage to the Sineu middleness for the touristically-minded promotion. It has certain attractions - its well-known market, its church dome designed by Joaquín Pavía y Birmingham, its one-time Palace of the Kings of Mallorca. Lloret, on the other hand, doesn't have any of these. Only a 1.74 metre high stone in some woods. Here lies the centre of Mallorca; it doesn't say.

At least this geo-centricity affords Lloret a claim to fame that it previously hasn't had. It places the village firmly on the map, where it has always been, but which hasn't been sufficient to entice anyone to go there. Being in the middle of things might be deemed advantageous but not necessarily in Mallorca. The middle is the middle of nowhere, regardless of whether it's in the middle of a wood or not.

However, now that Lloret can point to the authority of the university and its partners and so to its enviable location, will there be a surge of tourist interest? Surely any self-respecting tourists would wish to beat a path of an off-the-beaten path variety in order to take selfies next to the stone of Mallorcan middledom; wouldn't they? Well, possibly. Just as possibly tourists to England will wish to trample across the fields of Fenny Drayton and stand with a beaming smile next to an old railway sleeper that has been stuck in the ground along with a sign replete with the cross of St. George which states that the Ordnance Survey defined the spot as the geographical centre in 2002 (it took eleven years for this definition to be officially marked). The owner of the farm is, remarkably enough, called Farmer. Stephen Farmer believes that the sleeper (which in fact is 150 metres from the exact spot, which is in a field) could become a tourist attraction. As visitors go to Land's End to have their photos taken with the famous sign, then why wouldn't they want to come to Fenny Drayton and do likewise? But then Land's End does have some additional appeal. Firstly, it is land's end and secondly, there's a ruddy great ocean next to it. 

Still, councillors at the Borough of Hinckley and Bosworth live in hope of new-found tourism riches. So should the leaders of Lloret be shouting the geographic centre from the tourism rooftops? Maybe, but there will always be those who reject the sudden appearance of inquisitive tourists because they might cause harm to the common and its flora and fauna, while the town hall has bemoaned the fact that it already costs 3.6 million euros to pay for rubbish collection (a cost shared with other town halls). The chances are, therefore, that the stone marking the geographic centre will remain unmolested. In the middle of nowhere.

For photo of the Lloret stone, go to: http://ultimahora.es/mallorca/noticias/part-forana/2014/135350/piedra-metros-reivindica-centro-geografico-mallorca-lloret.html

Mainly On The Plain: Tourism in Mallorca's centre

The size of a town's population doesn't determine whether it has or doesn't have some form of tourism or some form of tourism presence (there is a difference; I'll come to that). By population, Ses Salines with 5,227 inhabitants is the smallest Mallorcan town with a discernible tourism industry (consisting of Colonia Sant Jordi), though Deyá, with under a thousand residents, might also make a claim. But many Mallorcan towns have little tourism. Fourteen of them comprise the mancomunidad (commonwealth, if you like) of the Pla de Mallorca (Mallorca's plain). The largest of these towns is Porreres with 5,486 people; the smallest is Ariany with 877. If you combined all the fourteen, their collective population would still only make it the fourth largest town in Mallorca. They can muster 38,114 people between them, over 2,500 fewer than Manacor, the third largest municipality.

The towns of the plain neither have much by way of tourism nor much by way of tourism presence, i.e. official information for tourists (so I thought) or tourist information offices. In fact, between the fourteen towns there is only one information office. It is in Sineu and it only opens on Wednesday market days.

Acknowledging this lack of presence, the fourteen have hit on the idea of beefing up Sineu's office. They are planning on it opening every day, being staffed by someone who can speak different languages (especially English and German) and offering information about all the towns and not just Sineu, which is the case at present.

Apart from it already having this office, Sineu as the centre of the plain's tourism presence makes some sense. The geographic centre of Mallorca doesn't quite lie within its municipal boundaries, but it almost does; it is actually in the neighbouring Lloret de Vistalegre. But unlike Lloret, which no one has ever heard of, Sineu has been heard of. The market is one thing, there is also the palace of the Kings of Mallorca, which was redeveloped in the early fourteenth century, having previously been a Moorish building.

So Sineu has some form in terms of history that might appeal to the more discerning tourist; more so perhaps than any of the other towns on the plain. Petra might, thanks to Father Junipero Serra, claim otherwise, but it doesn't have a feature quite as dominating as Sineu's Santa Maria church. When it comes to a tourist information office, therefore, Sineu it is.

The towns lack a tourist presence not just because they don't have any information offices; their official websites are similarly without tourist presence. Go to them and you won't find on any of them something which shouts out "tourism". Montuïri does have something called "visita turística prehistórica y tradicional", a PDF for the Son Fornés museum and talayotic site, some of which is conveniently upside down. It does, though, point out that guided tours can be booked. Otherwise, the towns' websites, while several of them have menu entries for places of interest and for fiestas, make no mention of tourism.

But, tucked away on some of them is a link to "Visit Pla de Mallorca". I probably should have known of the existence of this, but I didn't. It is a separate website. And it isn't at all bad. The information is even in English (and German), and the information is pretty decent. There are historical backgrounds to each of the towns and, under "sightseeing", there are lists of features in each town which, when you click on them, give good detail. For example, the palace of the Kings of Mallorca was handed over to an order of nuns in the late sixteenth century. The description tells us much about its architectural development since then.

Who, though, is aware of this little gem of a website? Why is it sitting there, lurking on some of the municipal websites and not on others? Why is it seemingly not linked into some grander portal? Why is not more known of the information for places to stay? The agrotourism, for instance. Why is there not more awareness of a promotional video on YouTube? It was uploaded four years ago. It has only had slightly over 4,500 views.

A regularly manned tourist information office in Sineu is an improvement. It could hardly be anything other than an improvement, but one has to question the determination and/or interest in developing tourism in the towns of the Mallorcan plain. All the towns have now had to submit tourism plans (and I've mentioned a couple of them previously; those for Algaida and Montuïri). This obligation under the tourism law has probably shaken them out of a certain lethargy. Yet astonishingly, they had already got together and produced a highly informative website. It's just that no one knew it was there.
http://www.visitplademallorca.net/

* Photo is of the convent at the former royal palace in Sineu. With due acknowledgement, it is taken from the website.

The Dinosaurs Of Mallorca

The film director Mel Brooks, if I remember rightly, once came up with a gag about Hasidic park. I'm reminded of this because Mallorca may well find itself, only some kilometres apart, with two theme parks. One, the Christian theme park in Inca, is meant to embrace religions other than Christianity, hence, possibly, Hasidism; the other, in Sineu, would appear to be some sort of Jurassic Park (which was the basis for Brooks' gag). The two parks could be put together, and an element of one might mean that the gag was realised.

The plan for a dinosaur theme park leaves me feeling distinctly underwhelmed. The developers say that everyone is interested in the history of dinosaurs and so it will be a great success. I don't know, is everyone interested? Or is everyone just a little tired of dinosaurs? The idea has a touch of the dinosaur about it: a lumbering concept that had been Spielberged into popular culture and has been done to death ever since to the point of extinction.

Possibly dinosaurs haven't reached the end of their life cycle as excuses for theme parks or any other dino-based venture, but like pirates and their increasing proliferation on Mallorca, dinosaurs are a default setting for me-too family entertainment. They are unimaginative and old news. Does Mallorca really want to be a repository for re-working familiar themes? I'm far from convinced that a Christian theme park gives the island the right image. Add a dinosaur park as well, and Mallorca might look like somewhere that has run out of ideas while at the same time offering an attraction (the Christian park) that is out of keeping with a general touristic style.

The dino park will require that the Council of Mallorca declare that it is in the island's general interest. This is a procedural necessity and one that has been brought to bear in, for instance, approving new hotel developments. Because it would occupy a plot of so-called rustic land, there are certain constraints which might need to be worked around, such as the provision of energy sources and guaranteeing the integrity of flora and fauna. As with the Christian theme park and any other development of whatever type, one can already hear the rustling in the undergrowth of the environmental lobby preparing its objections. Things can take an awfully long time in Mallorca because of all the challenges to developments. By the time these have all been exhausted, it may not only be dinosaurs which are extinct.

It appears that the land that is being earmarked for dino park could do with a spot of tidying up. It is rustic but it is also, in a natural way, rusting. Neglected (it had been used for paintball before it was realised that there wasn't authorisation for this), it could do with being put to some use, and use that might actually make it appear attractive. This is not the sort of argument, however, which carries much weight with the enviros.

Sineu town hall backs the scheme. It would help, so it says, with bringing more tourists into the town. But would it? Like the Inca theme park site is out of town, so is the land for dino park. The chances are that visitors would be bussed in and then bussed out, never setting foot in Sineu itself. And then there is the location. Sineu is pretty much at the geographical centre of Mallorca. This might sound like an advantage in that the theme park would draw on the different areas of tourist accumulation, but there is an inherent disadvantage in not being right in or by one of these tourist centres. The House of Katmandu, just to give one example of a fairly new attraction on Mallorca, was sited in Magalluf. In all likelihood, it would have been a complete flop had it been in Sineu or some other part of the island's centre.

Of course, dino park could be fabulous. It could get the excursions coaches rolling in. But does it really set the pulse racing? The other theme park, the one about which we no longer hear anything and about which we may never hear anything more, did at least have something going for it in that it sounded exciting in its array of attractions. Mallorca, if it is to have theme parks, needs parks that really grab the attention, those that are innovative and could be considered representative of a dynamic, modernising tourism destination. Dinosaurs don't really do it in this respect. Like all the johnny-come-lately pirates should be forced to walk the plank or come up with something more inspiring, then so the dinosaurs should be threatened with being meteored by 2012DA14, the asteroid discovered by the observatory in Costitx, and made to think up something less dinosaur-like.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

MALLORCA TODAY - Dinosaur theme park planned for Sineu

Sineu town hall has requested the Council of Mallorca to report as to whether a plan for a dinosaur theme park on land on the outskirts of the town would be of general interest. Were it do so, then it would help to clear the way for this theme park which would occupy land that at one stage had a paintball facility that was closed because of a lack of authorisation.

See more: Diario de Mallorca

MALLORCA TODAY - Parents will not let their children start new school term

Following yesterday's news of a potential strike by schoolteachers objecting to the reduction in the number of teachers, parents in the town of Sineu have offered support to the teachers' position and registered their discontent with what will be increased numbers of pupils in classes at the local secondary school. They are saying that they will not let their children start the new school term in September.

See more: Ultima Hora