Beaches And Towels: Oddities Of 2016

This was a year in which Ikea found itself involved in a Spanish general election, there were arguments over the use of "a" or "e", beaches were targeted by sellers on eBay and beach towels had the attention of environmentalists.

Whatever one might think of Podemos, they know how to do things differently. They "borrowed" the Ikea catalogue for their June election campaign. Prominent members of the party were to be found on a white Vilmar chair (Pablo Iglesias), by a Hemnes desk (Iñigo Errejón), with a PS 2002 watering can (Balearic leader Alberto Jarabo). Each image carried a message from the Podemos manifesto. Ikea stressed that it had nothing whatsoever to do with the campaign, though privately may have felt that it was pretty good promotion.

Toponymy (the study of place names) loomed large on the agenda. While Palma was engrossed (or not) in discussions regarding its name (Palma or Palma de Mallorca), Calvia was considering the rival claims of Paguera and Peguera. Here was a genuine vowel controversy. It had always been Pag, it was said, until the town hall introduced Peg in the 1980s. The current town hall was determined to ensure that Peg it was and will be. Toponymy experts were being consulted. The Peg camp were able to point to the derivation from "pega" for pine sap. The Pag-ists were unimpressed, and they included the hoteliers who were equally determined to use Paguera.

Calvia spent much of the summer informing us how well new ordinance and policing arrangements were going in stamping out crime (mostly petty) and bad behaviour. This was all very well, but the information rarely informed anyone about the most serious issues, such as actions against the so-called prostitutes of Magalluf and Santa Ponsa. Instead, there were stories such as the major success in confiscating 79 coconuts, 24 pineapples and 23 watermelons that had been destined for sale on beaches. In isolation, this was fair enough, but reaction to this success was inevitable: they can seize fruit but they can't do anything about the prostitutes.

Meanwhile, there was outrage when it was discovered that tiny pieces of beach (pebbles and sand) were being flogged on eBay. A German was offering bags containing bits of Sa Calobra beach for 5.90 euros. The regional environment ministry said such "extraction" could not be tolerated, though pointed out that it was a matter for the Costas Authority. There were also packets with Camp de Mar and Sant Elm beaches. The mayor of Andratx said that there would be "investigations".

Outrage was even greater when occupants of superyachts took over, "occupied" and "privatised" a beach on the island of Cabrera. Towels, beds and tents were installed by crew members. It was the equivalent of a "beach club", claimed environmentalists GOB. Action was demanded. Fines had to be issued, but once more the regional ministry suggested it was a matter for the Costas, who were being invited to intervene in other similar "occupations", such as by Russian oligarchs moving in on beaches and employing security personnel to keep the riff-raff away.

Towels were in great abundance on the beach in El Molinar a week or so after Cabrera had been invaded. A Portuguese performance artist by the name of Hugo Israel placed fifteen large towels on the beach and then sat in a chair sunning himself in typical tourist mode as a form of protest against tourist "saturation" and in defence of the island's environment and sustainability that were being harmed by excessive tourism. The stunt attracted a good deal of publicity, but for some, Hugo represented a growing "saturation" of protesters against saturation. And what was a Portuguese doing, staging a protest? Was he not a tourist? Where environmentalists were concerned, however, there were no objections to his "occupation" of the beach.

Back in Calvia they were getting agitated by the return of "Geordie Shore" to film in Magalluf; they having been the town hall, the tourism ministry and local businesses. There was no permission to film in public areas, they shouted, and to so contribute to a programme that would be "harmful to the image of Magalluf, Calvia and Mallorca" at a time when everyone was collaborating on pushing "quality tourism". Well, not quite everyone, as Geordie Shore were able to film in non-public areas, such as a party boat.

While Calvia was defending the good name of Magalluf and media sensation-seekers were finding there was now thin sensationalist gruel to be had in Maga, the authorities in Madrid and Barcelona were being confronted by the problem of hard-core pornography being filmed in the streets. Barcelona insisted that having sex in the streets was prohibited, but Madrid was less explicit (so to speak). Unless tripods were being used for filming, it seemed unable to stop it.

So for once, Magalluf was not sin city. And that was odd in itself.

The Great Vowel Controversy Of Calvia

Where, you will doubtless be wondering, is a toponymy commission when it is most needed. Only a week ago I was highlighting the government's revival of this twenty-person gathering of place names' experts. It is needed for Mallorca in particular: of the four islands there is less official toponymy in Mallorca than in the other three. And there is ample evidence of this. Paguera or Peguera? Palma or Palma de Mallorca? Just two daft examples currently doing the rounds to add to those of, for example, Porto Cristo versus Portocristo (and others) or Cala Ratjada plays Cala Rajada.

The Partido Popular in Calvia is minded to ignore the aspirations of said commission and indeed of the town hall responding to the apparently desperate requirement to harmonise the municipality's place names. (By the way, can we add Magaluf or Magalluf to the list?) The PP is suggesting that the citizens should decide. Have a referendum. Make the decision the people's Paguera or Peguera. It was always Pag, says the PP, until a unilateral decision taken by the town hall converted it into Peg in the 1980s. Not that it did wholly convert it. Had it done, there wouldn't be the argument there now is. Pag and Peg have resided side by side in comparative toponymic harmony since the '80s. But now the town hall appears determined to divide society in this part of Calvia over the choice between two vowels.

As might be detected, given the left-wing leaning of the administration and the opposition of the PP (and Ciudadanos), there is a bit of a Catalan thing going on here. The left, with the Open Left (Equerra Oberta) coming to the aid of the PSOE-Si Se Puede Calvia administration alliance, insists that there is no "linguistic conflict", only that there should be compliance with the law and with the department of toponymy at the university. Apart from begging a question, given there is such a department, as to why a toponymy commission is needed as well, this makes clear that toponymic correctness lies in the Catalanist camp. For what it's worth, the name is derived from "forn de brea" aka "pega", referring to pine sap. In Castellano, the colloquial "pega" means something like a snag or a catch. And yes, there is a snag. Is it Pag or is it Peg?

For reasons best known, so it would seem, to the good folk of Pag/Peguera, they opted for Pag at some time in the past, only for Peg to hit the revivalist trail some thirty odd years ago, courtesy of the town hall. And so we now arrive at the current controversy. Should the people decide? Perhaps they should. Holding a referendum is in current vogue. They're having one in the UK it would appear, though the subject is of somewhat greater consequence than a vowel. Of greater relevance is the citizen participation via referendum of Palma.

In that city the people (a very small minority) used their voice in choosing between Born terraces or not Born terraces. The vote went strongly against the town hall preference, which is probably why Palma hasn't opted for another referendum over the planned demolition of the Sa Feixina monument (the people would say no, and the town hall knows they would). It may also be why there is no referendum proposal regarding the choice between Palma or Palma de Mallorca.

There will undoubtedly be some Palma fanatics (in addition to those at the town hall) who will argue the case for with or without "de Mallorca", but the vast majority, one suspects, really couldn't care less. It was the nasty PP who were of course responsible for appending "de Mallorca", a move of some common sense if only to distinguish the city from others. But even if "de Mallorca" were to be retained, it's not as though anyone here ever refers to it thus. Tell me the last time you said, if you live outside Palma (de Mallorca), that you were having a night out in Palma de Mallorca.

The apparent pointlessness of this argument is reinforced twice over. Firstly by the fact that the Balearic parliament has to have a debate to decide whether it should hold a further debate to decide between the rival claims. Secondly by the weird assertion by a PSOE parliamentary deputy that the PP's adding of "de Mallorca" had been part of the Bauzá regime's desire to weaken Catalan culture and language. At least Mayor Hila had the sense to say that Palma was a Roman thing, because if Catalan gets dragged in, the name should really be the one that the bestower of all things Catalan, the conquering Jaume I of Aragon, gave the city: Ciutat de Mallorca.

Anyway, Pag or Peg, let the people decide. And perhaps give them some other choices. Piguera, anyone?

Working For Mallorca's Place Names

In Jonathan Meades' short story "Filthy English", the semi-autobiographical protagonist is cast as being a lexicographer by profession: that's someone who, broadly speaking, compiles dictionaries. Meades doesn't explore how his character earns a living - that isn't the point of the story - but a living he does make. But being a lexicographer, one would assume, offers only comparatively limited prospects of earning huge salaries or indeed of being presented with a vast array of job opportunities. How many dictionaries can there be?

Meades' lexicographer might also have been described as an etymologist - a student of the origin of words. Both professions exist within a range of studies, each of them with several degrees of obsessiveness and all related to words. Others include the philologist - the student of languages -  and the toponymist, he or she who studies place names. None might seem to offer great career prospects, yet, and I have remarked on this in the past, Mallorca appears to be awash with all of them. There are, for example, politicians who present themselves as philologists - the leader of Ciudadanos in the Balearics, Xavier Pericay, is one of them. For Pericay, this earnest background has a political significance. A Catalan speaker, he is nonetheless from the supposedly right-wing school of political thought which argues that there is room in society for more than one language: Castellano, for instance.

Obsessive or not, there is a fascination. How did a word come to be as it is? What's the background to such and such a place name? In the case of the latter - toponymy - the Balearic government has sought to provide some gainful employment (possibly) to a commission of toponymy. The department for linguistic policy has reactivated this commission, it having been moribund for four years.

And what, you may ask, will this commission do, all twenty members of it? Its brief, according to the department, will be to establish a working plan with the aim of completing the official toponymy of the islands, replete with geo-referenced nomenclatures, and so of contributing to the knowledge, correction and recovery of place names. In Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera, all this is apparently at an advanced stage but it is not in Mallorca.

Why, though, are they bothering? What is the purpose of this obsessing with place names? Does it have any practical outcome or is it merely an academic exercise? Well, in terms of practicality, there may well be applications. And for this one should consider the four years of moribundity. To what do these four years refer? The last government.

When the Bauzá regime came into power, one of its more idiotic ideas was to harmonise place names. This meant using one interpretation of these names, a Castilian interpretation. Hence, and at its most extreme, this might have led to road signs, say for example for Pollença with a cedilla, being changed to Pollensa. This could have been a practical outcome that would of course have been wholly impractical. How much would it have cost for starters?

Mercifully, they saw sense and the whole proposal was quietly dropped. But what was also dropped was any official consideration of place names. And why? The presupposition is that the absolutely correct use of names has an overwhelmingly Catalan element, a fact that the Bauzá language policy would have been less than keen on. Better, therefore, just to ignore the whole issue.

A clue to why we now have a toponymy commission once more lies with the department that has reintroduced it. Linguistic policy resides within the weirdly concocted (by Més) ministry for participation, transparency and culture. Place names, toponymy need to be politically correct according to a Mallorcan and Balearic nationalist narrative.

So this may all seem - and is - a political development, but in language terms there really isn't or shouldn't be anything wrong with it. Catalan influence is clearly fundamental and it would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise, but Mallorcan and Balearic place names are a great deal richer than one language alone: the various strands that combined to form Catalan, Arabic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Iberian, Mallorquín and other island derivatives, French, English in the case of Menorca, and indeed Castellano, they all play a part.

This study of place names is, therefore, an exercise in detailing the various cultural influences on the islands. As such, it is a worthwhile undertaking. And it is one that is set against a broader background, that of Spain. To give an idea of how widely the investigation of place names in the country as a whole is, one only needs to be aware of the conferences that are held by the specialised commission for geographic names: the last one was in Valladolid in April 2015.

Names are a Spanish obsession not just a Mallorcan one. And after all, as there are so many toponymists, etymologists and whatever knocking around, you have to give them something to do.

What's In Palma And Alcudia's Place Names?

They love a good toponym in Mallorca. Just as they therefore love toponymy, the study of place names, as well as onomastics - how names came to be the names they are - and indeed philology, the roots of language. All societies have their students of such matters, but in Mallorca, it can seem as though there are more philologists, toponymists and onomasts than you can shake the stick part of a ximbomba at, which begs its own question: where or how the hell do you come up with a word like ximbomba?

To say that there is an obsession with all this discovery of the origins of names is not an overstatement. To cite an example, on the local radio station in Pollensa there is a programme each Friday morning devoted to the toponymy of the municipality. At a time when, allowing for the hour's difference, Nick Grimshaw will be indulging himself in his Friday, weekend starts here Nickstape on BBC Radio 1, there are three blokes in a studio in the north of Mallorca dissecting the meaning of the name of a piece of land at the foot of the Tramuntana. The contrast is somewhat stark.

Calling this an obsession infers criticism when none is intended. It is more a case of there being genuine interest; one that extends beyond enthusiasts in a particular town and into wider society and also tourist society. How things became as they are goes to the heart of all the culture and heritage tourism that the regional government (among others) spends so much time espousing. Behind every place name is a story. Every place has its place in the story of Mallorca. The problem can be, however, finding that story or coming to an agreement. Toponymists will argue long into the night about the competing demands of the Romans, the Arabs, the Catalans and any others they can stumble across who were responsible for things having become as they are.

This obsession/interest has come to the fore with the argument over the name of Palma. The suffix "de Mallorca", it is said, is an artificiality either created with foreigners in mind or indeed created by these very foreigners. Hints of a degree of parochialism or even xenophobia in dismissing the claims for "de Mallorca" are not well disguised. It may be that this was never actually the name, but for administrative purposes it has existed in the past and had relatively little to do with foreigners. Mallorca, not so very long ago, was synonymous with Palma. Palma de Mallorca was commonly used. They even devised car registration numbers in line with this usage: the PM prefix.

In passing its decree that Palma it should be, the town hall has cited the ancient claims of Palma and Palma alone. It has always been Palma, it says, and has been since Roman times. Which isn't of course true. For example, there was a fair old length of time when it had a quite different name: Madina Mayurqa. Never let it be said that political correctness of a pro-Muslim style should get in the way of advocating the naming claims of a far older invasion force. The logic, or lack of it, is laid bare when one considers that the other major settlement from Roman times - Alcudia - has long since ceased to be known by the name that the Romans gave it, i.e. Pollentia. Alcudia is derived from Arabic. Perhaps the town hall should call a toponymy commission and request a reversion to Roman times. On second thoughts ... .

What is in fact additionally peculiar about Palma town hall's claims is that for centuries after the Catalan invasion it was known as Ciutat de Mallorca. The political make-up and ideologies of the current town hall administration must surely be aware that it was that nasty old Bourbon, Felipe V, who was responsible for restoring the name Palma in 1715 when his army came rampaging and dismantled all things (or as many things as possible) Catalan. Curious and curiouser.

Historical claims on place names and their reasons are rarely straightforward. To return to Alcudia, the simple explanation is that the Arabic name was unaltered other than through language adaptation. There was, if one accepts this, a seamless transition from Arab to Catalan days, but this fails to take account of what happened in 1248, almost twenty years after the Catalan invasion. A papal bull issued by Pope Innocent IV established a whole host of place names in Mallorca. These parishes were under the protection of different saints, and one of these was a place called Sant Jaume de Guinyent, i.e. Alcudia.

The common claim is that it was King Jaume II who changed the name of Alcudia to Sant Jaume de Guinyent in 1298, but the church had in fact beaten him to it by fifty years. This new usage was intended to remove the Arabic name. It didn't last because the locals insisted on referring to Alcudia. But the political motives for the change were flawed in that Guinyent was also Arabic (derived from "djinan" or garden).

Behind every place name there is a story as well as other claimants to the name. Obsession? No. Fascinating. All the history of Mallorca can be found in a name.

The Town With Six Names

Toponymy is a top topic in Mallorca. Place names, for the most part, are place names and they tend not to change or to be open to change. They are also usually not a matter of controversy. In Mallorca, however, toponymy is a favoured topic of conversation among the political, the geographical and the linguistic classes. Occasionally, it spills over into general conversation, as with, for example, the debate as to a possible change of name for Magalluf or the quite absurd arguments as to whether Palma should have become Palma de Mallorca (which it now has). The politico-linguistic arguments are more usually confined to the use of Catalan or Castellano. Though the regional government appears to have quietly forgotten about its insistence on place names being in Castellano, one can't rule out the possibility that it might remember that it was going to insist on this, and so cause another wholly unnecessary row. Should, for instance, Pollença always be Pollensa and so in Castellano rather than Catalan? As if, quite honestly, it makes any difference.

There is one place name in Mallorca that inspires greater discussion, greater controversy and greater argument than any other. I say one place name, but there are at least six alternatives. The world, generally speaking, knows Porto Cristo as Porto Cristo - two words - but this would be far too simple. There is a strong lobby for it to be Portocristo, while it is also referred to as Porto-Cristo (hyphenated). The lesser claims are for Cala Manacor, Port de Manacor and Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme, each of them with their own pedantic supporters who prefer relative toponymic antiquity over modernity.

To start at the beginning, the original name when the fishing village was founded over a century ago was Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme. Cala Manacor, as a geographer at the university argues, is the "genuine" toponymic name for the simple reason that it was a "cala" in the municipality of Manacor. However, the same geographer points out that Port de Manacor is also a "genuine" name because this described (and still does) the urban centre (such as it would have been). All of which is very interesting but doesn't explain how Porto Cristo or Portocristo or even Porto-Cristo ever came to be the name. Or names.

But Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme wasn't the original name. It was one invented in the late nineteenth century when Manacor town hall agreed to a project to build houses in what, historically, had been known as Porto Cristo (two words). This name goes back to the thirteenth century and came about because Italian fishermen took refuge from a storm and came with images of Christ and the Virgin. So, defenders of Porto Cristo are even more steeped in the defence of antiquity than the johnny-come-latelys who would put in a bid for Cala Manacor, Port de Manacor or Colònia de Nostra Senyora del Carme.

You would think that this thirteenth century heritage would be enough to stop any argument, but you would of course be wrong, and the body which helped to make matters more complicated than they might otherwise have been was the regional government. In 1988, in attempting to arrive at some harmonisation as to place names, the government proposed calling Porto Cristo (two words) Portocristo (one word). Outraged, certain politicians in Manacor argued that Portocristo (one word) was a false toponym borrowed from other one-word "portos" on the island (e.g. Portopí). As a consequence of all this, the Balearics Supreme Court got dragged in to arbitrate. It said that the name should be Porto Cristo but suggested that it could also be a hyphenated Porto-Cristo, which wasn't, with hindsight, a terribly useful compromise, if compromise it had indeed been intended to be.

This decision by the court was taken in 1990. Twenty-three years later, the matter keeps cropping up, as it did recently during a debate at a meeting of Manacor council. The reason why it keeps cropping up is because the Porto Cristo versus Portocristo camps won't let it drop and because there are still any number of anomalies as to the spelling. While university experts have argued the case for Porto Cristo, there are those who argue the case for Portocristo, as in fact they had back in 1988 when advising the government. Political parties in Manacor are now lined up behind the two names (and perhaps the hyphenated third), but at least one local politician has conceded that it is about time the whole ridiculous matter was laid to rest. But then he supports Portocristo.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.