Mapping Mallorca's Imagination

Cartographic precociousness has left its impression on me. When a child, I drew a map of our village. It hadn't occurred to me at the time - it wouldn't have, as I wasn't cognizant of such politico-arcanum - that I had created a socio-geographic representation. The higher land of the village, to its southerly side, was more than just topographically elevated. It was the domain of the grand, the villa, the church, the upper-class landowning caste.

This affluent scarp on the Surrey landscape towered over the commercial centre of the village, the High Street in other words, and the modern estate of engineers and teachers, an agglomeration of the aspirational lower to middle class with its pretensions to the acquisitiveness of late 1950s and early 1960s new consumerism.

To the northerly end, and on the wrong side of the tracks, thanks to the Aldershot to Waterloo line that sliced through the village, was the council estate, a post-war south London spillover and a place of cars jacked up on bricks and the occasional gypsy encampment.

My map showed all this. Importantly, it wasn't simply a representation, it was a social document, one that was the basis for stories, most of them outrageous fibs of course, that I invented for the people of my village.

Maps, as maps used to be, were acts of faith. You trusted in their accuracy, as you had no way of verifying them. You could see a map, but you couldn't see the truth of it for yourself. Maps were virtual reality before the term was invented. More than this, because maps were shorn of intimacy, they were templates for invention and imagination. They hid stories and histories.

The map, therefore, has served a dual purpose, that of practicality and that of interpretation. The imagination that was released by maps has, however, become dulled. A trend towards three-dimensionalism hastened the emergence of technologies such as exist today, the most extreme removal of imagination being the obscenity of Google Street View.

Such intimacy, such real reality makes archaic some of the most fabulous creations of the cartographer. It would be impossible for Beck to diagrammatically show the London Underground nowadays. He would be considered an idiot. Yet he achieved what should have been an impossibility - functionalism made from the abstract. And in so doing, his map added power to one of London's most enduring stories, that of the mystery of its old tube stations and lines.

Technology has not, however, replaced the map. It has digitalised it, put it onto mobile phones, zoomed into it and out of it, but the map remains, even in its basic, non-intimate state.

The tourist coming to Mallorca is confronted with map after map after map. It is the single most useful piece of information the tourist can have. Some may indeed app a map, but most don't. They seek the utility of something that never folds properly and that flaps in a breeze. Utility is the key, so much so that a tour operator rep once told me that he and colleagues used to have to clean up transfer coaches on which adverts that had surrounded maps handed out to the newly arrived had been discarded. The tourists would tear the ads off and keep the map. Why? Who knows.

For tourists who don't vandalise their maps, utility is served by being able to locate Bar Brit and its steak and chips and Sky TV on the corner of Calle Ikis and Calle E-griega. An advert without a means of locating an establishment for the unknowledgeable tourist isn't a great deal of use, yet many businesses persist in using media that fail to impart such knowledge.

The local maps, of the resorts and towns, and the maps of Mallorca are almost exclusively only used in a functional way. The other purpose of the map, the interpretation, is rarely deployed you would think. Yet take a look at a map of Mallorca and you see all manner of strangeness. The name places themselves are strange. They should conjure up enquiry, but how many do actually enquire? What is it with, say, Biniali or Bunyola or the innuendo of Búger? What are their stories?

Maps should map the imagination. A map of Mallorca should be a map of Mallorca's imagination.

You may remember a time when maps would be put up on walls and pins would be placed on them to denote this or that. You can still stick a pin in a map. Shut your eyes, and when you've stuck the pin in, off you go. To wherever it might be and to whatever story the place on your map is hiding.


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What's The Story?

At one time when I lived in London, before they closed the station, I used occasionally to get a sudden urge to travel to the far end of the Central Line. Ongar. Like many place names in England, it was one with no immediately obvious connection to any other. The beauty of English towns and villages lies as much in their obscure nomenclature as any picture-postcard green, millpond or church. Ongar. Was it on guard or "en garde", was it on the gar, in which case what was a "gar", might it have once been one gar (same question)? What tribal and linguistic back story gave Ongar its handle? Celtic, Roman, Germanic, Danish, Norman? Perhaps it had been invented, or there had been a Mr. Ongar. If so, how had he come by his name? I never did make the journey, that urge being quelled by an all too rationally opposing view that it was a bit of a waste of time. Such rationality should never be allowed to intrude in the pursuit of pointlessness. For there is no pointlessness in wanting to head onward to Ongar, or indeed anywhere else. If it simply comes down to the fact of its being there, this should be reason enough. And then there is the name.

Everywhere has a story. No place exists without one. And within each place, every house, street, wood, shop, pub has a story. Maps are the factual and cartographic frontispiece to the stories which lie behind those place names and places themselves. In Mallorca there are hundreds of places. How many of them do any of us really know? For many, outside of their immediate area, there is little or no knowledge. There is often little knowledge of the places they inhabit. There is an incuriosity that denies someone in Alcúdia a visit to Cala San Vicente, or someone in Pollensa to investigate Coll Baix. The names themselves should be sufficient to spark curiosity. The very fact of their being there. But no. In which case there has to be a more compelling reason. And this is often just a restaurant recommendation, a friend living there, or a day out at a different beach. The stories of the places are neglected, largely because there are none, or rather none that are made manifest.

All the places in Mallorca. Take one - Esporles. I know nothing of it. There is the annual sweet fair this weekend. Why is there a sweet fair? Indeed where is Esporles? Why is it there? What's the story about its name, its people? The answers are not simple records of historical fact. The factual approach is sterile, it is the dating of kings and queens approach that led much history teaching into irrelevant disrepute before teachers, and indeed historians, had the good sense to realise that stories held as much if not more relevance. This shift in emphasis is one that has given rise to the quasi-story historiography of Peter Ackroyd or to Gilda O'Neill's anecdote collection from London's East End.

Take a look at a map of Mallorca. Punxuat, Biniali, Ariany, Moscari, Galilea. Where are they? What do any of us know of them? What knowledge there is tends to be confined to what local tourist boards pump out. Superficial, matters of historical record, but lacking personality or insight. The same applies to better-known places. The Roman Cecilio Metelo may have been important in the BC history of Alcúdia, but so what? The more interesting story is why poor old Cecilio has lent his name to such an uncharming street as he has. The unlovely and the derelict are every bit if not more interesting than some grand manor house or the revisionist history regarding Chopin and Valldemossa. He hated the place, the winter dampness and cold, and was damning of the local medics who couldn't treat his tuberculosis. That's not what you normally hear. The small town of Maria de la Salut is, on the face of it, unremarkable. For many, it will be the place in which is located a rather splendid restaurant - Cas Metge Monjo - but behind the otherwise unremarkable facade is (or maybe was as I haven't been there for some years) the semi-dilapidated state of the church. Here is a story worth knowing as well as a photographic opportunity more striking than the terrace at Cas Metge. In Playa de Muro there is a villa by the beach that has been a ruin for years. Why? What's the story? And then there's Es Foguero in Alcúdia. The giant fun-palace ruin abutting the nature park of Albufera and the unused industrial estate - three stories in one.

Mallorca is not big. Its very compactness, allied to its combination of great antiquity, modernity but also recent backwardness, grinding poverty, agrarianism and semi-isolation enrich it with thousands of stories, and stories that are manageable in their relating because of that compactness. Tourism, for the most part, is the pursuit of the anodyne, and indeed one of the alternative takes on tourism - the cultural one - elevates itself little higher than this state of being mentally uninspiring. Yet tourism should, in its purest form, be about inspiration, and about discovery of the different, the strange, the disconnection with the normalcy of back home.

The stories of Mallorca. This should be the real alternative tourism. But of course it isn't, because the stories of Mallorca are Mallorca. Alternative tourism is in fact sun and beach, bucket and spade. There are stories surrounding the resorts as well, thousands upon thousands of them, but their stories are of recent origin, they are the alternative. In the whole story of the stories of Mallorca the resorts are but the epilogue.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Laurel and Hardy. Today's title - not the actual title, though it was in brackets for the album title.

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