Fifty years ago this coming Saturday, Maria Steiner, a Swiss citizen, received a pleasant surprise. She and her husband Roger were to be treated to a fortnight's free holiday in Palma. They already were on holiday, or were about to be, so the free fortnight was presumably to be arranged some time in the future. The benefactor was the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board. It was represented at Palma airport on 24 June, 1967. Maria was the one millionth tourist to have arrived at the airport that year.
Included in the report of this was a brief mention of the fact that the one million mark had been attained three days earlier than in 1966. There was no comment on it, but it was - one guesses - something in which a certain pride could be taken (probably). It was indicative of the advance of tourism, and one million tourists were worthy of celebrating.
Some two months later, there was another report. It said that there had been sixty thousand passengers - arrivals and departures - in two days at the airport. This was a "bonita" figure, despite the fact that tourist Mallorca was "invaded". A distinction was drawn between the resorts and the unknown corners of the island, which most certainly had not been invaded.
Today, the numbers are of course vastly greater. A celebration of the multi-millionth tourist arrival is more likely to involve the payment of an airline ticket home, a flight to be taken immediately. Invasion, as we know, is now saturation and "massification". Unknown corners of the island are shared on social media, while environmentalists and politicians get into almighty flaps about the "collapse" of beaches, of roads, of parking areas, of services, of resources.
The invasion of 1967 didn't carry a negative connotation; in the report cited, that is. But fifty years ago, there were already rumblings about the impact of tourism. The press and individuals were not totally cowed by censorship. They were allowed to be critical so long as this didn't cross the line and become an outright assault on the regime. One critic was Josep Alfonso Villanueva. He was to become a member of the Balearic parliament with PSOE when democratic government was created in 1983. In the mid-60s, he pursued a career as an economist and in 1969 wrote a socioeconomic analysis of the hotel and hostelry industries. A conclusion he was drawing at that time was that there should be a limit to the number of tourists.
Another article from fifty years ago began by saying that the tourism revolution was, in spiritual terms, negative. There was a need for there to be a balance or otherwise the new society being created would respond only to materialistic motives. There was a further need for there to be a university, the principal purpose of which should be to consider the sociological impact of this still new industry: the University of the Balearic Islands wasn't to be founded until the end of the 1970s.
The university, it was argued, should assist in guaranteeing social equilibrium, with culture as well as socioeconomics its chief concerns. What is striking about this is that politicians weren't being called on to attend to these matters. That was because, in effect, there weren't any, other than Francoist appointees. Otherwise, there were concerns being voiced about water resources. There was no plan for proper exploitation of water. Moreover, there was criticism of the wholly imbalanced development of tourism. Coming back to the unknown corners, there were any number of them without tourists, without bars, without homes. Tourism was being pressed into confined and specific areas; the economic benefit of tourism was not being distributed. In Palma alone, more than 50% of Majorca's tourism capacity was to be found.
So what you had fifty years ago was something of a divide of opinion. On the one hand there was talk of capping the number of tourists. This was because of the harm being caused to traditional industries - agriculture still accounted for around a quarter of employment but this was falling rapidly - and the harm to the social fabric. Resources were an issue, as was infrastructure: roads in particular. On the other hand there was acknowledgement of tourism's benefits, tempered by economic wealth not being evenly spread.
Lurking behind these acceptable statements in the press was a very much more critical movement. It was concerned primarily with the cultural impact but it found very little public expression because of the Catalan overtones. As for the environment, it was to be six years before GOB was founded. And it was originally concerned only with birdlife.
The way in which issues are nowadays expressed is very different. But the themes aren't. Tourist limits, resources, impact on society, unequal wealth creation from tourism. It was all there half a century ago. They just had to be careful how they spoke about it.
Showing posts with label Tourism history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tourism history. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Monday, November 07, 2016
Retro Promotion: Travel Fairs Of The Past
Just over a year ago, I wrote about this initiative. It had been launched at Puerto Pollensa's Illa d'Or hotel. At the time, I said that it was intriguing, combining as it does the island's literary past with routes in different parts of the island which, for the most part, correspond with where the literary greats were active - Robert Graves in Deya, for instance.
The Council's London promotion of WoW is more than just an attempt to develop greater cultural tourism by remembering the past, it is also - albeit they wouldn't say so - a strong echo of how tourism promotion once was. In the early days, attendance at fairs was very much part of the plan, and the plan was heavily biased towards culture.
The fairs were initially in Mallorca. There was one in particular, which was held on three occasions between 1908 and 1911. Unsurprisingly it was in Palma, and it was called Semana Deportiva - sports week. The activities included sailing and cycling races, and while these were aimed at attracting what was then a very novel breed of tourist, their principal objective was to showcase Palma and Mallorca. Invites went out to potential interested parties on the mainland and in European countries, the UK having been one of them.
Sport was the hook. It was more understandable to those unfamiliar with the island. But behind the sport lay various other activities - cultural ones. Hence for instance, two theatres - the Balear and the Lírico (Lyric Theatre) - staged drama and a performance by Fatima Miris, an Italian actress and singer who was to travel the globe, such was her popularity. There were also what are now very familiar at a Mallorcan fair or fiesta. The idea had originally been to hire giants and "caparrots" (bigheads) from a manufacturer. When they looked at the numbers, it was realised that Palma may as well restore a pair of giants that it already had and to create some bigheads. The grand sum of 125 pesetas was spent on this.
Quite what overseas visitors made of all this is not known, but here was very clear evidence that in the first decade of the twentieth century, Mallorca was seeking to combine culture and sport as the island's main reasons for tourism existence. Sun-and-beach was as then unheard of. Sunbathing wasn't to start coming into real vogue until the 1920s. Mallorca therefore promoted its cultural heritage, such as with giants, and its sporting possibilities, like cycling. How things haven't changed.
Having had some success with bringing people to its fairs, Mallorca branched out. Initially, this was to the Iberian peninsula. Between 1910 and 1912, the island promoted itself at tourism congresses in Tolosa (the Basque Country), Lisbon and of course Madrid. The capital had started staging such congresses as a result of the founding of the first tentative tourism ministry, which was part of the much broader development ministry.
But it wasn't to be until 1923 that Mallorca went truly international. In April of that year, there was participation at New York's second tourism congress. A number of brochures were published in different languages, and pride of place was given to a collection of photos. While much is known about the way in which paintings were used for promotional purposes in those days, surprisingly little is ever said about the photography. Yet within the Mallorca Tourist Board there was a whole group dedicated to this, and one of the most revered of the photographers was Gaspar Rullan, who was a pioneer of colour photography in Spain and was also for a time the official photographer of the provincial delegation, which was the island's administrative body.
The single most ambitious project was the one of 1929. This was for the exposition of Montjuic, better known as the Barcelona International Exposition. That city's Pueblo Español was built for this expo, and one of the exhibitors was Mallorca. The island transported people and items indicative of its culture. There were, for example, xeremier pipers. But the biggest attraction of the lot was a re-creation of the Charterhouse in Valldemossa, replete with the cell that Chopin and Sand had stayed in.
There won't be anything so spectacular in London this week, but there will be much that is, if you like, retro tourism promotion. It's highly reminiscent of those early days, and as part of Walking on Words, Valldemossa will be remembered for George Sand and Frederic Chopin.
* Poster from Wikimedia Commons.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Tales Of The Llevant: The Belgians
Belgians might seem unlikely contributors to Mallorca's tourism history. It's not as if one hears a great deal about the importance of the Belgian market nowadays; in fact, you don't hear anything about it. But Belgians there most definitely were. The most celebrated was Gerard Blitz because of his original 1950 tented Club Med village on the beach of the French in Alcúdia. Club Med were to eventually transfer operations and create a permanent base on the island's south-east coast. The only Club Med in Mallorca lasted in Portopetro until 2001.
Portopetro is all but a continuation of its neighbour just to its north, Cala d'Or, the two resorts being part of a string of generally understated touristic inhabitation that includes the calas of Figuera, Santanyi and Llombards, separated by the Mondragó park. And it was in Cala d'Or that the Belgian connection was made and was to be crucial to the resort's early development.
But before the Belgians, there was an Ibizan. Josep Costa Ferrer, aka Picarol, aka Don Pep, a painter, cartoonist and publisher. At the start of the 1930s, he turned up in Ses Puntetes and bought fifteen "quarterades" from Catalina Adrover de Calonge (a quarterada is a measurement of land equivalent to slightly more than 0.7 of a hectare and so roughly 7,000 square metres). He paid 1,000 pesetas for each quarterada. He got a bargain and proceeded to establish a coastal urbanisation which he named after a cala from his native Ibiza - Cala d'Hort. The name was quickly corrupted. It became Cala d'Or. The orchard cove became the gold cove.
The story of Cala d'Or and of its development is one about which we have more first-hand knowledge than of any of the other inter-war coastal developments in Mallorca. It is a story not without its glamour on account of names of those who came and bought properties; Rudolf Valentino's one-time wife was just one. The richness of the story is due to the fact that it was well chronicled, and the person who chronicled it was Don Pep himself.
Yet, despite the various articles that Don Pep wrote, there are discrepancies and elements missing. For example, the price he paid for the land was also reported as having been 13,000 pesetas in total. It might not matter - it was still incredibly cheap even for those days - but it is an indication of how these stories and histories have become mangled. Then there is the story of the Belgians. The accepted wisdom is that a Sr. Van Crainest and a Medard Verburgh were the principal developers of Cala d'Or. It is a wisdom which is true, but what is never explained, and even Don Pep didn't explain, was their backstory.
Van Crainest is only ever referred to by his surname. I can find no reference to his Christian name, while the surname is almost certainly spelt incorrectly. Van Craeynest is the normal spelling. He was described (only ever described) as having been an important "bodeguero", a literal translation of which is grocer but which can mean other things, such as a keeper of a wine cellar. It is probably more accurate to say that his business was that in the French tradition of the epicerie, a grocery store for sure, but way more than that, including the sale of fine wines.
But why did Van Crainest come to Mallorca? The only explanation seems to be that Verburgh invited him, and so who was Verburgh, and what was he doing in Mallorca? He was a painter, but what drew him to Santanyi and to Don Pep? The answer, I suspect, lies on the other side of the island. Don Pep had originally intended to establish a sort of haven along the Formentor promontory, where land prices were vastly higher. In 1931, following a well-established pattern of artists staying in Puerto Pollensa, Verburgh took up residence in the Hotel Miramar, having come from the US to seek inspiration, as did so many other artists, from Mallorca's light and landscapes. Don Pep definitely knew the likes of Adan Diehl, who had founded the Hotel Formentor, and so would have known various artists. Verburgh was almost certainly one of them, and Verburgh was not just a painter, he was also the youngest son of a family that had a grocery business (or an epicerie). Van Crainest, it can probably be assumed, either had a business association with the Verburgh family or was indeed a member of the wider family.
There is nothing sinister in any of this, simply a bit of mystery. Much of Mallorca's tourism history has a distinct starting-point but little or nothing that explains what brought about the starting-point. This is the case with Cala d'Or. The Belgians arrived, started developing and the rest was history. There was rather more to it than that.
Index for July 2014
Alcúdia old well - 18 July 2014
Alcúdia Via Fora - 13 July 2014
Anti-bullfighting campaign - 27 July 2014
Bad image and reaction - 3 July 2014
Bauzá Assemblea de Docents rap video - 19 July 2014
Belgians in Cala d'Or - 31 July 2014
Cala Bona and 1920s' roots - 29 July 2014
Cala Ratjada and Joan March - 28 July 2014
Cala Ratjada and Manacor-Artà train - 23 July 2014
Citizen participation and opinion - 2 July 2014
Holiday lets - 4 July 2014, 24 July 2014
How war shaped Mallorca's tourism development - 20 July 2014
Jaume Matas prison - 14 July 2014
Magalluf fellatio video - 5 July 2014, 7 July 2014, 11 July 2014, 12 July 2014, 26 July 2014
Mallorca like Brazil - 10 July 2014
Mallorca's tourism: how it might have been - 20 July 2014, 21 July 2014, 22 July 2014
Mediterranean winds - 16 July 2014
Naturism and anarchy - 8 July 2014
Patrona and Pollensa Festival - 25 July 2014
Pedro Sánchez - 15 July 2014
Pickpocketing - 1 July 2014
Pregón of fiestas - 6 July 2014
Scandals and PR disasters - 9 July 2014
S'Illot tourism development - 30 July 2014
Tourism, summer 2014 - 17 July 2014
Winds - 16 July 2014
Portopetro is all but a continuation of its neighbour just to its north, Cala d'Or, the two resorts being part of a string of generally understated touristic inhabitation that includes the calas of Figuera, Santanyi and Llombards, separated by the Mondragó park. And it was in Cala d'Or that the Belgian connection was made and was to be crucial to the resort's early development.
But before the Belgians, there was an Ibizan. Josep Costa Ferrer, aka Picarol, aka Don Pep, a painter, cartoonist and publisher. At the start of the 1930s, he turned up in Ses Puntetes and bought fifteen "quarterades" from Catalina Adrover de Calonge (a quarterada is a measurement of land equivalent to slightly more than 0.7 of a hectare and so roughly 7,000 square metres). He paid 1,000 pesetas for each quarterada. He got a bargain and proceeded to establish a coastal urbanisation which he named after a cala from his native Ibiza - Cala d'Hort. The name was quickly corrupted. It became Cala d'Or. The orchard cove became the gold cove.
The story of Cala d'Or and of its development is one about which we have more first-hand knowledge than of any of the other inter-war coastal developments in Mallorca. It is a story not without its glamour on account of names of those who came and bought properties; Rudolf Valentino's one-time wife was just one. The richness of the story is due to the fact that it was well chronicled, and the person who chronicled it was Don Pep himself.
Yet, despite the various articles that Don Pep wrote, there are discrepancies and elements missing. For example, the price he paid for the land was also reported as having been 13,000 pesetas in total. It might not matter - it was still incredibly cheap even for those days - but it is an indication of how these stories and histories have become mangled. Then there is the story of the Belgians. The accepted wisdom is that a Sr. Van Crainest and a Medard Verburgh were the principal developers of Cala d'Or. It is a wisdom which is true, but what is never explained, and even Don Pep didn't explain, was their backstory.
Van Crainest is only ever referred to by his surname. I can find no reference to his Christian name, while the surname is almost certainly spelt incorrectly. Van Craeynest is the normal spelling. He was described (only ever described) as having been an important "bodeguero", a literal translation of which is grocer but which can mean other things, such as a keeper of a wine cellar. It is probably more accurate to say that his business was that in the French tradition of the epicerie, a grocery store for sure, but way more than that, including the sale of fine wines.
But why did Van Crainest come to Mallorca? The only explanation seems to be that Verburgh invited him, and so who was Verburgh, and what was he doing in Mallorca? He was a painter, but what drew him to Santanyi and to Don Pep? The answer, I suspect, lies on the other side of the island. Don Pep had originally intended to establish a sort of haven along the Formentor promontory, where land prices were vastly higher. In 1931, following a well-established pattern of artists staying in Puerto Pollensa, Verburgh took up residence in the Hotel Miramar, having come from the US to seek inspiration, as did so many other artists, from Mallorca's light and landscapes. Don Pep definitely knew the likes of Adan Diehl, who had founded the Hotel Formentor, and so would have known various artists. Verburgh was almost certainly one of them, and Verburgh was not just a painter, he was also the youngest son of a family that had a grocery business (or an epicerie). Van Crainest, it can probably be assumed, either had a business association with the Verburgh family or was indeed a member of the wider family.
There is nothing sinister in any of this, simply a bit of mystery. Much of Mallorca's tourism history has a distinct starting-point but little or nothing that explains what brought about the starting-point. This is the case with Cala d'Or. The Belgians arrived, started developing and the rest was history. There was rather more to it than that.
Index for July 2014
Alcúdia old well - 18 July 2014
Alcúdia Via Fora - 13 July 2014
Anti-bullfighting campaign - 27 July 2014
Bad image and reaction - 3 July 2014
Bauzá Assemblea de Docents rap video - 19 July 2014
Belgians in Cala d'Or - 31 July 2014
Cala Bona and 1920s' roots - 29 July 2014
Cala Ratjada and Joan March - 28 July 2014
Cala Ratjada and Manacor-Artà train - 23 July 2014
Citizen participation and opinion - 2 July 2014
Holiday lets - 4 July 2014, 24 July 2014
How war shaped Mallorca's tourism development - 20 July 2014
Jaume Matas prison - 14 July 2014
Magalluf fellatio video - 5 July 2014, 7 July 2014, 11 July 2014, 12 July 2014, 26 July 2014
Mallorca like Brazil - 10 July 2014
Mallorca's tourism: how it might have been - 20 July 2014, 21 July 2014, 22 July 2014
Mediterranean winds - 16 July 2014
Naturism and anarchy - 8 July 2014
Patrona and Pollensa Festival - 25 July 2014
Pedro Sánchez - 15 July 2014
Pickpocketing - 1 July 2014
Pregón of fiestas - 6 July 2014
Scandals and PR disasters - 9 July 2014
S'Illot tourism development - 30 July 2014
Tourism, summer 2014 - 17 July 2014
Winds - 16 July 2014
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Tales Of The Llevant: Blurred lines
Of the various pioneers of Mallorca's tourism, some became great names and created great dynasties, others did not become great names but their names nonetheless reside in the history of the pioneering tourism years. In a small coastal part of Manacor there was one such pioneer. You will find him referred to as a one-time goalkeeper with Barcelona. He was, but he only played two games. Before joining Barcelona, he was with Real Mallorca, and he was to end his career with Mallorca in 1963. While he was still playing, he opened a hotel in a small coastal part of Manacor where there was no hotel. This was S'Illot. The pioneer, the one-time Barça goalie, was Pere Caldentey Bauzá. He lived to enjoy the fruits of his pioneering, but he didn't live long. He died at the age of 46 in 1975.
There is an error in the preceding paragraph. Though S'Illot is in Manacor, it is also in Sant Llorenç. Pere was born in Sant Llorenç. He built what was originally a pension right by the border between the two municipalities, this border being formed by the torrent of Can Amer. Though Manacor might have claimed the pension as being its, Pere's pension was most definitely in Sant Llorenç. And it still is. The hotel Peymar, nowadays a three-star, was not just the first hotel in S'Illot, it was the first coastal hotel in Sant Llorenç. The Playa del Moro in Cala Millor might have claimed bragging rights where being the first was concerned (1964), but it wasn't, albeit that it, like the Peymar, was only just in Sant Llorenç. Walk five streets up from the current Playa del Moro, and you are in Son Servera.
The Peymar took its name from Pere and his wife Margalida: Pe y Mar. Legend has it that it opened in the 1950s, though there is an alternative version which says that it was 1961. As with the somewhat blurred border lines between municipalities, there are also blurred facts from those pioneering days of tourism. The blurring gets even more out of focus when you factor in that S'Illot is also called Cala Moreia. Things can get even more confusing if you consider the case of the Caves of Hams, not far from S'Illot. Look the caves up and you will find that a "tourism pioneer" was involved in the caves discovery. He was? Pere Caldentey. But not the same Pere Caldentey. He was Pere Caldentey i Santandreu, and he died in 1950, so at a time when the other Pere Caldentey was keeping goal for Real Mallorca.
There was a good deal of rivalry between municipalities when it came to where the real pioneering occurred or didn't. The Manacor wing of S'Illot was hard at it in a 1971 magazine, stating clearly that it was their part which was the pioneering zone. That the Peymar was the wrong side of the stream couldn't obscure the fact that in the 1930s, the Manacor part was where there had been a plan for a coastal urbanisation drawn up.
This pioneering has to be put into some context. There were no houses of any description in S'Illot until 1929. By 1934, there were all of ten dwellings, and by the time that tourism was really looking as though it might become something for the pioneer to get his teeth into, i.e. 1960, there was a grand total of 95 dwellings, almost all of them summer holiday homes. Something that these summer vacationers, and Pere Caldentey come to that, had to contend with was the lack of utilities. Undeveloped coastal areas simply didn't have them. There is the story of the summer holiday homeowners of Magalluf, all half a dozen of them, who chipped in so that they could get some electricity connected. (The electricity company, GESA presumably, saw no point in its putting its own money in as in the mid-1950s it saw no future for Magalluf.) In S'Illot, in 1963, an electricity supply was installed, and this supply does rather draw into question one of the great yarns of tourism pioneering. Enter into the story, Jaume de Juan Pons.
In 1963, so the story goes, he turned up in S'Ilot, took a shovel out of his Seat 600 and started digging. He was to become one of the great names of tourism (the Playa Moreia hotel), but when he first appeared in S'Illot, he said there was no electricity. Well, that's debatable, though it would appear that the electricity was not switched on for the first time until the August fiestas, so the story does all rather depend on when in 1963 the digging commenced. There again, as it is said that the Playa Moreia opened in 1963, when did the digging really start?
Blurred? Just a bit.
There is an error in the preceding paragraph. Though S'Illot is in Manacor, it is also in Sant Llorenç. Pere was born in Sant Llorenç. He built what was originally a pension right by the border between the two municipalities, this border being formed by the torrent of Can Amer. Though Manacor might have claimed the pension as being its, Pere's pension was most definitely in Sant Llorenç. And it still is. The hotel Peymar, nowadays a three-star, was not just the first hotel in S'Illot, it was the first coastal hotel in Sant Llorenç. The Playa del Moro in Cala Millor might have claimed bragging rights where being the first was concerned (1964), but it wasn't, albeit that it, like the Peymar, was only just in Sant Llorenç. Walk five streets up from the current Playa del Moro, and you are in Son Servera.
The Peymar took its name from Pere and his wife Margalida: Pe y Mar. Legend has it that it opened in the 1950s, though there is an alternative version which says that it was 1961. As with the somewhat blurred border lines between municipalities, there are also blurred facts from those pioneering days of tourism. The blurring gets even more out of focus when you factor in that S'Illot is also called Cala Moreia. Things can get even more confusing if you consider the case of the Caves of Hams, not far from S'Illot. Look the caves up and you will find that a "tourism pioneer" was involved in the caves discovery. He was? Pere Caldentey. But not the same Pere Caldentey. He was Pere Caldentey i Santandreu, and he died in 1950, so at a time when the other Pere Caldentey was keeping goal for Real Mallorca.
There was a good deal of rivalry between municipalities when it came to where the real pioneering occurred or didn't. The Manacor wing of S'Illot was hard at it in a 1971 magazine, stating clearly that it was their part which was the pioneering zone. That the Peymar was the wrong side of the stream couldn't obscure the fact that in the 1930s, the Manacor part was where there had been a plan for a coastal urbanisation drawn up.
This pioneering has to be put into some context. There were no houses of any description in S'Illot until 1929. By 1934, there were all of ten dwellings, and by the time that tourism was really looking as though it might become something for the pioneer to get his teeth into, i.e. 1960, there was a grand total of 95 dwellings, almost all of them summer holiday homes. Something that these summer vacationers, and Pere Caldentey come to that, had to contend with was the lack of utilities. Undeveloped coastal areas simply didn't have them. There is the story of the summer holiday homeowners of Magalluf, all half a dozen of them, who chipped in so that they could get some electricity connected. (The electricity company, GESA presumably, saw no point in its putting its own money in as in the mid-1950s it saw no future for Magalluf.) In S'Illot, in 1963, an electricity supply was installed, and this supply does rather draw into question one of the great yarns of tourism pioneering. Enter into the story, Jaume de Juan Pons.
In 1963, so the story goes, he turned up in S'Ilot, took a shovel out of his Seat 600 and started digging. He was to become one of the great names of tourism (the Playa Moreia hotel), but when he first appeared in S'Illot, he said there was no electricity. Well, that's debatable, though it would appear that the electricity was not switched on for the first time until the August fiestas, so the story does all rather depend on when in 1963 the digging commenced. There again, as it is said that the Playa Moreia opened in 1963, when did the digging really start?
Blurred? Just a bit.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Tales Of The Llevant: Cala Bona
Ninety years ago, on 20 July 1924, there was an inauguration in Cala Bona. It wouldn't have been a grand affair. It is doubtful that numerous dignitaries and general freeloaders attended. This, after all, was just a tiny place on the east coast with a wee small port and some fishermen. Nevertheless, on that day ninety years ago Miquel Vives Servera and his wife, Matilde Maria Gonzalez Miralles, opened Sa Fonda de Can Cupa, sometimes also referred to as Sa Fonda de Can Bona. Their daughter, also Matilde, who was eighteen years old at the time, came to be renowned for her bouillabaisse and lobster à l'Américaine, but even then she had a good reputation. There may not have been many dignitaries at the opening, but the fonda (inn) attracted people from various parts of Mallorca. They came from Sineu, they came from Sant Joan, and the doctor in Vilafranca also came. The inn flourished and the inn became a hotel. The Hotel Cala Bona.
In 1960, just as the tourism boom was about to get underway, the hotel could boast all of fifteen rooms. The clientele wasn't foreign. It primarily came just the short distance from Manacor to sample a new speciality of the house, red mullet. In 1961, a plan was put forward to put two more floors on to the hotel. By the following year, the German tour operator Quelle had entered into an arrangement with the hotel, and the rest, needless to say, was history. Cala Bona, as a tourist resort, was born, and its pioneer was Matilde's son, Sebastian Bauzá. In 1963, the Hotel Llevant was opened, but immediately hit problems. The failure of a tour operator it had contracted with left it with more waiters than guests. By 1964, though, things had picked up. And there was another hotel, not one that was the creation of local Mallorcan families but of a Swiss couple, Wolfgang and Trudel Schrader, who had been invited by a friend to Cala Bona in 1960, had bought some land and had built a hotel. It was the Gran Sol.
In 1992, Matilde Vives was honoured by the Cala Millor hoteliers' association. She was asked if, back in the days of the original inn, she could have imagined how the inn and then the hotel would come to play a part in the new tourism world. It was a daft question. How could she have been expected to have foreseen what was to be? And especially on the east coast of Mallorca. As she commented then, while Cala Bona had its inn, Cala Millor had nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a house and certainly not a hotel. It wasn't until 1933 that a hotel emerged in Cala Millor - the Eureka - by which time there were also some small houses.
In the inter-war years, the east coast was all but overlooked when it came to the early development of resorts (Porto Cristo and especially the caves were a different matter; they hadn't been overlooked). As I remarked yesterday, Cala Ratjada, which had its rich villa and palace owners, might have become one of those inter-war resorts, but it didn't. The only true tourism development was way down on the south-east corner in what was to be called Cala d'Or. When tourism development kicked in in the 1960s, it was development with a large "D". The coast from Cala Bona down to Calas de Mallorca was referred to, in derogatory terms, as the "wall of concrete", and it was compared with a similar "wall" along the Playa de Palma. There was, however, one pretty crucial difference. Playa de Palma was planned. They actually wanted to build a wall of concrete in Palma. It was within one municipality, i.e. Palma, and stretched from the original resort of Ciudad Jardin to the border with Llucmajor and so Arenal, which, as an incipient resort development back in the 1930s, had been called Bellavista. The east-coast wall was not planned quite so systematically; it couldn't have been because there were three municipalities involved.
This so-called east-coast wall came into being in a more piecemeal fashion. Calas de Mallorca, at its lower end, wasn't a factor until a 1963 law on "the centres of national touristic interest" declared it a zone for development (Playa de Muro was another resort which was covered by this law). By the time that Calas de Mallorca was being legally defined, Cala Millor had been, as tourism legend tells us, "discovered" by Skytours.
Mallorca's tourism history is full of pioneers, those like Sebastian Bauzá and indeed his mother and father. But these pioneers, down Mallorca's east coast certainly, were not all, as was the case with Cala Bona, local people. There were the Schraders as well. And there were also the Belgians. Which is another tale entirely.
In 1960, just as the tourism boom was about to get underway, the hotel could boast all of fifteen rooms. The clientele wasn't foreign. It primarily came just the short distance from Manacor to sample a new speciality of the house, red mullet. In 1961, a plan was put forward to put two more floors on to the hotel. By the following year, the German tour operator Quelle had entered into an arrangement with the hotel, and the rest, needless to say, was history. Cala Bona, as a tourist resort, was born, and its pioneer was Matilde's son, Sebastian Bauzá. In 1963, the Hotel Llevant was opened, but immediately hit problems. The failure of a tour operator it had contracted with left it with more waiters than guests. By 1964, though, things had picked up. And there was another hotel, not one that was the creation of local Mallorcan families but of a Swiss couple, Wolfgang and Trudel Schrader, who had been invited by a friend to Cala Bona in 1960, had bought some land and had built a hotel. It was the Gran Sol.
In 1992, Matilde Vives was honoured by the Cala Millor hoteliers' association. She was asked if, back in the days of the original inn, she could have imagined how the inn and then the hotel would come to play a part in the new tourism world. It was a daft question. How could she have been expected to have foreseen what was to be? And especially on the east coast of Mallorca. As she commented then, while Cala Bona had its inn, Cala Millor had nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a house and certainly not a hotel. It wasn't until 1933 that a hotel emerged in Cala Millor - the Eureka - by which time there were also some small houses.
In the inter-war years, the east coast was all but overlooked when it came to the early development of resorts (Porto Cristo and especially the caves were a different matter; they hadn't been overlooked). As I remarked yesterday, Cala Ratjada, which had its rich villa and palace owners, might have become one of those inter-war resorts, but it didn't. The only true tourism development was way down on the south-east corner in what was to be called Cala d'Or. When tourism development kicked in in the 1960s, it was development with a large "D". The coast from Cala Bona down to Calas de Mallorca was referred to, in derogatory terms, as the "wall of concrete", and it was compared with a similar "wall" along the Playa de Palma. There was, however, one pretty crucial difference. Playa de Palma was planned. They actually wanted to build a wall of concrete in Palma. It was within one municipality, i.e. Palma, and stretched from the original resort of Ciudad Jardin to the border with Llucmajor and so Arenal, which, as an incipient resort development back in the 1930s, had been called Bellavista. The east-coast wall was not planned quite so systematically; it couldn't have been because there were three municipalities involved.
This so-called east-coast wall came into being in a more piecemeal fashion. Calas de Mallorca, at its lower end, wasn't a factor until a 1963 law on "the centres of national touristic interest" declared it a zone for development (Playa de Muro was another resort which was covered by this law). By the time that Calas de Mallorca was being legally defined, Cala Millor had been, as tourism legend tells us, "discovered" by Skytours.
Mallorca's tourism history is full of pioneers, those like Sebastian Bauzá and indeed his mother and father. But these pioneers, down Mallorca's east coast certainly, were not all, as was the case with Cala Bona, local people. There were the Schraders as well. And there were also the Belgians. Which is another tale entirely.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Paradise Regained?: What tourism should have been
(In the previous two articles I have argued that it was war and what followed - economic autarky and then technocracy - which destroyed the original principle of Mallorca's tourism from pre-war times and led to the type of tourism which emerged in the 1960s.)
The technocracy was such that it hasn't ever really gone away. It may be more friendly, it may have a greater appreciation of individuals' needs, of the environment and of markets, but it survives in its current-day form. It is typified by a Balearics tourism minister whose background is as an architect and planner and by a Mallorcan national tourism secretary of state whose specialism is property and its planning. They are representative of the new technocracy, knowledgeable of things but not, one fears, people.
Despite all this, we are seeing signs, I believe, of how uninterrupted organic development might have shaped very different resorts. The current-day technocrats are not blind to the sins of the past, even if they can sin in human terms and in being undemocratic in their biases towards property (hotels versus private accommodation, as an example). They have established a framework for belated, very belated modernisation of mature resorts, those which were the result of Fordist mass tourism. This framework cannot bring back what was lost of the natural patrimony but it can, through a re-conception of resorts, bring back - to an extent - the lost philosophy of the greater harmony of the 1930s garden city resorts. And nowhere is this potentially more evident than in Magalluf.
To take again my thesis about how war shaped later tourism development, Magalluf was a prime example. Had there been more organic development, Magalluf would still have become a resort, but it would not have been as it was to become. In 1959, approval was given for its exploitation, and that exploitation was sudden and disastrous. The environment was just one victim of a model of authoritarian-state diktat combined with virtually non-existent planning regulations and with inadequate, easily swayed, corrupt officialdom. Magalluf was, if you like, the model fascistic tourist resort. It was Fordist mass tourism in extremis. From nothing in the late '50s emerged architectural barbarism. It was the technocrats' wet dream.
Palmanova and Santa Ponsa, though they were both to also fall victim to this barbarism, were, unlike Magalluf, products of pre-war planning. Had they developed organically, they too would have been very different. Santa Ponsa is a better example than Palmanova. You can discern from some of its layout the original garden city principle, and that original principle, similar to Alcúdia, would in all likelihood have spawned a golfing resort of a different style to today. It may be forgotten that there was actually a golf company in Santa Ponsa that pre-dated Alcúdia's 1934 golf course. It was to be decades before that golf vision was realised, and by then it had to vie with the technocratic undermining of the original principle.
Magalluf would in all likelihood have been developed before it was. Like its neighbours there was a similar need for land exploitation, but this exploitation would almost certainly have corresponded with the garden city principles in 1930s' Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. All three resorts would thus have taken on a very different appearance to that which they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The chances are that there would have been a form of mass tourism even with organic development, but the mass would have been smaller and it would have been of an alternative character. It would still have been foreign, but the offer would have been less dominated by foreign culture and concreted vandalism. It would simply have been more "Mallorcan". The transformation of Magalluf, as we are not witnessing because of Meliá's intervention, is, I would argue, along lines that would have emerged had Magalluf been left to develop organically and not been that model fascistic tourist resort. Even aspects of the new look owe something to the 1930s principles: boulevard, green areas, and thus a greater harmony between living space and natural patrimony.
One of the challenges that Mallorca faces is determining what mass should now mean. If it is to be smaller mass, and it may well mean this, then there are inevitable consequences, but this smaller mass would have been the norm had it not been for the mad dash to develop in the 1960s. One can argue that what occurred in the '60s was in fact an aberration. It was not how it was meant to have been and it was not how it would have been, had war not led to the desperate solutions of the technocrats and had the resorts been allowed to develop organically. It has taken fifty years to attempt to right the wrongs of fascistic mass tourism. These attempts should not be criticised. They should be applauded. They are what Mallorca should have been.
The technocracy was such that it hasn't ever really gone away. It may be more friendly, it may have a greater appreciation of individuals' needs, of the environment and of markets, but it survives in its current-day form. It is typified by a Balearics tourism minister whose background is as an architect and planner and by a Mallorcan national tourism secretary of state whose specialism is property and its planning. They are representative of the new technocracy, knowledgeable of things but not, one fears, people.
Despite all this, we are seeing signs, I believe, of how uninterrupted organic development might have shaped very different resorts. The current-day technocrats are not blind to the sins of the past, even if they can sin in human terms and in being undemocratic in their biases towards property (hotels versus private accommodation, as an example). They have established a framework for belated, very belated modernisation of mature resorts, those which were the result of Fordist mass tourism. This framework cannot bring back what was lost of the natural patrimony but it can, through a re-conception of resorts, bring back - to an extent - the lost philosophy of the greater harmony of the 1930s garden city resorts. And nowhere is this potentially more evident than in Magalluf.
To take again my thesis about how war shaped later tourism development, Magalluf was a prime example. Had there been more organic development, Magalluf would still have become a resort, but it would not have been as it was to become. In 1959, approval was given for its exploitation, and that exploitation was sudden and disastrous. The environment was just one victim of a model of authoritarian-state diktat combined with virtually non-existent planning regulations and with inadequate, easily swayed, corrupt officialdom. Magalluf was, if you like, the model fascistic tourist resort. It was Fordist mass tourism in extremis. From nothing in the late '50s emerged architectural barbarism. It was the technocrats' wet dream.
Palmanova and Santa Ponsa, though they were both to also fall victim to this barbarism, were, unlike Magalluf, products of pre-war planning. Had they developed organically, they too would have been very different. Santa Ponsa is a better example than Palmanova. You can discern from some of its layout the original garden city principle, and that original principle, similar to Alcúdia, would in all likelihood have spawned a golfing resort of a different style to today. It may be forgotten that there was actually a golf company in Santa Ponsa that pre-dated Alcúdia's 1934 golf course. It was to be decades before that golf vision was realised, and by then it had to vie with the technocratic undermining of the original principle.
Magalluf would in all likelihood have been developed before it was. Like its neighbours there was a similar need for land exploitation, but this exploitation would almost certainly have corresponded with the garden city principles in 1930s' Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. All three resorts would thus have taken on a very different appearance to that which they did in the 1950s and 1960s. The chances are that there would have been a form of mass tourism even with organic development, but the mass would have been smaller and it would have been of an alternative character. It would still have been foreign, but the offer would have been less dominated by foreign culture and concreted vandalism. It would simply have been more "Mallorcan". The transformation of Magalluf, as we are not witnessing because of Meliá's intervention, is, I would argue, along lines that would have emerged had Magalluf been left to develop organically and not been that model fascistic tourist resort. Even aspects of the new look owe something to the 1930s principles: boulevard, green areas, and thus a greater harmony between living space and natural patrimony.
One of the challenges that Mallorca faces is determining what mass should now mean. If it is to be smaller mass, and it may well mean this, then there are inevitable consequences, but this smaller mass would have been the norm had it not been for the mad dash to develop in the 1960s. One can argue that what occurred in the '60s was in fact an aberration. It was not how it was meant to have been and it was not how it would have been, had war not led to the desperate solutions of the technocrats and had the resorts been allowed to develop organically. It has taken fifty years to attempt to right the wrongs of fascistic mass tourism. These attempts should not be criticised. They should be applauded. They are what Mallorca should have been.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Mallorca's Tourism: The technocratic solution
In the first article in this series I looked at how Mallorca's tourism, had it not been for war, would have developed organically in line with a philosophy established in the early years of the twentieth century.
What happened instead was that there was no philosophy, other than a politico-economic philosophy of technocracy. At its most extreme, technocracy advocates a scientific response to a problem, usually with scant regard for democratic principles or general welfare needs. Spain's solution, and thus Mallorca's, was primarily a technocratic one, and the technocrats were those who inhabited Franco's think-tank.
Franco himself was unconvinced as to the merits of tourism, mainly because he feared a corruption of a highly conservative, Catholic and introverted society by foreigners, for whom he reserved a paranoid xenophobia. It took the Americans to, in effect, bribe him into thinking differently. But once he started to change his thinking, he needed those who would bring about this new tourism industry. And those were the technocrats of Opus Dei. Their scientific method was one which owed a great deal to Henry Ford: mass production and standardisation. Take the mass out of the car factory, put it in the resorts and what do you get? Mass tourism. Far from being organic, therefore, Mallorca's tourism development was subject to a sudden shock of artificiality that tore down the edifice of the original philosophy and erected instead innumerable edifices that ripped to shreds the garden city notion and the natural patrimony.
War - both the Civil War and the Second World War - reinforced Franco's paranoia. It led to the imposition of the truly disastrous economic model of autarky, a model symptomatic of the hyper-xenophobic. Had the post-war model been open rather than closed, it is arguable that war would have represented a pause in tourism development and not a breakdown, but autarky was a consequence of war and of its dogmatic victors. Thus, war was the determining factor in shaping what was to occur towards the end of the fifties, which was the technocratic solution of Fordist mass tourism as a response to the complete failure of war-inspired autarky.
It is all hypothesis, I appreciate, and there is a further factor which suggests that tourism development may well have occurred in the way that it did anyway. And that, perversely enough, was the very land that the founding fathers of Mallorca's tourism were keen to preserve as much as possible for its heritage value. Coastal land had typically been considered all but worthless. The need to exploit it was a further reason why the 1930s garden city resorts emerged, but it doesn't follow that this need for exploitation would inevitably have led to the total transformation of some of the island's coastline (parts of Calvia being cases in point). Coming back to Alcúdia and to its pre-war golf course and hotel, it might have been that the development there would have been more in line with a golfing resort, perhaps in a Portuguese style. Alcúdia would be a very different place now, had it been. The part tourist, part residential urbanisation was already conceived in the 1930s, don't forget. Organic development would have meant something quite different to the artificiality of the 1960s that rapidly sought to make up for the lost 30 or more years in the desperate pursuit of the pressing need for sudden economic improvement.
Perhaps above all, a continuous process of development would have meant that the Mallorcan people maintained control of their destiny. Sure, a whole load of Mallorcans cashed in thanks to mass tourism, but the cashing-in was made possible by an economic model dictated from Madrid, by foreign interests and by a total loss of the collective spirit that had sought to maintain the natural patrimony. The Mallorcans lost much of their own say, and so little did their culture come to matter, that by the time mass tourism arrived it had been cast adrift on the Mediterranean and been replaced by a kitsch Spanishness and the comfort blankets of imported foreign cultures for the new tourist innocents abroad, British and German for the most part.
The technocratic solution also took away what soul there would have been in Mallorca's tourism. Mass production for the factory floor paid little attention to the needs of the individual. Mass tourism was similar. It dealt with units of production: hotels of standard designs and tourists packaged into the hotels' standardised rooms. The human touch was absent from the technocratic solution, but fortunately the human touch couldn't be killed off, and it was maintained by what grew up alongside the hotels - the bars and restaurants of the resorts, the so-called complementary offer. It was they, more than other parts of this new tourism industry, which humanised mass tourism. It is all the more scandalous, therefore, that this very humanising element has been so disregarded by the current-day scramble to impose all-inclusives.
(The final part tomorrow.)
What happened instead was that there was no philosophy, other than a politico-economic philosophy of technocracy. At its most extreme, technocracy advocates a scientific response to a problem, usually with scant regard for democratic principles or general welfare needs. Spain's solution, and thus Mallorca's, was primarily a technocratic one, and the technocrats were those who inhabited Franco's think-tank.
Franco himself was unconvinced as to the merits of tourism, mainly because he feared a corruption of a highly conservative, Catholic and introverted society by foreigners, for whom he reserved a paranoid xenophobia. It took the Americans to, in effect, bribe him into thinking differently. But once he started to change his thinking, he needed those who would bring about this new tourism industry. And those were the technocrats of Opus Dei. Their scientific method was one which owed a great deal to Henry Ford: mass production and standardisation. Take the mass out of the car factory, put it in the resorts and what do you get? Mass tourism. Far from being organic, therefore, Mallorca's tourism development was subject to a sudden shock of artificiality that tore down the edifice of the original philosophy and erected instead innumerable edifices that ripped to shreds the garden city notion and the natural patrimony.
War - both the Civil War and the Second World War - reinforced Franco's paranoia. It led to the imposition of the truly disastrous economic model of autarky, a model symptomatic of the hyper-xenophobic. Had the post-war model been open rather than closed, it is arguable that war would have represented a pause in tourism development and not a breakdown, but autarky was a consequence of war and of its dogmatic victors. Thus, war was the determining factor in shaping what was to occur towards the end of the fifties, which was the technocratic solution of Fordist mass tourism as a response to the complete failure of war-inspired autarky.
It is all hypothesis, I appreciate, and there is a further factor which suggests that tourism development may well have occurred in the way that it did anyway. And that, perversely enough, was the very land that the founding fathers of Mallorca's tourism were keen to preserve as much as possible for its heritage value. Coastal land had typically been considered all but worthless. The need to exploit it was a further reason why the 1930s garden city resorts emerged, but it doesn't follow that this need for exploitation would inevitably have led to the total transformation of some of the island's coastline (parts of Calvia being cases in point). Coming back to Alcúdia and to its pre-war golf course and hotel, it might have been that the development there would have been more in line with a golfing resort, perhaps in a Portuguese style. Alcúdia would be a very different place now, had it been. The part tourist, part residential urbanisation was already conceived in the 1930s, don't forget. Organic development would have meant something quite different to the artificiality of the 1960s that rapidly sought to make up for the lost 30 or more years in the desperate pursuit of the pressing need for sudden economic improvement.
Perhaps above all, a continuous process of development would have meant that the Mallorcan people maintained control of their destiny. Sure, a whole load of Mallorcans cashed in thanks to mass tourism, but the cashing-in was made possible by an economic model dictated from Madrid, by foreign interests and by a total loss of the collective spirit that had sought to maintain the natural patrimony. The Mallorcans lost much of their own say, and so little did their culture come to matter, that by the time mass tourism arrived it had been cast adrift on the Mediterranean and been replaced by a kitsch Spanishness and the comfort blankets of imported foreign cultures for the new tourist innocents abroad, British and German for the most part.
The technocratic solution also took away what soul there would have been in Mallorca's tourism. Mass production for the factory floor paid little attention to the needs of the individual. Mass tourism was similar. It dealt with units of production: hotels of standard designs and tourists packaged into the hotels' standardised rooms. The human touch was absent from the technocratic solution, but fortunately the human touch couldn't be killed off, and it was maintained by what grew up alongside the hotels - the bars and restaurants of the resorts, the so-called complementary offer. It was they, more than other parts of this new tourism industry, which humanised mass tourism. It is all the more scandalous, therefore, that this very humanising element has been so disregarded by the current-day scramble to impose all-inclusives.
(The final part tomorrow.)
Sunday, July 20, 2014
What-If: War and Mallorca's tourism
It's a game we can all play, the what-if game. Ultimately futile, it is nonetheless a game which can be instructive in explaining how things came to be as they are; these things being Mallorca's tourism. It's a game I have been playing again, and the starting-point, strangely enough perhaps, was golf. It was the old course in Alcúdia which set me thinking.
That course was opened in 1934. It closed two years later. Thirty years after it had been opened, Mallorca got what was truly its first golf course. Had it not been for war, there would have been several courses by the time that Son Vida opened. Of that, I think you can be certain. War and what was to follow until Spain began to wake up in the 1950s disrupted the development of tourism in Mallorca, and so my thesis, if you can call it such, is that it was war, as much if not more than the dynamics of the late 1950s, which created the Mallorca of the 1960s and thus the Mallorca of today.
The Alcúdia golf course was part of the planned urbanisation of an area along the bay. Part tourist, part residential, it mirrored other similar enterprises on the island - the garden city resorts of Son Bauló, Cala d'Or, Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. While one cannot and should not ignore the part played by opportunistic entrepreneurs and bankers in the creation of these resorts and while one can also say that there was no obvious all-island masterplan which brought them about, they were nevertheless the consequence of dual philosophies. One was the garden-city philosophy itself, the harmonious co-existence between living space and the environment. The other was that of the fathers of Mallorca's tourism, most obviously Miquel dels Sants Oliver and Bartomeu Amengual at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth.
These two journalists were alert to the potential of tourism for economic development. Indeed, there was a necessity; diversification was called for because of a crisis in agriculture. They saw the potential, so much so that they conceived a tourism for the summer, which ran counter to the generally held view that tourism was a winter phenomenon. This summer tourism may have been one based on the health benefits of the seaside, but it was still a different way of looking at tourism. It was their contributions which were to inform the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board, a body whose own contribution to tourism history anywhere in the world is pretty much without parallel.
There were obviously some powerful business interests that guided the tourist board, but if one looks back at its records during the early years after its founding in 1905, what emerges is a picture of an organisation working with a co-operative spirit and within - to use a dreadful word - an holistic framework. There was little to guide the tourist board. Yes, there were experiences in France, Italy and Switzerland, but the tourist board was working from almost a blank piece of paper and was doing so in creating an integrated industry for an island with its own specific needs and constraints. One of these constraints was land and so, by association, the environment and fragile nature of an island eco-system. There may not have been a scientific environmental perspective back then, but there most definitely was one that was founded on the island's patrimony, its natural heritage. Sants Oliver had it and perhaps crucially so also did any number of individuals from the arts world who were as important to the tourist board's co-operative spirit as the businesspeople. The resorts that emerged in the 1930s were thus in keeping with a guiding philosophy. They sought to balance the needs of construction with those of the island's natural patrimony. But then, war intervened.
It is of course quite legitimate to argue that the many factors of the late 1950s and early 1960s would have conspired to create what was created in any event. There is no escaping the realities of those factors - consumerism, the jet engine, higher standards of living, paid holidays, tour operators and so on. Perhaps it would have happened as it did, but I somewhat doubt it. My argument is that had it not been for war, Mallorca's tourism development would have been organic. It would have taken the creations and attitudes of the 1930s - the garden city resorts, the golf, the awareness of the natural patrimony - allied them to what was evident from the early part of the last century in terms of hotels, predominantly up-market ones, and followed a straighter line in arriving at a different model of tourism. It would thus have been a continuous revision of the original philosophy and one that would have been more sympathetic to that patrimony.
(To be continued tomorrow.)
That course was opened in 1934. It closed two years later. Thirty years after it had been opened, Mallorca got what was truly its first golf course. Had it not been for war, there would have been several courses by the time that Son Vida opened. Of that, I think you can be certain. War and what was to follow until Spain began to wake up in the 1950s disrupted the development of tourism in Mallorca, and so my thesis, if you can call it such, is that it was war, as much if not more than the dynamics of the late 1950s, which created the Mallorca of the 1960s and thus the Mallorca of today.
The Alcúdia golf course was part of the planned urbanisation of an area along the bay. Part tourist, part residential, it mirrored other similar enterprises on the island - the garden city resorts of Son Bauló, Cala d'Or, Palmanova and Santa Ponsa. While one cannot and should not ignore the part played by opportunistic entrepreneurs and bankers in the creation of these resorts and while one can also say that there was no obvious all-island masterplan which brought them about, they were nevertheless the consequence of dual philosophies. One was the garden-city philosophy itself, the harmonious co-existence between living space and the environment. The other was that of the fathers of Mallorca's tourism, most obviously Miquel dels Sants Oliver and Bartomeu Amengual at the end of the nineteenth century and start of the twentieth.
These two journalists were alert to the potential of tourism for economic development. Indeed, there was a necessity; diversification was called for because of a crisis in agriculture. They saw the potential, so much so that they conceived a tourism for the summer, which ran counter to the generally held view that tourism was a winter phenomenon. This summer tourism may have been one based on the health benefits of the seaside, but it was still a different way of looking at tourism. It was their contributions which were to inform the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board, a body whose own contribution to tourism history anywhere in the world is pretty much without parallel.
There were obviously some powerful business interests that guided the tourist board, but if one looks back at its records during the early years after its founding in 1905, what emerges is a picture of an organisation working with a co-operative spirit and within - to use a dreadful word - an holistic framework. There was little to guide the tourist board. Yes, there were experiences in France, Italy and Switzerland, but the tourist board was working from almost a blank piece of paper and was doing so in creating an integrated industry for an island with its own specific needs and constraints. One of these constraints was land and so, by association, the environment and fragile nature of an island eco-system. There may not have been a scientific environmental perspective back then, but there most definitely was one that was founded on the island's patrimony, its natural heritage. Sants Oliver had it and perhaps crucially so also did any number of individuals from the arts world who were as important to the tourist board's co-operative spirit as the businesspeople. The resorts that emerged in the 1930s were thus in keeping with a guiding philosophy. They sought to balance the needs of construction with those of the island's natural patrimony. But then, war intervened.
It is of course quite legitimate to argue that the many factors of the late 1950s and early 1960s would have conspired to create what was created in any event. There is no escaping the realities of those factors - consumerism, the jet engine, higher standards of living, paid holidays, tour operators and so on. Perhaps it would have happened as it did, but I somewhat doubt it. My argument is that had it not been for war, Mallorca's tourism development would have been organic. It would have taken the creations and attitudes of the 1930s - the garden city resorts, the golf, the awareness of the natural patrimony - allied them to what was evident from the early part of the last century in terms of hotels, predominantly up-market ones, and followed a straighter line in arriving at a different model of tourism. It would thus have been a continuous revision of the original philosophy and one that would have been more sympathetic to that patrimony.
(To be continued tomorrow.)
Sunday, April 27, 2014
The Invention Of The Summer Season
In a few days time we will wish April goodbye. We will thank it for its mostly blissful and unusually warm weather. Thank it for bringing riches of tourists over Easter. Thank it for having been a more-than-decent warm-up act for once. In a few days time it will be the first of May, the official opening day of the summer tourism season. The resorts, generally already reasonably busy, will crank up their busy-ness. There will be more coaches, more people, more of everything. But being the first day of the season, it will also be a national holiday. Labour Day. Fortunately, not everyone chooses to close for the day, though there is something comically appropriate about the season's commencement coinciding with a day of non-labour.
Official starts to seasons are the stuff of recent tourism vintage. In the good old days, there weren't official starts. There weren't seasons - not in a tourism sense of the word. There wasn't tourism, so how could there have been?
The tourism summer season is typically styled as being a phenomenon which took off in the early 1960s. In terms of mass tourism, this was the case, but the summer season already existed and its roots lay with the new fad for sunbathing that grew between the two world wars. Assigning a precise date (if not place) to the emergence of the summer season is impossible. Tourism, prior to the advent of its organisers - the tour operators - was mostly organic. It had a natural development, aided by those who acted as cheerleaders for the "island of calm", a term first used by the Catalan artist and writer Santiago Rusiñol in 1912.
Rusiñol was in the vanguard of literary and artistic sorts who were to introduce a Bohemian element to Mallorca. If places on the island can be identified as original destinations for summer tourism, then they would be those with which these Bohemians were associated - Formentor and Puerto Pollensa and El Terreno in Palma. But most visitors in the early part of the last century were attracted less by the summer than by the winter; tourism to Mallorca was predominantly during what we would now call the off-season. It was the sunbathing trend - with the French and Americans to its fore - which was to secure Mallorca's summer future.
Going back further, Mallorca was an island that was mainly unknown and generally ignored. The first tourists to anywhere, it might be said, were the upper-class young men of the Grand Tour. For two centuries from the mid-seventeenth century they took journeys of European cultural discovery. Mallorca was not on the Grand Tour; indeed Spain was not part of the usual itinerary. Mallorca had nothing to offer. It was some island stuck in the middle of the sea.
It makes for a bit of a story, but crediting Frederic Chopin with having been the first Mallorcan tourist is somewhat far-fetched. It could be argued that he invented the notion of health tourism, as his stay on Mallorca in the late 1830s had supposedly been intended to have been for the good of his poor health. But he wintered miserably, along with his live-in lover, and wasn't about to become a regular return visitor to the island. The greater claim on having been a first-mover of Mallorcan tourism was one of those European upper-class young men: an aristocratic young man, the Archduke Louis Salvador Maria Joseph John Baptist Dominic Rainer Ferdinand Charles Zenobius Anthony of Austria. The many-named Archduke was a tour party all of his own. The Archduke, who laboured for over 20 years putting together the several volumes of his grand work, "Die Balearen", wasn't a tourist though. He was a resident. It was to be friends and associates who visited him in Valldemossa and Deyá in the later part of the nineteenth century who were the tourists. Painters, historians, naturalists, poets, ornithologists; you name them, they visited.
The Archduke, who was to be named honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourist Board) in 1909, was undeniably important in fostering subsequent tourism in the form of Germanic generations who were to come for the sun and who were to - for all time - become the butt of jokes on account of their beach-towel behaviour. But that was to be a different type of tourism to that which his friends enjoyed. This different type - summer season tourism - can only truly be said to have started with Gerard Blitz (Club Med) and Vladimir Raitz (Horizon) at the start of the 1950s, though the role of the British Workers' Travel Association shouldn't be forgotten in the context of the development of the Mallorcan summer season. A trade-union association, its membership would have applauded the fact that Labour Day was a national holiday and the first day of the season.
Official starts to seasons are the stuff of recent tourism vintage. In the good old days, there weren't official starts. There weren't seasons - not in a tourism sense of the word. There wasn't tourism, so how could there have been?
The tourism summer season is typically styled as being a phenomenon which took off in the early 1960s. In terms of mass tourism, this was the case, but the summer season already existed and its roots lay with the new fad for sunbathing that grew between the two world wars. Assigning a precise date (if not place) to the emergence of the summer season is impossible. Tourism, prior to the advent of its organisers - the tour operators - was mostly organic. It had a natural development, aided by those who acted as cheerleaders for the "island of calm", a term first used by the Catalan artist and writer Santiago Rusiñol in 1912.
Rusiñol was in the vanguard of literary and artistic sorts who were to introduce a Bohemian element to Mallorca. If places on the island can be identified as original destinations for summer tourism, then they would be those with which these Bohemians were associated - Formentor and Puerto Pollensa and El Terreno in Palma. But most visitors in the early part of the last century were attracted less by the summer than by the winter; tourism to Mallorca was predominantly during what we would now call the off-season. It was the sunbathing trend - with the French and Americans to its fore - which was to secure Mallorca's summer future.
Going back further, Mallorca was an island that was mainly unknown and generally ignored. The first tourists to anywhere, it might be said, were the upper-class young men of the Grand Tour. For two centuries from the mid-seventeenth century they took journeys of European cultural discovery. Mallorca was not on the Grand Tour; indeed Spain was not part of the usual itinerary. Mallorca had nothing to offer. It was some island stuck in the middle of the sea.
It makes for a bit of a story, but crediting Frederic Chopin with having been the first Mallorcan tourist is somewhat far-fetched. It could be argued that he invented the notion of health tourism, as his stay on Mallorca in the late 1830s had supposedly been intended to have been for the good of his poor health. But he wintered miserably, along with his live-in lover, and wasn't about to become a regular return visitor to the island. The greater claim on having been a first-mover of Mallorcan tourism was one of those European upper-class young men: an aristocratic young man, the Archduke Louis Salvador Maria Joseph John Baptist Dominic Rainer Ferdinand Charles Zenobius Anthony of Austria. The many-named Archduke was a tour party all of his own. The Archduke, who laboured for over 20 years putting together the several volumes of his grand work, "Die Balearen", wasn't a tourist though. He was a resident. It was to be friends and associates who visited him in Valldemossa and Deyá in the later part of the nineteenth century who were the tourists. Painters, historians, naturalists, poets, ornithologists; you name them, they visited.
The Archduke, who was to be named honorary president of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourist Board) in 1909, was undeniably important in fostering subsequent tourism in the form of Germanic generations who were to come for the sun and who were to - for all time - become the butt of jokes on account of their beach-towel behaviour. But that was to be a different type of tourism to that which his friends enjoyed. This different type - summer season tourism - can only truly be said to have started with Gerard Blitz (Club Med) and Vladimir Raitz (Horizon) at the start of the 1950s, though the role of the British Workers' Travel Association shouldn't be forgotten in the context of the development of the Mallorcan summer season. A trade-union association, its membership would have applauded the fact that Labour Day was a national holiday and the first day of the season.
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Voices In My Head: Article writing
There was a strange moment on Friday evening. I was listening to the playback of the latest edition of Radio 2's "The People's Songs". It went under the title "Y Viva España". The theme, as the song title might suggest, was holidays; foreign holidays as they were when the British, first discovered them. These were the days of innocent adventure, the discovery of what really was a new world or a very different world.
The strange moment was when the presenter, Stuart Maconie, made a reference to those things we took on holiday. One of them was a Harold Robbins novel. Why might this be strange? Because some weeks previously, I had written a history of Mallorca's tourism. And in it, I had mentioned the packing of the Harold Robbins novel into the suitcase to be taken away to the sun and heat of Mallorca. Moreover, I had considered how popular culture reflected those early days of tourism in the sixties and into the seventies. A key element of this popular culture was music, and in the article, I had quoted from a song which, while it was truly dreadful, summed up much about Mallorcan and Costas holidays of the time - "Y Viva España".
Invoking Sylvia's far from classic was hardly very original; in fact, it was very unoriginal. A Robbins novel, on the other hand, I had thought was less obvious. It came to mind only because my father was an avid reader of his stuff. Perhaps it was more obvious than I had thought, though, and so Maconie cited it as well.
But then there were further references in the programme. One was to Vladimir Raitz, the founder of Horizon Holidays and effectively the founder of the package holiday. In my article, Raitz played a key part, one reason having been because Raitz tends to be forgotten in tourism history, his place in it overtaken by those who came later, such as Harry Goodman.
All the references in Maconie's programme were coincidences. My article clearly hadn't informed his script. It isn't available online, and the programme was doubtless recorded some time ago, so I am not for one moment suggesting that the references were anything other than obvious or perhaps less obvious examples of two people writing from a similar page.
There is, however, something stranger. When I conceived the tourism history article, I had been influenced by a previous episode of "The People's Songs", which deals with the anecdotal. I didn't end up with the volume of personal accounts that I might have liked that went into the article in the fiftieth anniversary special of the "Majorca Daily Bulletin", but I got some. It's an idea I'd like to revisit and see if more can be generated, but that's for another time; I had wanted the article to be that much more personal.
Even more than this influence was Maconie himself. A good part of that article was written with a voice in my head. Maconie's. Much of it was structured in such a way that it was as if a radio script was being read out, one of Maconie's, so the style was similar. It wasn't anything like as good as Maconie, but his style of delivery was firmly in my head as I wrote it.
There are different influences on how one writes. Usually, they are influences found in the writing of others. But I had never written something in the way I did a good deal of the tourism history article, so it was this which was really very strange, because, as I was listening to "Y Viva España" with its various common references, that I half imagined it was me doing the talking. It was most odd.
That tourism history article isn't online. Indeed, the one that appeared in the special supplement was heavily edited because the original was very much longer. I'm minded to seek permission to be able to put it up online. If I do, then you might read it and think of Maconie. Alternatively, you might think I'm crackers. Voices in my head. Mad or what.
"The People's Songs", "Y Viva España": http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l9qb8
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
The strange moment was when the presenter, Stuart Maconie, made a reference to those things we took on holiday. One of them was a Harold Robbins novel. Why might this be strange? Because some weeks previously, I had written a history of Mallorca's tourism. And in it, I had mentioned the packing of the Harold Robbins novel into the suitcase to be taken away to the sun and heat of Mallorca. Moreover, I had considered how popular culture reflected those early days of tourism in the sixties and into the seventies. A key element of this popular culture was music, and in the article, I had quoted from a song which, while it was truly dreadful, summed up much about Mallorcan and Costas holidays of the time - "Y Viva España".
Invoking Sylvia's far from classic was hardly very original; in fact, it was very unoriginal. A Robbins novel, on the other hand, I had thought was less obvious. It came to mind only because my father was an avid reader of his stuff. Perhaps it was more obvious than I had thought, though, and so Maconie cited it as well.
But then there were further references in the programme. One was to Vladimir Raitz, the founder of Horizon Holidays and effectively the founder of the package holiday. In my article, Raitz played a key part, one reason having been because Raitz tends to be forgotten in tourism history, his place in it overtaken by those who came later, such as Harry Goodman.
All the references in Maconie's programme were coincidences. My article clearly hadn't informed his script. It isn't available online, and the programme was doubtless recorded some time ago, so I am not for one moment suggesting that the references were anything other than obvious or perhaps less obvious examples of two people writing from a similar page.
There is, however, something stranger. When I conceived the tourism history article, I had been influenced by a previous episode of "The People's Songs", which deals with the anecdotal. I didn't end up with the volume of personal accounts that I might have liked that went into the article in the fiftieth anniversary special of the "Majorca Daily Bulletin", but I got some. It's an idea I'd like to revisit and see if more can be generated, but that's for another time; I had wanted the article to be that much more personal.
Even more than this influence was Maconie himself. A good part of that article was written with a voice in my head. Maconie's. Much of it was structured in such a way that it was as if a radio script was being read out, one of Maconie's, so the style was similar. It wasn't anything like as good as Maconie, but his style of delivery was firmly in my head as I wrote it.
There are different influences on how one writes. Usually, they are influences found in the writing of others. But I had never written something in the way I did a good deal of the tourism history article, so it was this which was really very strange, because, as I was listening to "Y Viva España" with its various common references, that I half imagined it was me doing the talking. It was most odd.
That tourism history article isn't online. Indeed, the one that appeared in the special supplement was heavily edited because the original was very much longer. I'm minded to seek permission to be able to put it up online. If I do, then you might read it and think of Maconie. Alternatively, you might think I'm crackers. Voices in my head. Mad or what.
"The People's Songs", "Y Viva España": http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l9qb8
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Friday, March 15, 2013
The People's History Of Mallorca's Tourism
The statistics form the dry bones of the story of Mallorca's tourism. There are many, many other stories that contribute to the island's tourism history. Many other stories that resonate with nostalgic names: Dan Air, Britannia, Intasun, Horizon, Clarkson, Pontinental. Other stories that tell of the growth of the resorts. From the time, in 1960, when it could be said of the beaches of Magalluf and Palmanova that they were all but deserted in summertime. Stories of a clash of cultures, one that was so extreme that, so said a study in 1971, 90% of mental illness among teenage males, unused to the sight of so much near-naked female flesh, was caused by that flesh. So many stories.
Tourism history has a tendency to deal solely with the factual. Mallorca's tourism history is replete with information about the number of hotels, about when and where they were built and about how many beds they had. It is a history crammed with figures for passenger movement at Palma's Son Sant Joan, the airport itself being its own historical category, as it first opened to commercial airlines in 1960. There are other figures for arrivals at Palma's port. Figures for the costs of this and the costs of that.
Getting the facts right is imperative, but there is one key ingredient which is often overlooked in tourism history. Tourists. Or, more accurately, people. Without people, there are no tourists. Without tourists, there is no tourism. This is a statement of the blindingly obvious, but people - tourists, holidaymakers, vacationers, travellers, call them as you will - can appear to be the least important element of the tourism industry. They are human resources, processed through the airport, channelled to transfer coaches, checked in and marked down at receptions, packaged into hotel rooms. They are the raw material of the tourism industry, one to be counted and converted into a table of data, evaluated by accountants measuring turnover, allocated living space according to a minimum requirement of square metres.
Tourism is nothing without people and nothing without people's feelings for Mallorca, nothing without what people see, hear, do. Nothing without the emotional bonds that they form with the island. Nothing without the collective memory that creates its own history, a history of tourism as experienced by people. The people's history of Mallorca's tourism.
To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the "Majorca Daily Bulletin", a special supplement is to be published in May. It will also coincide with the official awarding of Pedro Serra's MBE. The supplement will contain a major feature about fifty years of Mallorca's tourism. It was one that I had started to write, when it occurred to me that there was something missing. The people's history of tourism was what was missing.
And so, this is where you come in. While the feature will cover developments over the past fifty years, I want to weave in your own stories. They can be whatever you want to say. They can be about the island as a whole or just a single place or resort. They can be about how things have changed. They can be about what it was like to come to Mallorca for the first time; they can be funny or sad; they can be about characters you have known; about hotels, restaurants, bars, beaches, music, excursions, tour operators, airlines, roads; about, in some cases, why you stayed in Mallorca. There is no limit, except perhaps within reason. And they don't have to be about the sixties. Fifty years are fifty years, so the noughties are as relevant as the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. And if you are not British, please don't think that you are excluded, as you most certainly are not.
It's over to you. Write as much or as little as you want. If you have photos as well, and are happy to give permission for possible publication, then they would also be most welcome. I look forward to hearing from you. Contact: andrew@thealcudiaguide.com (subject, tourism history).
* The photo is of Alcúdia beach early 1970s, courtesy of Sheila Nicholls.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Every Poster Tells A Tourism Story
It mystifies me why more is not made of an aspect of Mallorcan and Spanish history that is, for many people, more relevant and more real than much of the history that tourism bodies would prefer to shove down people's throats. Indeed, the tourism bodies are missing a trick, because they are sitting on a vast repository of documentation and images that is a record of the very thing they are concerned with and is what intrigues any number of visitors - tourism itself and its history.
In 1985 the Institute of Touristic Studies (part of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce) was established. Its centre of documentation has well over 100,000 documents of various types. Some can be accessed via the internet or, if you happen to be in Madrid, can be seen by visiting the centre (naturally enough, only ever open in the mornings; don't let's get too carried away with convenience to the public).
The use of the word document suggests something rather dry. Many of the documents are just that, but not all. Nothing like all, as they include brochures, postcards, photos and posters.
Posters have a particular status in local culture. For some fiestas, they seem more important than the fiestas themselves. Their presentation are events in their own right, and sometimes - for the right and wrong reasons - they become news, as with the poster for the final bullfight in Barcelona (the right reason because it was so highly prized) and for Palma's most recent San Sebastià fiesta (the wrong reason because the design was plagiarised).
Posters for tourism have a long history, and not just in Spain. They were once, of course, a means of promotion for British seaside resorts, produced by the old "Big Four" regional rail companies and then the nationalised British Railways.
Spanish tourism, by comparison with that to Bridlington or Brighton, is more recent, and the Institute's astonishing collection of posters covers the second half of the last century. The golden age for the tourism poster, though, was from 1960 to 1980.
One of the first posters in the collection, dating from 1961, suggests that Spanish tourism authorities hadn't quite got the hang of what was to make Spain a mass tourism destination. A "Castilian Landscape", it shows a rainbow tumbling from a sky of blue clouds into the horizon of a wheat field.
A year later, however, and the penny has started to drop. Though the posters were all designed to promote Spain (in different languages), images of different parts of the country were used, and so Mallorca, and its beach tourism, features for the first time. A poster in French has a scene of the beach at Formentor. Sunshades made from reeds shield sunbathers, two boats and what looks like a water-skier are in the sea, pines (symbolic of the area) encroach on either side of the foreground. It looks remarkably contemporary; or maybe nothing has really changed.
The choice of Formentor, exclusive then and still exclusive, does perhaps hint at the type of tourism that was being mainly hoped for. In the same year, there is a poster for Torremolinos. Not of what you might expect, but of its golf course. Benidorm appears for the first time in 1966, or at least the name appears; you don't see any of the resort, just some sail boats on a beach.
As the 1960s progress, you can trace how widely promotion was being conducted. Posters are produced for exhibitions across Europe and even in New York. Historic sites vie with the image of the bullfight and with those of resorts, and Mallorca shows off a second - Cala San Vicente with the iconic shot of the Cavall Bernat horse promontory across the Cala Molins.
The "alternative" tourism of the current day is revealed to be not quite so alternative or new. In addition to the likes of golf, gastronomy appears in 1967; a rustic bodega with an Iberian ham very much in evidence. But by now, mass tourism is being admitted to, and it is Torremolinos again, this time with a beach scene, not packed with people, but in far greater numbers than had been on Formentor beach.
I could go on, but you should see for yourselves. The collection is fascinating and it is made more fascinating because the posters represent images and resorts which mean something, which is the point of much Mallorcan and Spanish tourism history - it is history within people's own lifetimes. And this is why more should be made of it.
To see the posters, go to http://www.iet.tourspain.es. There is an English section, and you need to click on "documentary funds", then "catalogues search" and you will come to a list which includes "tourist posters". Type in "España" where it says "words" in the first box, then put in the dates 1960-1980 and opt for dates ascending or descending.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
In 1985 the Institute of Touristic Studies (part of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce) was established. Its centre of documentation has well over 100,000 documents of various types. Some can be accessed via the internet or, if you happen to be in Madrid, can be seen by visiting the centre (naturally enough, only ever open in the mornings; don't let's get too carried away with convenience to the public).
The use of the word document suggests something rather dry. Many of the documents are just that, but not all. Nothing like all, as they include brochures, postcards, photos and posters.
Posters have a particular status in local culture. For some fiestas, they seem more important than the fiestas themselves. Their presentation are events in their own right, and sometimes - for the right and wrong reasons - they become news, as with the poster for the final bullfight in Barcelona (the right reason because it was so highly prized) and for Palma's most recent San Sebastià fiesta (the wrong reason because the design was plagiarised).
Posters for tourism have a long history, and not just in Spain. They were once, of course, a means of promotion for British seaside resorts, produced by the old "Big Four" regional rail companies and then the nationalised British Railways.
Spanish tourism, by comparison with that to Bridlington or Brighton, is more recent, and the Institute's astonishing collection of posters covers the second half of the last century. The golden age for the tourism poster, though, was from 1960 to 1980.
One of the first posters in the collection, dating from 1961, suggests that Spanish tourism authorities hadn't quite got the hang of what was to make Spain a mass tourism destination. A "Castilian Landscape", it shows a rainbow tumbling from a sky of blue clouds into the horizon of a wheat field.
A year later, however, and the penny has started to drop. Though the posters were all designed to promote Spain (in different languages), images of different parts of the country were used, and so Mallorca, and its beach tourism, features for the first time. A poster in French has a scene of the beach at Formentor. Sunshades made from reeds shield sunbathers, two boats and what looks like a water-skier are in the sea, pines (symbolic of the area) encroach on either side of the foreground. It looks remarkably contemporary; or maybe nothing has really changed.
The choice of Formentor, exclusive then and still exclusive, does perhaps hint at the type of tourism that was being mainly hoped for. In the same year, there is a poster for Torremolinos. Not of what you might expect, but of its golf course. Benidorm appears for the first time in 1966, or at least the name appears; you don't see any of the resort, just some sail boats on a beach.
As the 1960s progress, you can trace how widely promotion was being conducted. Posters are produced for exhibitions across Europe and even in New York. Historic sites vie with the image of the bullfight and with those of resorts, and Mallorca shows off a second - Cala San Vicente with the iconic shot of the Cavall Bernat horse promontory across the Cala Molins.
The "alternative" tourism of the current day is revealed to be not quite so alternative or new. In addition to the likes of golf, gastronomy appears in 1967; a rustic bodega with an Iberian ham very much in evidence. But by now, mass tourism is being admitted to, and it is Torremolinos again, this time with a beach scene, not packed with people, but in far greater numbers than had been on Formentor beach.
I could go on, but you should see for yourselves. The collection is fascinating and it is made more fascinating because the posters represent images and resorts which mean something, which is the point of much Mallorcan and Spanish tourism history - it is history within people's own lifetimes. And this is why more should be made of it.
To see the posters, go to http://www.iet.tourspain.es. There is an English section, and you need to click on "documentary funds", then "catalogues search" and you will come to a list which includes "tourist posters". Type in "España" where it says "words" in the first box, then put in the dates 1960-1980 and opt for dates ascending or descending.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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