Sand In Your Shoes

I wonder if Dido still has sand in her shoes. It's some fourteen years since she informed us that she did. Two weeks away and the whole world should have changed, she intoned, adding that she would leave it until tomorrow to unpack. Like so many before and since, Dido was unable to accept her return to normality. Like so many before and since, she had returned home with part of the beach.

Around the same time as Dido was lamenting her lost fortnight, I came across a sign on a beach (Playa de Muro's rustic Es Comú, if you must know), which very kindly asked its visitors to not leave with the beach. In other words, it noted that the sand was valuable and could one ensure that as little of it as possible (if any) was taken with one on leaving.

At the time, I found this sign ever so slightly absurd. Does anyone willingly leave a beach with sand? There is, after all, all that vigorous shaking of towels, etc. that goes on. Yet it is impossible to leave without sand. Is one supposed to add some form of mobile hoover to all the other paraphernalia that makes its way onto the beach in order to vacuum up the sand and then deposit in a nice recycled heap? One might do, but one can also be sure that, having completed this task, the northeasterly will blow and cover the towel with yet more sand.

The last thing anyone wants to take away from a beach is sand. It is extraordinarily annoying and, as Dido discovered, it can linger well beyond the check-in at departures. So, while signs can remind us all of the necessity not to take it away and inadvertently affect endangered biodiversity (or whatever), it's reasonable to suggest that these signs are somewhat redundant.

There again, they do act as reminders of the importance of sand while letting visitors know that the sand isn't theirs. It's our (Mallorca's) sand, and Mallorca is where it should stay, preferably on the beach. A problem is, though, that there are all manner of people other than your normal beachgoers who are getting in on the beach act and then disappearing with sand. More than that, they are taking the beach over, staking it out, treating it as though it were theirs, when it most certainly is not.

A couple of days ago, I drew attention to the fact that one cannot trespass on certain beaches for reasons to do with heightened environmental sensitivity or with the possibility of being shot by the military. Such limitations are fortunately few and far between. Beaches are freely available, and so is the sand. A pleasant sandy cove. Where could be better than to have a wedding?

One is tempted to think that this is all the fault of the Benidorm TV series. There they all were on the beach. The riff-raff tourists (and residents) had clearly been ushered away. Madge and Mel were there to be married and would have properly tied the knot had The Oracle not crash-landed on Mel. Ever since, beaches of whatever type and wherever have become the locations à la mode for uttering the I do's (or their equivalents).

Über-environmentalists Terraferida, for whom I do have some time, have returned to social media with their latest tourist "massification" production. A wedding on a beach at a cove near Colonia Sant Jordi has got them into their latest lather. Now, without knowing the intimate details of the wedding arrangements, I'm nevertheless guessing that there wasn't a great phalanx of security keeping the riff-raff away. I'm also guessing that it wasn't at a time of day when the beach might possibly have been packed ("massified") by other tourists, having away with the sand. I'm also supposing that there was nothing to stop the wedding having been held, because Terraferida have pretty much said this. The Costas Authority, they insist, shouldn't be giving generalised permission for such an event, which comes as news to me as I had thought express permission was needed. Didn't James Blunt get into a bit of bother over his wedding reception on a beach?

Anyway, permission or not, what was the big deal? As far as Terraferida were concerned, the wedding was representative of the takeover of beaches. Moreover, it was organised by a foreign company (apparently). And, not that Terraferida specifically stated this, once the wedding was finished, all the guests plus happy couple would have been legging it with valuable sand. The beach had been massified, it had been ecologically endangered, and foreigners, to boot, were to blame.

Terraferida do make valuable contributions. I often agree with them, but they run the risk of alienating those who might otherwise be sympathetic by potentially trivialising their cause. Sand, it is safe to say, gets in your shoes.

Your Haitian Divorce

Friends of mine - Benjamin and Sara - got married the weekend before last. It was a fine occasion, and the ceremony took place, not in a church, as it was a civil occasion, but in "la sala", the hall at Alcúdia town hall, the one where a week later Carme Garcia of the Mallorcan socialists didn't quite tie the knot with Coloma Terrasa of the Partido Popular but made herself instead the eternal bridesmaid (for as long as eternity will last, which will not be long where Carme is concerned).

Some years ago now, other friends had decided that they would get married somewhere exotic. They chose the All-Inclusive Republic of Dominica, sometimes known just as Dominican, one half of the island of Hispaniola that Columbus colonised.

At the time, the early 1990s, transporting yourselves, to say nothing of various family members and/or friends, to far-flung lands in order to say "I do" was still fairly uncommon as well as something distinctly extravagant. There was also an anxiety attached: that getting yourselves to the church on time, or the beach-side tent, might be foiled either by British Airways going on strike or by a hurricane blowing up and carrying the tent off to Florida.

Weddings have now, though, truly gone global. The market for overseas weddings, for those in the UK who are getting hitched, accounts for one in five of all weddings. Mintel's research into this industry, published earlier this year, shows that cost is not a deterrent, indeed it can be an advantage in that it works out cheaper to head off abroad.

For Ben and Sara, the wedding at the town hall was not a case of heading abroad, as they live in Alcúdia. But for an increasing number of couples, Mallorca is now a leading destination for the foreign wedding. And in locations that, despite what Mintel say about the cost advantages of getting married abroad, can cost a fair old wedge.

"Ultima Hora" has looked at the Mallorcan wedding market. Five-star hotels, rural hotels and agrotourism fincas in the island's countryside are the favoured locations for a market that generates annually some two million euros of business and which has grown significantly over the past few years. The German market is by far the greatest, representing some 90% of all the rural and agrotourism weddings, which can, depending on the number of guests and the length of stay, run to a cost of some fifty grand.

There's money to be made from weddings, and the agrotourism industry is making a reasonable earner from them, which will come as something of a relief; the industry has been hit hard by economic crisis, and talk was that the current season would still be "difficult".

Of course, the rules regarding residency and religion influence the nature of the ceremony in Mallorca but, notwithstanding complications that need to be smoothed out by, for example, getting married under civil ceremony in the UK first, any number of places will be happy to be the location for the happy, dream day and happy to be the recipient of a sizeable number of folding notes.

Generally though, the foreign wedding pales into wedding-party insignificance against the vastness of the local wedding occasion. Just one place that does big-time receptions is the mediaeval pile of S'Alqueria d'Es Comte, near to Santa Margalida. I was once there for a Saturday evening meal at the Es Turó restaurant. A table in the inner courtyard was out of the question. So many were the numbers that it was the spillover from the main courtyard. Lord knows how many the numbers were - it was as though the entire population of the town was in attendance. (700 is in fact its capacity.)

The foreign wedding has been good news for the wedding planners as well as the hotels, but what about the divorce planners? Mallorca doesn't have quite the same advantages as the Dominican Republic. There, you can get married one day, decide it was all a mistake, and nip over to the other half of Hispaniola. And you don't need to take the other half. As immortalised in song by Steely Dan - "congratulations, this is your Haitian divorce" - untying the knot can be done without the other's permission. And it doesn't cost much. Less than fifty grand, that's for sure.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Am I Ever Gonna See My Wedding Day?

BEING SPANISH - PART THREE

Take a look along a street or at a row of houses or other buildings, and one - it might be hoped - would gain an appreciation as to one's location, albeit a very general location. It might be a good idea for some form of general knowledge quiz. Show the contestants photos of representative streets, and get them to name the country or the area. I wonder how many might get Spanish if they were to be shown some of the streets or buildings around here.

When the tourist is first deposited in one of the tourism centres, let's take The Mile as an example, what does he or she see? That expectation that some may have had of being Spanish would soon dissipate. What being Spanish is there? Only the Spanish word - nada - nothing. Tourism centres are built with one thing in mind and that's the first word of this sentence - tourism - and these centres tend to a conformity of the non-descript. They are, in some respects, comforting, as in their architectural barrenness they aspire to nothing more than a neutrality; the tourist feels no sense of dislocation by being jettisoned into a habitat of non-architecture. They are mass architecture for a mass tourism. Yet some centres could even be described as anti-architecture; they have elevated the art of a miserabilist prefabrication, combined with naked and unsympathetic commerce, into a state of anti-being Spanish which means that verification as to location can only be made through the consultation of a map or the airline ticket that confirms that one is indeed no longer in one's country of origin. Such anti-architecture exists all around, and it is not unique to one resort: Can Picafort has it in abundance; Playa de Muro boasts its hideous strip from the municipal office to the Banca March roundabout: the stretch going into the port of Alcúdia is also unit-upon-unit of unintelligent design as is that part of the frontline of Puerto Pollensa from the nautical club to Sail & Surf. Nowhere is immune to the appetite of anti-architecture.

But in truth, what does one really expect? These tourism centres are, for the most part, creations with only one thing in mind, and they are manifestations of a modernity that went largely unplanned. Moreover, these are not historic or heritage centres where conformity to a style is the first item on the planning application. Consequently, the tourism centre's sense of "being Spanish" can be said to be indeed Spanish because of its essentially ad-hoc nature. It may not be what some vague romantic image, conjured up in the mind of the tourist, may have anticipated, but it is a form of being Spanish nevertheless, albeit an equivocal one.

One looks, however, to the old towns and to the port areas for hints of something more exact. Yet what does one find? It is all too easy to overlook the fact that both the ports and both the old towns of Alcúdia and Pollensa are places not just of tourism but also of residence and business. This trinity of needs has not been well reconciled, and nowhere is evidence of this more startling than in Puerto Pollensa. There is a curious tag that gets attached to Puerto Pollensa which is that it is unspoilt or relatively unspoilt. There is no such thing as unspoilt unless there is no habitation; there is only degree of having been spoiled. But the unspoilt tag is perhaps illuminating; it is being Spanish euphemism. And so one casts one eye around Puerto Pollensa and what is revealed is a largely arbitrary set of apartments with no commonality, among which is the chic white and grey blandness of Taylor Woodrow's construction on the former Garbi hole. Where is this "being Spanish"? There is elegance, for sure; the marina has it, but not as much as Alcúdia's does. But neither marina can be defined as Spanish. If elegance is a facet of being Spanish, ironically the Taylor Woodrow building is arguably, despite its having been built without any sense of context, one of the few in Puerto Pollensa that can be said to possess it. The quaintness of old hotels in the centre of the port, unlike Alcúdia in this respect, smacks of a past, but it does not suggest Spanish as such. It is only when one gets to the square that one feels the stirrings of this vague concept, and it is the church that does it. Squares, in themselves, are not redolent of a uniquely Spanish style. Nor are churches especially, but the imposing style of Catholic churches and their positions in the centres of urban areas are a move in that direction. Puerto Pollensa does this much better than Puerto Alcúdia where there is no square and a church that one could be forgiven for ignoring. I used to. Indeed when I was first there and was told that such and such was near to the church, my reaction was what church. It was only when one day in its vicinity I heard the bells that I realised that the building which could pass for a community hall in a British council estate was indeed a church.

Amongst the non- and anti-architecture, it is the grand statements of religion that cause one to pause and recognise a being Spanish. Of course, such churches exist elsewhere in the Mediterranean as do the narrow streets of tightly built townhouses with shuttered windows, but it is they, and they alone, which impress with their strength and scale and argue the case for a being Spanish. And Pollensa old town does this with brilliance. The connections between the churches, along those narrow streets and from one square to another transport one into a clearly different place. In an architectural antiquity fashion, nowhere tries being Spanish better than Pollensa.


GETTING MARRIED IN THE MORNING
And talking of churches ... . This past weekend has seen the fifteenth annual wedding fair in Palma. Here is a strange old thing, not weddings, but the degree of interest there is in having a wedding in Mallorca; it is one of the things I get asked about from time to time, i.e. in terms of those from the UK who wish to have their wedding here. And the problem is, I don't really have a clue. I thought that one had to be a resident to have a church wedding, and this may be the case, but there is a whole industry here that arranges weddings in whatever setting. Also, there are restaurants that promote themselves as wedding breakfast locations, the splendid Jardin in Puerto Alcúdia for example. The "boda" is a massive deal here, as it is anywhere.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Bill Withers (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x28wpt_bill-withers-lovely-day-live_music). Today's title - a line from a cheesy but still great song. Who?

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Love Is In The Air

"I'm getting married in the morning, ding-dong the karaoke's gonna chime."

Ah yes, the Mallorcan wedding. One of the oddest things that crops up both in my inbox and elsewhere is the advice on getting tied here. Well maybe it's not odd, as such, just I am surprised by the regularity with which marriage in Mallorca registers - so to speak. Accordingly, I am going to be completely useless at imparting good info as I am totally confused as to the deal with getting hitched if you don't happen to be a resident or a Spaniard. I thought that you had to be a resident to actually have a religious wedding or that you could have (if not resident) a form of blessing were you already married. Whatever. If someone actually knows the lowdown, I would be very appreciative if you could give me the definitive line.

But this is largely by the bye, as I am reliably informed, by the bar-owner himself, so it is beyond doubt, that more or less everyone who passes through the portals of Vamps in Puerto Alcúdia ends up proposing marriage. Well no, not to Les (at least I don't think so), but to someone else. Actually, it isn't everyone (I made that up), but never let a touch of exaggeration spoil a good story. Quite what it is about Vamps that sets its punters down the road to the aisle I'm not sure. Perhaps it's the optical illusion thing there behind the bar. And so, next morning in the cold light of the hangover, it's a case of having been down on one knee to what was a thing of beauty through the haze of an adrenaline cocktail, but which turns out to be the garbage container at the back of the Astoria Playa hotel. But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps love is truly in the air off The Mile, as opposed to the waft of curry emanating from Taste of India.

On having all this related to me, I had this image of the Reverend Les presiding over the congregation to a karaoke accompaniment, one that I duly informed Les of, to which he responded that, rather than "dearly beloved", those in the pews (or on bar stools in this instance) would be addressed as "dearly bedraggled", and I shall genuflect with due acknowledgement in face of a bar-owner knowing better than myself the demeanour of his clientele.

It just so happens that I recently received an email asking for advice as to somewhere nice "outside" for getting married - in Alcúdia that is. I duly suggested the likes of La Terraza overlooking the sea at Alcanada or perhaps the square in front of the Sant Jaume church (always assuming the good burghers of Alcúdia would countenance such a thing). What I hadn't considered, till now, was next to the pool table on the Vamps terrace, a tattoo for the groom next door at the tattoo studio while he waits for his bride and a tikka masala wedding breakfast for all at the Indian. So, next time I get asked about a good spot for tying the knot ... .


QUIZ
Yesterday's chain - Springsteen to "Philadelphia" to Tom Hanks to Woody in "Toy Story" and therefore Buzz Lightyear. Easy. And from Buzz to Paul Simon? And today's title - who?

(PLEASE REPLY TO andrew@thealcudiaguide.com AND NOT VIA THE COMMENTS THINGY HERE.)