Maintenance Failure: Albufera

The Supreme Court in Madrid last week ruled against the Balearic Government in a compensation claim, the origins of which go back 26 years. In 1988 the Albufera wetlands were granted protection from any further development when they were declared a nature park. The regional government is thus liable for paying 21 million euros to a developer - Playas de Mallorca S.A. - in respect of some 33 hectares of land (approximately 80 acres) on which it has not been able to build villas or hotels.

The time that it has taken for the court to reach its decision is extraordinary. Ten years ago the Balearic High Court had ruled that the government was not liable, a previous decision having said that it was. The level of compensation then was 13.5 million, so over the intervening years the amount has risen by more than 50%.

Playas de Mallorca S.A. was one of the companies responsible for the transformation of Albufera into Alcúdia's City of Lakes in the 1960s and 1970s. That transformation project originally envisaged far greater development than that which occurred, but there were pockets of further development which were placed in the pipeline. The 33 hectares would have represented development of roughly a quarter of the size of what became the City of Lakes, but with protected status came prohibition and ultimately compensation.

Protection, welcome though it most certainly was, has brought with it questionable benefits. In environmental terms, one can't question the advantage of protection, but in ongoing care, attention, maintenance, management and benign exploitation, one can.

Albufera is currently experiencing a problem of a natural variety: a lack of water. The situation this autumn is much the same as it was last year. Too little rain has meant that water levels have dropped and, as a consequence, migratory aquatic birds are seeking alternative locations. The situation will doubtless right itself, but in the meantime there are fewer birds than would normally be expected and so reduced opportunities for bird watchers. Despite this, it is said that visitor numbers are "optimal", which is a vague description but not an unsurprisingly vague one. How do they know how many visitors there are?

At present, cutbacks have meant that it is not possible to conduct satisfactory censuses of the number of birds at given times in Albufera. If they can't count the wildlife, how can they count the human life? And even if they can arrive at an "optimal" number, how many of these visitors are not residents and especially not members of the regular school parties which descend on Albufera?

Keeping tabs on the number of visitors and who they are has not been helped by the fact that the Can Bateman information centre has been closed for most of the year. It has now re-opened, but its closure is symptomatic of the malaise which affects natural spaces such as Albufera. These are granted protected status or, as was the case with Son Real near Can Picafort, acquired at vast cost and are then, thanks to unclear lines of responsibility as well as lack of funding, allowed to fall into neglect.

Moreover, personnel, when there are any, receive insufficient training in the use of the information systems at Can Bateman, while there have been previous occasions when the centre has been closed and when visitors were unable to use the so-called green card (now abandoned) to obtain discounts for bike hire or indeed obtain a bike, full stop. These all point to a failure, in marketing terms, of ensuring that the product is right. But this is a marketing and product failure mirrored elsewhere in, for example, the absence of a dedicated website for Albufera (there is good information through Balears Natura, but this isn't only for Albufera) or in other information centres being shut; the one in Puerto Pollensa's La Gola rarely seems to be open.

Pollensa's tourism development plan includes a focus on attracting bird-watching tourists and so, in addition to the La Gola centre, the town hall would like the old fish market to include another information centre for the Tramuntana and its birds, wildlife and what have you. Laudable though this might be, has any consideration been given to its ongoing maintenance and funding? And who would supply these? The town hall, the Council of Mallorca, the government?

Local authorities talk the talk about wildlife and nature tourism but then do too little to back it up. They create centres and then don't look after them. They have natural spaces but then equally fail to care for them adequately. Maybe the developer should have been allowed to build, but then, had there been more City of Lakes-style development, who would have looked after it? Alcúdia's City of Lakes suffers from seemingly being a low priority. It's a familiar tale. Create something and then don't maintain it.

Unfinished Symphony: Albufera

Two in the morning. Save for the Saturday-into-Sunday night birds that swoop along the main road to and from the clubs and bars of the north and who create their sampling of engine rush and techno from the in-car system, the nights are quiet. With the arrival of May, the music of the machines will start to become unrelenting. But for now, there is motor silence. Not that there is silence.

During the day, it is hard to tell what noises come from Albufera. Those which there are, are usually drowned out by the incessant traffic. At night, it is a different matter. Amidst the quietness of the road, there is only one man-made sound that comes intermittently; the throb and sometimes roar of the Es Murterar power station, a rumbling synthesizer that conveys a mood music of mystery, an industrial electronica that is aurally surreal when set against the other sounds - those of the nature park. In April, in springtime, the sounds of Albufera build up, they are constant, always changing; they are their own unfinished symphonies.

In the mix of sound and limited vision, to the fore there is the sight of the puff monsters of pines silhouetted against moonlight or the distant lights of Muro and Sa Pobla. They are the maestros, the mute conductors of the orchestras that they hide. Unseen, in the pit of Albufera, whole string, horn and percussion sections stay up all night and play for a sleeping audience. They are the phantoms of an opera that the puff monsters mask.

It is too early for the crickets. In summer, they come to dominate, with their drum-box rhythms. For now, it is the marsh frogs that are the main percussion. It is subdued, understated at present. As the weeks pass, the frogs' chorus reaches a crescendo before being supplanted by the crickets in this unending and cyclical opus.

The music of the wetlands is variously symphonic, jazz orchestra or an ambient soundscape dreamt from the imagination of Brian Eno or Philip Glass. The syncopation of the frogs is a rapid chatter of scat drumming over which wails an improvised, viola screech of a startled barn owl or over which is the high-pitched piping blast of a scops owl. This jam session with its shifting members can bring the single, irregular hoot of a different owl, a sonic bleep that rises and falls as though it were being spun around on a radar screen.

The counterpoint to the melodies of nightingales and even robins are the crow-like bursts of a night heron on its discordant Ornette Coleman sax or the comedic intermezzo of a duck disturbed into a deranged trumpeting. The party animals that fly-dance to the tunes of the Albufera night club are the bats, darting and diving and ignoring the admonitory stares of the puff monster conductors.

You can sit and listen to all this. You can have a front-row seat for an astonishing concert that costs nothing. But you can't sit too long. Not before there is a different sound, one of a sawing buzz by the ear. The mosquitoes are alive again and they are giants in spring. The bats are hungry, thankfully. They do their best, but there are only so many mosquitoes they can eat as though they were chomping on their equivalent of popcorn taken into the auditorium for the Albufera concert.

As the night orchestra quietens around dawn, so a different shift takes over. There are over hundred different types of bird in Albufera at present, some that are there all the time, like the hoopoe which joins with the bats in being a natural destroyer of the nasty. For the hoopoe, it is the moth of the processionary caterpillar. Other birds are passing through, one or two are there by accident, such as the golden eagle. And most announce themselves as dawn comes, when they can be heard because the road is nearly always silent. Just at the moment.

The sights of Albufera, during the daytime when it can be seen, are what attracts, but there is a different attraction. What can't be seen but can only be heard. At night. The unfinished symphony of Albufera.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

In A Silent Way

The end of January marked an anniversary. 28 January to be precise. Twenty years since S’Albufera was declared a protected nature park, the first in the Balearics. The “Diario” celebrates this fact. Its reporter waxes lyrically, referring to the “intense peace” and “silence”. This is not a unique experience, it is one I have also sensed as have others.

Having Albufera as one’s back garden may bring with it certain disadvantages, well one – mosquitoes – but it affords many positives, not least in its proximity. Albufera is somewhere to escape to and to find tranquillity, though this can be disturbed by groups whose noise breaks not just the silence but also scares the wildlife into hiding. But one should not complain. Albufera is somewhere to be enjoyed and explored. The shame is perhaps that it is not explored by more, though there is an element of contradiction here. The more Albufera is invaded by humans, the less attractive it is to the fauna. Humans, as much as the man-made threats of the industrial estate, the power station, the nitrates from Muro and Sa Pobla farming and the possible change of use of the neighbouring Son Bosc finca, can be a liability in such an eco-system. Were they all whispering Attenboroughs or Bellamys creeping around, this would not be so, but they are not.

But Albufera cannot be preserved as a vast no-go area to homo sapiens. It would lose part of its purpose were it to be so, and it is the sheer vastness of the park that limits the impact of migrant humans, wings clipped so as not to spread from the designated routes or to explore deeply in numbers its less accessible parts.

The success of Albufera lies in the numbers that it is home to, some 3,000 species now, a doubling of aquatic birds since the late ‘80s. It is an achievement on a natural scale every bit as impressive (if that is the correct word) as the artificial scale of tourism infrastructure. Though the silence within its hugeness can be agoraphobic, in truth it is never silent. It is constant movement and never rests, and soon the small-hours calls of night birds will be joined by the cacophony of the frogs’ choruses, and the migrating formations will swoop and chatter over the tall reeds in daytime. Albufera is reserved for a minority in summer, the majority gathering as flocks and seal colonies on the beaches and pool-side. But perhaps that is how it should be, and how the wildlife prefers it to be.


QUIZ
Yesterday – “Unwritten”, Natasha Bedingfield. Today’s title – was going to use “The Sound of Silence” but remembered the newspaper cutting in the Albufera reception with a “sonido del silencio” headline. Too obvious. The chosen title is a jazz classic. Who?

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