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

Neighbours At War: Sewage treatment

Lurking on the edge of the wetlands of Albufera there is something which, from an aerial view, looks like a giant painter's palette. Its colours range from grey-silvers to greens to royal and deeper blues. It is the Albufera sewage treatment plant. Most people don't know of its existence, except perhaps because of the occasional whiff. The rustic part of Playa de Muro (the so-called Sector Two), which comprises a couple of urbanisations, nine hotels and an awful lot of forest and dunes, is subject to strange smells. There is, especially in high summer, one that is like burnt sulphur. I have always assumed this to be because of a sort of marsh gas from the low-level wetlands and vegetation. I may be right. But there are other more pungent smells. An antiquated sewage pipe network is one cause. An antiquated sewage plant may well be another.

The plant is not far from Playa de Muro's border with Can Picafort. It is, therefore, within the municipality of Muro, whose neighbour, Santa Margalida, shares the facility. Or to be more specific, the coastal resorts of Playa de Muro and Can Picafort - with their combined eighty odd hotels - share it. The transient tourist populations of the two resorts massively dwarf the resident populations. These are places which exist primarily because of hotel tourism, and that hotel tourism lies at the centre of an ongoing sewage row between Muro and Santa Margalida town halls.

The Albufera plant, like the pipe network, is antiquated. A new one or an additional one has been required for years. The regional government's environment ministry has earmarked a site for a new one. It is in Son Bauló, the eastern part of Can Picafort. This proposed site has created a stink, the reason being that there are fears that its outlet - 3.7 kilometres out to sea in the bay of Alcúdia and at a depth of 25 metres - might lead to beach pollution and cause destruction of posidonia sea grass. Santa Margalida town hall, in a rare demonstration of unity between its usually antagonistic political parties, continues to flatly reject the plant's construction. The environmental concerns are one reason, but there are, as always, political and commercial ones as well.

Santa Margalida's stance is essentially one of not in our backyard, to which Muro has pointed out that for years Santa Margalida has been happy enough to make use of a sewage plant which is in Muro's backyard. Muro claims that the Albufera plant is creaking, that it could itself cause environmental contamination (to the eco-sensitive wetlands) and that it is past its sell-by date. It, therefore, maintains that the new plant is an absolute necessity. Santa Margalida says that the Albufera plant should be extended. The result? Stand-off.

Into this row has now entered a throwback political dimension. Santa Margalida maintains that the Son Bauló solution was something of a stitch-up involving the discredited former president of the Balearics, Jaume Matas. It was a political pact, the town hall claims, between Matas and the former mayor of Muro, Miguel Ramis, by which a study of the Son Bauló site was given the appearance of legality through some alleged manipulation. Miguel Ramis was the founder of Grupotel; he still is its president. Ten years ago, hoteliers in Playa de Muro, of which Grupotel is one, clubbed together and bought land in Son Bauló; the very land on which the sewage treatment plant may be sited.

That Santa Margalida is now seeking to make some political capital out of the affair adds a new twist to the story but it is a twist which seems all a bit late in the day. Furthermore, around the time that the land was being acquired, there did appear to be general consensus between the town halls as to the necessity for a new plant and for it to be established in Son Bauló. The former mayor of Santa Margalida, Antoni del Olmo, signed up to an agreement in 2005, one which Muro says that Santa Margalida should honour. It should also be noted that the acquisition of the land by the Playa de Muro hoteliers was transparent and one which most parties at the time seemed to accept as a solution in a spirit of sharing and co-operation between hoteliers in the two resorts and between the two town halls.

Since that time, though, the politics have moved on. So, what happens next? GOB, the environmental watchdogs, have added their penny's worth, saying that there should be a third option, one that is neither Albufera nor Son Bauló, but without offering an actual alternative. All the time, while the arguments fly, the Albufera plant, according to Muro, becomes more of a risk. One day, perhaps, the whiffs in Playa de Muro will be even more pungent.

The Man Who Invented Tourism

In Can Picafort is a road which, like others, goes in a straight line in linking the thoroughfare of the Carretera Artà and the Paseo Colon and which adds to the criss-cross grid layout of this part of the resort. Along this road are some pine trees which hang over the road itself and partially obscure a hotel. It is the Farrutx, named after the cape at the eastern end of the bay of Alcúdia, the tip of one of three giant claws - Pinar and Formentor being the others - between which are one enormous bite and one lesser bite of coastal crescents eaten by the voracious appetite of the sea. These bites are the bights (German, "Bucht") of Alcúdia and Pollensa, the bays of Alcúdia and Pollensa.

Can Picafort is a case example of two styles of resort urban planning in one. Though the whole of it is called Can Picafort, it is really two resorts in one. Can Picafort was created according to the grid system which stops abruptly around about where the marina is. The rest of the resort, Son Bauló, is the original resort, with origins dating from the 1930s. Its layout is totally different. Its circular style is evidence of a quasi-garden city design approach, the dominant planning philosophy of the 1920s and 1930s before 1960s' modernism brought with it the Milton Keynesian new town grid.

The name Can Picafort has existed since the end of the nineteenth century. It comes from what was little more than a shack that belonged to one Jeroni Fuster. It was called "Picafort", derived from words to refer to the strong itch from a mosquito bite. But there was little or nothing in Can Picafort until the 1960s. Photos show the early formation of the grid road system; sand tracks that led to the beach in the late 1950s. One of them, the main one, is now Via Suisa. At its beach end were once dunes. 

Son Bauló, as a tourist area, is thus much older. As Can Picafort as a whole developed in the 1960s, Son Bauló dominated, which was unsurprising as its basic infrastructure had been in place thirty years before, a product of the drive to create resorts between the world wars but one that had its roots some thirty or forty years further back in time.

Let's go back to that road with the pine trees and the Hotel Farrutx. Its name is Miquel dels Sants Oliver, a name that will mean little or nothing to guests at the hotel or to any tourist or indeed to many residents. In the small town of Campanet, they have started commemorating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Oliver, who was born there in 1864. Later this year there will be further acts of celebration.

Oliver was a journalist. For a time he was also the editor of "La Almudaina", a newspaper that was founded in 1887 by his father. He was known for many things, but it was articles that he wrote in that newspaper in the early 1890s which made him a hugely important figure in the development of Mallorca's tourism. At the same time as Jeroni Fuster was lending the name of his shack to what was to become a major tourist resort, Oliver was setting out principles for a whole new industry - tourism.

It could be argued that Oliver invented Mallorca's tourism because what he, with remarkable vision foresaw in his articles, was tourism for the spring and summer seasons. It was to be some years before hot-weather tourism truly caught on, but Oliver's vision ran counter to the thinking of the time, that tourism was something for the mild winter. He wrote those articles against a background of economic crisis in the island's agricultural sector, the result in part of the phylloxera plague that struck grape vines. He saw the necessity for diversification, and tourism was that diversification. For it to be successful, though, there needed to be great improvements to infrastructure. His thinking directly led to the founding of the Majorca Tourist Board in 1905, though when we speak - in English - of a tourist board, we underestimate what this meant. Its Spanish name is more meaningful: Fomento del Turismo, the development of tourism, which was to be development in all facets, one of which, some years later, was the creation of resorts, such as Son Bauló.

Of course, what Oliver could not have foreseen was what came in the 1960s. He would probably have been horrified. Tourism visionary he was, but he was also sympathetic to rural traditions, such as those of his home town, and to the natural and unspoilt environment, like that of the bays in the north. Would he have liked his name to have been given to a road with a hotel called Farrutx in a resort built on dunes? Unlikely.

The Dolmen Of Son Bauló

Generally speaking, Mallorca's urban planners have shown sufficient sensitivity towards the presence of the island's archaeological heritage that they have managed to keep it a discrete distance from their urbanising tendencies, albeit that significant amounts of this heritage have either succumbed to nature and have  disappeared and been buried or to the destruction of man in times when they knew no better and to further destruction by man in times when they should have known better. Much has been bulldozed out of existence or built on, never to be seen again.

A good example of this urban separation between ancient and modern is the Pollentia Roman town in Alcúdia. It sits on its own, molested by little more than a road that runs past one side and the proximity of a parking area of such primitiveness that it might have been developed in Roman times. There again, the planners would have had a pretty shrewd idea that the ruins were there even before excavations started. Not that this had stopped previous generations who saw to it that all the secrets of Pollentia will never be revealed.

Some of this heritage is a great deal older than Pollentia and is also a great deal more visible. Mercifully, it hasn't, for the most part, been subjected to the artificial insemination of development, and nor was it in those days when man really couldn't have given a tinker's cuss about some old rocks lying around. Nevertheless, in its contemporary environment this ancient heritage can find itself all but rubbing a rocky shoulder with urbanisation. Ancient does lie close to modern, an example being the Talayotic remains in S'Illot. The best one can say is that at least tourists get to appreciate the existence of this ancient heritage. They can't really avoid it.

But S'Illot is not without its sensitivity, and this is very much more than can be said for the total lack of respect that has been shown to the dolmen of Son Bauló. This ancient burial site is a close neighbour, a far too close neighbour, of Can Picafort's industrial estate. Santa Margalida town hall, which owns the dolmen land, has come up with the idea of affording it a tad greater respect and so granting it some privacy. They're going to put some hedges up as well as some information panels to explain what it is, which should be helpful for those coming and going at the nearby warehouses.

The town hall does of course see this initiative, which will set it back some one hundred grand, as being representative of sustainable tourism, a term which can be used to mean whatever you want it to mean, so long as it is touristically correct. One can but hope that the town hall is right, but the dolmen, not exactly vast, is unlikely to attract great numbers of sustainable tourists, deterred by the otherwise unsustainable existence of factory, workshop and warehouse. Still, hats off to Santa Margalida. Their heritage heart is in the right place. It's just unfortunate that the dolmen heritage happens to be in the heart of an industrial estate.

For all this, the dolmen is important. Assigning it a precise time in the past has proved not to be easy. There are wild fluctuations as to when it is believed that it was created and there is also debate as to whether it can be linked in more or less direct historical terms to the far better known and far more extensive necropolis burial site not so far away at the coastal edge of the Son Real finca. The reporting of the dolmen's provenance is such that it might have been created at any time from the fourth to the second millennium BC. Getting a precise handle on its origins would be useful in furthering understanding of early Mallorcan settlement. It is believed that there was no permanent inhabitation until the third millennium BC, but it is also accepted that there was transient occupation, that of temporary visitors who were probably attracted by the island's wood, before this; perhaps as far back as the sixth millennium BC.

Mallorca has an astonishing amount of prehistoric sites which lend themselves to a greater understanding of Mediterranean culture in the very distant past. Respecting, albeit belatedly, the Son Bauló dolmen is the least that can be done. But how sad is it that so much of the past has been made invisible to contemporary investigation and examination. The more recent past, that of the Romans of Alcúdia's Pollentia, has thus far been revealed through excavation to be less than ten per cent of its former existence.

The chances are that we will never know the true extent of Pollentia, but it is worth trying to find out, just as it is worth trying to find out about even more ancient Mallorcan civilisation. It may be on an industrial estate, but great respect to the dolmen.

* Photo from: http://balearsculturaltour.net

MALLORCA TODAY - Dog initiatives in Santa Margalida

Santa Margalida town hall is getting tougher with owners who allow dogs to roam the streets unattended and so foul the streets without any subsequent removal of excrement. There are, however, to now be so-called "caniparks" for dogs, one of them having opened in Son Bauló, while the beach of Na Patana (a "rustic" beach away from Son Bauló) is to be made available for owners to take their dogs.

See more: Diario de Mallorca