Huntin', Shootin', Fishin': Mallorca and hunting

"Madonna has opened up this world for us now, sweetheart. She's made it stylish. Re-invented it."
"So you're going to kill things because of Madonna."

The "Absolutely Fabulous" take on huntin', shootin' and fishin'. Mallorca's winter tourism industry is missing a trick by not appealing to the Notting Hill/Holland Park set and shipping them in for a bit of wildlife slaughter. A fine rural hotel, a touch of agrotourism, evenings in the spa and then in the morning out into the Tramuntana range or onto a finca and give some fauna a good seeing-to with a high-powered rifle. If you're lucky, you might get it served up. Fancy some goat? How about some partridge? Rather plumper than a thrush or a starling.

To the north of Alcúdia old town, in the mountains of La Victoria, the quality of goat is first-rate. It was awarded a certification a couple of years ago. The excellence of the catch, promoted as such, was partly designed to bag an overseas hunter tourist.

Hunting isn't exactly big when it comes to Mallorcan tourism, but it is pretty big in Spain as a whole. An organisation known as Ibex Hunt Spain ("the taste of professionals", says its website) can help with the hunting of the Balear goat. It can help in other ways: "you will enjoy hunting our wild animals in a natural and rugged environment ... another outstanding feature is our rich and varied gastronomy ... we can also offer you a variety of accommodations (sic)". What did I tell you? A country hotel and you can wolf down the catch. That's the taste of the professional presumably.

Cue dramatic music. Mountainous terrain. The poignant plucking of a guitar. The sighting of the gun. The falling of the goat. The huntsman with his trophy. This describes a video from Ibex Hunt that you can see on YouTube - "Hunting Balear Goat". Tasteful and professional. Not, one imagines, that everyone would agree.

Oh dear, the sensibilities of anthropomorphisising homo sapiens. Personally, while I find the stabbing to death of a bull less than completely agreeable, I have no qualms with hunting. No, this isn't quite accurate. I have no qualms because it's not something I ever think about. The subject only looms into gun sight once the local hunting seasons get underway. Even then, until the transposition of human attributes onto dumb animals is given an airing by the outraged, it all passes me by, despite the sounds of gun shot that ring out daily from Albufera.

It can all be reconciled by invoking our inner hunter-gatherer. Where the anti-hunting lobby may have a point is the rather less equal contest nowadays. Our forebears lacked a Winchester semi-automatic or a silver-engraved Browning, but rest assured that if the technology had been available, they would have used it. A further difference is that those ancient ancestors would have removed the head and eaten it and taken to wearing the horns rather than mounting the head on the living-room wall, a singularly peculiar thing to do. But if someone wants to, then who am I to say they shouldn't.

Local hunting falls into two distinct categories. One is for sport, as with the goat, the other is for control. Blasting birds out of the skies or trees does have a reason, such as ensuring that those with animal-centric sensibilities can be guaranteed their olive oil or wine. Birds quite like some of Mallorca's produce as well, which is one reason for the culls. Wildlife management isn't only about keeping the wildlife alive, it's also about killing it.

Mallorca's hunting tradition is part and parcel of the island's ruralism. It may not be as strong as it was for the obvious reason that Mallorcan rural life doesn't exist in the same way that it did before mass tourism. But it's still very much there. It is celebrated each year at the hunters' fairs. For example, in 2009 this was in Pollensa, for which they had the Council of Mallorca to thank for stumping up over a hundred grand to stage it. Money well spent no doubt in helping to preserve Mallorca's alternative tourism as well as the cadre of licensed hunters on the island, of which there are over 25,000. Which sounds like an awful lot.

It isn't only the animal-rightists who get into a tiz about hunting, there is also the environmental group GOB. It has made the not entirely stupid point that it does seem somewhat contradictory to have reserves where birds flock in, only to go and start taking a pop at them. But you come back to that management, of both flora and fauna. It's all done in the best interests of nature, so be thankful that Mallorca's countryside hasn't been overrun by Barbour-wearing Madonnas or Eddys and Patsys. Yet.





Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Enjoy Your Trip: Review websites

Do you use TripAdvisor? Do you post reviews to it? Do you take notice of reviews on the site? Do you put reviews on other sites or are you guided by what others might say? Are your reviews potentially defamatory? Do you know that, in the UK at any rate, you might end up facing legal action if you do so?

The fight back has started. At a so-called "masterclass" in London, arranged by TripAdvisor with the intention of showing hotel and restaurant owners how they can make the most of the website, the whole thing turned into something of a fiasco - those owners expressing their anger as to how TripAdvisor goes about its business.

In fact the fight back started some while ago. In the UK, since 2008, misleading reviews, i.e. those which, for example, come from a hotel itself and masquerade as independent opinion, can be subject to naming and shaming by trading standards or even court action. It hasn't helped that much. There are PR companies who will sort out good reviews, there are hotel or restaurant businesses who will give "incentives" to get good reviews. There can also be a whole load of family and friends only too happy to oblige. Users of sites - consumers, travellers - are being taken in.

Then there are the negative reviews. TripAdvisor says that it has ways of combatting them and it points out that has its "owners centre" through which responses can be made to negative comments, but this hasn't satisfied owners who have seen their businesses' reputations being dragged through the mud of cyberspace. The anger has given rise to the anti-TripAdvisor site - ihatetripadvisor.org.uk. The power of the negative review is such that owners can be subject to blackmail in order to stop bad comments.

TripAdvisor is singled out because it is the biggest and best-known of the review sites. It isn't the only one of course. Far from it. There are so many reviews, opinions and comments plastered across Lord knows how many websites, it is a wonder that anyone has the time to ever go to a restaurant or take a holiday as they are spending so much of it on reading what can be misleading, malicious, ill-informed, gushing, potentially fraudulent. The wonder is that anyone takes any notice of any of it, given how unreliable it seems.

Recommendations from "real" people can be hugely powerful, as indeed can criticisms. This is why so much prominence is granted to sites such as TripAdvisor. The Spanish director of the site revealed earlier this year that a well-known but unnamed hotelier places more importance on the opinions expressed rather than the categorisation system that TripAdvisor has.

But the potential for abuse is enormous. Which is why a group of 700 businesses is considering a group defamation action against TripAdvisor, and why individuals can be liable to action against themselves if they're not careful.

There is now advice being given to site users so that they can try and sort out the reliable and honest wheat from the ill-formed or misleading chaff. One piece of advice is that if several reviews all make similar observations, then the information should be ok. Maybe so, but there is an undeniable tendency to the me-too about much that is posted. It is the curious psychology of online communities, one of reinforcement. One person slags off or praises to the hilt and others follow my leader; they don't want to be left out. And the reverse psychology, as it were, occurs when someone takes umbrage at this groupthink, which can then have the effect of reinforcing even further the initial line of argument. How dare anyone disagree?

I have recently seen a particular restaurant coming in for some harsh comment. As it so happened I was at another restaurant, two doors down from the one in the spotlight. I mentioned to someone who works there that the restaurant more or less next door has got a poor reputation. "Really? I like it. Food's always good. It's always packed. People wait on the street to get a table." And this was from someone who is a chef in a rival establishment. Go figure.

The worst aspect of all this isn't that a business can be brought to the point of ruin by bad reviews, deliberately arranged or just because, well, the place is no good or, for whatever reason, people don't like it. This is bad enough. But more than this is the fact that we now seem incapable of making choices of our own. Everything is decided for us. By people we have never met, who don't know what we really like, but in whom we invest colossal and utterly ludicrous amounts of credibility. Which country we might go to, which resort in a country, which hotel in a particular resort, which restaurant or bar, which this, that or the next thing.

Why bother going on holiday any longer? You can just stay at home and spend your week or fortnight reading the reviews. About as exciting as being on holiday, given that the spirit of adventure or the unknown has been lost. And even if you do go on holiday, how do you spend your time? Must tell everyone how good/bad it is. Go to sites x, y and z. "Hotel's brilliant/rubbish. Restaurant's outstanding/awful. Resort is fantastic/dreadful."

Once upon a time holidays were there to be enjoyed. Of course there were bad experiences. So you never went back. Of course travellers and consumers did not have the "empowerment" of the internet to voice their discontent or their praise. Fair enough, but behind any comment, good or bad, can you be really sure as to its authenticity, as to how accurate it might be, as to how simply nasty it might be? You can't. Information isn't everything, and nor is having the whole trip advised.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Empire Of The Sun: German and British tourism

The sunbeds' battle has been won. The question is how long the war will drag on. Some hoteliers are preparing for the withdrawal of the vanquished, accepting the dominant hotel occupancy force. Sunbedsraum. Peace in our time. The resorts quietening to the sound of retreating Tommies now whistling in the distance and drowning in the horizon where the sun goes down on a modern empire.

From the mid-70s to the mid-80s, at the height of imperial might, the British represented 40% of the foreign tourism market on Mallorca's beaches. It was a tourism army that, in its numbers, eclipsed that of Germany. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the percentages have been more than just reversed. German tourism, at around 50% of the total, is double that from Britain.

It is indeed the case that some hotels are adapting to a weaker British market or are contemplating the previously unthinkable - a post-British market. This may all be in response to the short-term shock of the past couple of years and the collapse of the pound, but as alternative tourism markets emerge for the hotels and tour operators to sink their teeth into, could it be we that we are witnessing the end of Mallorca's Britannic tourism industry?

Chances are that we are not. Talk of the apocalyptic demise of British tourism - not now, but some time - is an absurd exaggeration. These things have a habit of going in cycles. German tourism itself has not always enjoyed a completely harmonious relationship with Mallorca, despite a love affair between Germany and the island that goes back half a century. Not so long ago, Mallorca had to repair a rupture caused by a perception that German tourists were somehow unwelcome. Repaired it was, and the relationship has been given new life.

But the relationship with Germany has always seemed, even during the period of British dominance, to be stronger. And the relationship goes deeper than just tourism. It can be seen on the high streets, such as they are - Lidl, Schlecker, Müller and, at some point, Media Markt. Two of the best-known estate agencies are of German origin - Kühn & Partner and Engel & Völkers. TUI is bigger than its rival Thomas Cook, a company which has reclaimed its "Britishness" since the MyTravel merger, but which retains a strong German flavour. Air Berlin is more than simply an airline shuttling German tourists to and from the island; its local boss has headed the Mallorca Tourism Board.

It is a relationship, therefore, which has appeared to be altogether more "serious". "Real" business rather than just the bar. Not that there aren't of course German-run bars. There are. But it's an oddity that even in a place like Alcúdia, which is not as "British" as some might have you believe, the German bar is thin on the ground, almost to the point of non-existence.

This "seriousness" may all have to do with the nature of the relationship and a competing historical perception of Mallorca. For years, many a Brit would look down his or her nose at Mallorca, the consequence of an image problem that was only partly accurate. Notwithstanding the emergence of a beer, sausage and oompah German tourism culture in the likes of Arenal, Mallorca did not suffer to anything like the same degree from being viewed negatively in Germany.

The Germans have bought into the whole "paradise island" deal in a way that the British have never done. Clichéd it is, but the Germans use the expression quite unashamedly. For Mallorca and its tourism at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is just as well that they do. TUI says that its winter tourism to Mallorca from Germany has started with "much dynamism" and that next summer there will be a growth in the numbers of German tourists.

The Germans are still very much in love with Mallorca, but even with the Germans, the signs are there. More tourists next year, but more in all-inclusives. Hotel prices have been lowered while those in other destinations have increased. And the Germans are being tempted into a different affair, that with Turkey. TUI in Germany now takes more tourists to Turkey than it does to Mallorca.

The battle in Mallorca may have been won, but the eastern front has been well and truly breached. And that is a war Mallorca is in danger of losing, if indeed it hasn't already lost it.


"We lived an adventure. Love in the summer."
"Lie in the sand and visualise. Like it's '75 again."




Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Not The Same: Ensaïmadas

Say sweetbreads to me and I'll come out in a cold sweat. It's all to do with the memory of a meal in the Dordogne. The dish looked appetising enough, until I was told what "ris de veau" actually meant. I had mistaken the "ris" bit to be rice. Tucking into pancreas isn't at the top of my list of culinary experiences to be repeated. Nor, come to that, is sweet bread.

Sweet bread is making an appearance in the US. The separation of bread from sweet presumably overcomes the connotation with offal, making it more a waffle, or maybe the Americans don't know what sweetbreads are. Whatever. Sweet bread is available in Starbucks. Mallorcan Sweet Bread, aka the ensaïmada (so long as the aka is not used, it would seem). The Americans can lard their asses even more, courtesy of Mallorcan lard. Or can they?

The key ingredient of the ensaïmada is pork lard - "saïm". The word is derived from the Latin for fat. An unfathomable peculiarity of an otherwise healthy Mallorcan Mediterranean diet is that they go and wreck it by shovelling lard and sugar down their necks. What on earth are they thinking of?

The reverence shown to the ensaïmada baffles me. It has its own "day". It gets hauled off in boxes by passengers from the airport, intent on inflicting it on unsuspecting relatives and friends on the mainland. It has been 15 metres in diameter, such as at Inca's Dijous Bo a couple of years back. It has been, according to a press reader survey in February 2009, the seventh wonder of Mallorca (at least it wasn't the first).

The ensaïmada has also been a victim of recession and of rival Mallorcan products. Production and sales have fallen.

According to Starbucks' US website, one of its Mallorca Sweet Breads contains a mere 60% of your daily saturated fat intake; indeed it has 39% of total fat intake for the day. The site bigs up the bun by saying that (in Mallorca) "one wouldn't dream of starting the day without a coffee and this traditional sweet bread". Ah yes, you wake up and the first thing that comes to mind is to get off to the bakers or the local café and give yourself a sugary moustache.

Going through the lengthy list of the sweet bread's ingredients on the website, there seems to be no mention of "saïm". Maybe the pork lard is covered by something else, but if not, then it isn't, strictly speaking, the saïm thing. Were it to be, then who knows how high the fat content would be.

The Mallorcan ensaïmada is a registered "brand", but the president of the ensaïmada regulatory council, which has faced its own financing issues, reckons that there isn't a lot to prevent Starbucks from promoting the bread. It is promotion, after all. But the name "ensaïmada" isn't actually being used, albeit that the website gives a brief background to what is "called ensaïmada in Spanish". The president also points out - most important this - that the Starbucks' bread has been coiled in the wrong direction. And yes, there is a right direction. To the right. Clockwise.

The ensaïmada isn't only to be found in Mallorca. It is not uncommon in, say, the Philippines or Latin America, but the pork lard ingredient is what makes it distinctively Mallorcan. It would be telling porkies to claim that the ensaïmadas of the world, without a dash of pig, are really ensaïmadas.

As for my own personal less than great regard for the ensaïmada, don't take this as some holier-than-thou health assault on pastry or cake in general. Not at all. I can have my cake and eat it, too. Many times over, thanks very much. Just that the ensaïmada, rather like another hugely over-rated breakfast bread, the croissant, is terminally dull. And it confirms that the Mallorcans, like the French, don't understand breakfast. Mind you, neither are as mad as the Dutch who put chocolate bits on bread and butter.

No, it's nothing to do with health or the presence of pork lard. It's everything to do with breakfast. Bacon and sausages a-sizzling. And an egg being fried. Preferably in lard. The ensaïmada? Doesn't even get near.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

These Words: The Pope and Spanish secularism

The Pope's favourite two words. Aggressive and secularism. Combined, they come out like a knocking-copy comparative advertising slogan. Marketing people know of the dangers of knocking the competition. The Pope should know of the dangers as well.

The Pope levelled the aggressive secularism charge against Britain. He has now done so as well in Spain. It's one that carries more weight in a Catholic country, more so than it did in Britain where it should have been shrugged off with a so-what.

The charge carries weight and danger because it is an overtly political statement, one that is explicit in its criticism of the socially liberal, anti-Church policies of the current Zapatero government. The danger is immense. While it may be a reassuring message for a moderate Catholic right, there exist more extreme elements. The added danger of the Pope's words can be seen in the context of his expression of contemporary secularism. He compared this to the "strong and aggressive (that word again) anti-clericalism" of the 1930s.

Playing the '30s card resonates with all manner of alarm bells. The anti-clericalism of that time was just one factor that contributed to the rise of Nationalism and of Franco. And strict Catholic orthodoxy was to become an important strand of Francoism.

The Pope is referring to the efforts of the Second Republic from 1931 to undermine the privileged position of the Catholic Church and to introduce reforms such as secular education. The circumstances are nowadays quite different, with regard especially to education. They also differ dramatically in another way. The Republic attempted to address social problems and issues in the first part of the 1930s, but did so against a background of what was a shaky political structure. This is not the case today.

It was the apparent persecution of the Church by Republican constitutional change that was to become a theme of the political and then military struggles of the 1930s. To draw a comparison with anti-clericalism and secularism then and now is not completely without foundation, given the emergence of policies related to abortion, divorce and homosexuality. But the dynamics are very different, as indeed are the issues.

A generation or more has grown up knowing both increased secularism and democratic stability. The Church's influence has been reduced significantly in a country where only around a seventh of the population now attends mass regularly. And education, one of the battlegrounds of the '30s, is a further factor in a society that now enjoys better standards of education than before. The Pope might reflect on the fact that the reinstatement of the Jesuits under the Nationalists, alongside the Falange's control of universities, did not contribute to making a population that much better educated than it was in the '30s. It certainly did nothing for anything that might have approximated to a liberal educational tradition. Which was really the point of the Church's opposition to anti-clericalism under the Republicans. And remains so today.

One of the great ironies of Spain and of all the problems it faced from the nineteenth century until Franco died is that Spain gave the world the concept of liberalism. It has taken an enormously long time from its inception as an ideal in the early 1800s for it to have finally taken hold in Spain. The word and the concept have come to be wrongly abused, hijacked by a right wing that has misappropriated it through - further irony - its own politically correct dogma. In today's Spain liberalism is portrayed, by the Catholic right, as the creation of what it sees as social evils. But this is a stance unshared by and rejected by a majority of the population.

For the Pope, there is more history. It is that of Spain at the end of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth, when Spain was the perfect example of a Catholic "state" and, moreover, was crucial to Catholic imperialism. For the Vatican, there is much riding on Spain's ongoing Catholicism, but much which is historical symbolism. The danger in what the Pope has said lies in stirring up that symbolism and giving it political succour. Whether aggressive or not, secularism - and liberalism - have come to define Spanish society. That of today. And it's only taken a couple of hundred years for it to get there.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Alphabet Soup: Surnames and spelling

Revolution. Reform. Not quite. A bit of a change more like. Change which, to the British, will seem distinctly peculiar.

The "revolution" applies to Spanish surnames; the reform to some language use. That there are bodies which adjudicate on such matters, form laws or conventions to cover them might strike you as somewhat bizarre. Not so to the Spanish, however. Such as in the case of names.

The Spanish find the British concept of the "middle" name, i.e. the second, third or fourth Christian name, distinctly odd, notwithstanding the existence of a Juan Antonio here or a José Maria there. But these aren't examples of middle names, as they're first names, both of them. Use your British-given middle name in official documents and you will, in all likelihood, be called by it, as in Señor or Señora (Middle Name). If you are a woman and your middle name is Joan, in Mallorca you will be addressed as and pronounced as Senyora (as in the Catalan) Joanne. A man's name dressed up as a woman's. It does get dreadfully confusing.

Personally, I find it quite amusing. My middle name, Colin, crops up on all sorts of things. Medical card, for example. I am, where a receptionist, nurse or doctor is concerned, "Señor Colin". Not that I'm that bothered. Quite the opposite. It's just one letter away from Colon, which thus makes me - nearly - a descendant of Columbus. Possibly. They've not asked me for my DNA yet though in the attempt to establish that the old Italian came from Felanitx.

The revolution in surnames, coming on the back of greater acceptance of "new" Christian names, which has seen Kevins (for example) becoming more common, as well as Mohameds, will be one by which the paternal surname will not automatically be the first surname. First surname, you ask? Yes, first surname. There are always two, unless there are more. But the more is usually only because of some long, drawn-out, pompously aristocratic styling, especially if the surname isn't particularly distinguished.

The current norm, under birth registration laws, is for the father's surname to come first, the mother's second. Which means their first surnames, because they of course have two. Maybe. But you can swap them around, if you want, just to add to the confusion. And you can also choose to be known by your second surname, if you so wish. President Zapatero is an example. His first surname is in fact Rodríguez, but Zapatero is less common. He wishes to stand out from the Rodríguez crowd, even if he has acquired a further surname - Bean. Picasso was another who went maternal. He was paternally a Ruiz.

Under the new law, the alphabet rule will apply. Picasso would have been Picasso after all. But not if the parents decide otherwise. As ever, there will be an exception to the Raúl. Apparently this will all be more equal, says the ruling PSOE socialist party, not that everyone is in favour. Let the alphabet decide and those surnames towards the end of the alphabetic chain will slowly die out. No more Zapateros, for example.

Oh, and by the way, if you were thinking of becoming a Spanish citizen, you would have to find a second surname, assuming you didn't already have one. That's the rule, and it often leads to double-barrelled repetition. Imagine it. Potato Head is transferred to Real Madrid and decides to become Spanish. Two Wayne Rooneys. There are only two Wayne Rooneys. Wayne Rooney Rooney.

While the politicians have been looking to establish a new order in surnames, the Real Academia Española, which sets out rules for language, has been hard at work preparing its new official spelling publication. It will be out in time for Christmas. Get your orders in now! It's not, says the co-ordinator Gutiérrez Ordónez (first name Salvador, or is it Salvador Gutiérrez?), revolutionary or a reform. But it will make things simpler. Allegedly.

Among the changes are those to the alphabet. If you weren't aware, "ch" and "ll" are parts of the alphabet. Not any longer, according to the new "Ortografía". Moreover, "i griega", which is a considerable mouthful for "y", will become obsolete and hereafter be merely "ye". And there will be all sorts of other useful spellings for you to learn and digest. Planning a trip to Qatar, for example? Well, you can still plan the trip, but you will be going to Catar. Or maybe you want to go there four or five times. Hitherto, had you wished to do so, you would have written "or" as "o" with an accent - "ó". Why? To avoid confusion of course with the or "o" without an accent, which is how it is normally spelt, when you are creating emphasis between one number or another. But no more. The accent is to be dispensed with. Far less confusing. Just like the order of surnames of which there are only two - ó three ó four.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Only The Lonely

I was in a bit of a hurry. But I wasn't in that much of a hurry. I could have stopped, spent fifteen or thirty minutes. He'd suggested a coffee. Sorry, got to get off, work to do; that sort of thing.

He's not someone I really know. The sort of person you see around, bump into now and then. It was only as I was driving off that I realised I should have hung around. What's the scale, do you suppose, of loneliness in Mallorca?

Many years ago now, my mother once confided in me that she was lonely. Initially I was surprised. She was outgoing, a life and soul of the party East End girl; we used to duet in the local pub when I was a kid. But then I became less surprised. Moved house, family gone, a not unusual tale of social breakdown.

That was in England though, where the familiar surrounds you, where things are easy. They can be easy enough in Mallorca, but there isn't quite the same familiarity. A while ago, before she moved back to England, someone who had lived on the island for some years, told me that it wasn't quite the same. Yes, you had friends, but they weren't friends like the old ones. There is a convenience of friendship, she was implying. Those you know wouldn't necessarily be ones you would really choose. But isn't this true of anywhere that you might move to?

The point is though, I guess, that you can know people and still be lonely. And there is a sense in which expat communities are indeed a convenience. Without them, the potential for loneliness would be increased through exclusion by language and culture. But where this convenience exists, there is the risk of the sort of superficiality that the "Daily Mail" sought to expose a couple of years ago (in Portals), one based on what is an erroneous perception of expat lifestyle centred on doing lunch and yacht parties - erroneous where most are concerned, but not all.

In April last year, The Royal British Legion published an outstanding report - "Caring In Spain". (The full report and the accompanying "knowledge bank" are available online at http://www.britishlegion.org.uk.) While primarily this looked at health care, the report also dealt with issues such as the importance of social networks and of clubs. Convenience maybe, but what came through, clearly enough, was that without clubs and associations the lives of many would be intolerable.

However, not everyone is "clubbable". The most obvious club is ESRA. It does much by way of good works, but it also comes in, with the greatest respect, for criticism. It has an image problem that turns people off. Perhaps the fault lies with its being seen as being too "expat". I really can't put my finger on it. But maybe some research into what this image problem is might not go amiss, as it has the power for immense good, along with the expansion of the efforts by Age Concern España.

The issue of loneliness, though, is not exclusively one that might affect the elderly. It can be seen around and about. Just one stereotype is the person clutching a drink at a bar. When the TV critic of "The Sunday Times", A.A. Gill, savaged the dead Keith Floyd, he did so by referring to the sadness of the expat in a Costas bar in mid-morning - and staying there for several hours. Paul Whitehouse's cringingly embarrassing Archie is not too far removed from a type you might be unfortunate enough to encounter. Alcohol dependence and being the bar bore are, nevertheless, or can be, symptomatic of a state of loneliness.

And loneliness can be a step away from more serious conditions. The Legion's report looked also at psychological problems, of which depression or suicidal tendencies can be a part. As far as I am aware, there is no Samaritans service in Mallorca, but there is on the mainland, on the Costa Blanca (http://www.costablancasamaritans.com). The presence of the Samaritans in Mallorca might well be something to be explored. One wonders how well depression is tackled, even where it might be admitted, when the potential for language problems with a local doctor is concerned.

This might all sound as though I am overstating the issue. Perhaps so. But I come back to the question I posed. What's the scale of loneliness in Mallorca? I have no idea as to the answer. Under a Mallorcan sun, however, there are social issues that seem as though they can't or shouldn't exist. They do. And under a Mallorcan sun is a sparsely populated karaoke bar. Up steps a performer to the confessional mike. Behind the dark glasses. Only the lonely.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Kissing With Confidence: Embracing Facebook

The Pope is to be confronted by a kiss-in - a "queer kissing flashmob" - when he turns up in Barcelona on Sunday. A gay and lesbian demonstration will involve two minutes of slobbering. "Avert your eyes, Holy Father. They're using tongues and all."

This is part of what is an ongoing collapse of Catholicism in Spain. The rearguard, die-hard Catholics are said to be outraged. Which is presumably part of the reason for the kiss protest. What the Pope thinks about it, who knows. Not that keen, one would imagine. He probably won't be videoing it all on his mobile and then posting it on YouTube. Does the Pope do the internet in this way, do you suppose? Doubtful. It's unlikely that he tweets or has a Facebook page. If he did, then he might have been invited to the kiss-in or been asked whether he liked it or to have even been asked to become a "friend". The notion of the Pope being poked by some gay activists is really not something one should devote too much time thinking about.

The demo has been arranged through Facebook. Ah yes, Facebook. Where would we be without it? With a lot more time on our hands to do something more productive, like lying down or watching the telly. We would also be a whole lot less likely to be invited to demos or to partake in some action, gay, lesbian or otherwise.

In recent times, Facebook has been used locally to try and arrange an alternative to the Can Picafort night party during the summer fiesta (i.e. staging it on the beach where it used to be held); to call to arms supporters of live ducks being thrown into the sea (also in Can Picafort, and a movement which furthermore featured a YouTube video with, coincidentally, a "Pope" enticing some Donalds from the Son Bauló torrent); and to post pictures of rubbish, graffiti and general unpleasantness in Pollensa and its port. I daresay there have been many others. Were I to spend my life hooked up to Facebook, I might be able to tell you about them, but I don't. I am ambivalent towards it.

A touch of citizen participation agitprop seems a pretty good application of Facebook. I am all in favour. There are plenty of other benefits. What I don't like is the controlling nature of Facebook, the control on time and the sheer impulse to use it. This stems from an irrational further dislike, that of having been steered in its direction by some nerdy geek who wasn't much good at getting his leg over. I can at least take satisfaction in the knowledge that a time will come when we all hate Mark Zuckerberg as much as we now hate Bill Gates.

The rotten thing about Facebook is that it can be so useful. And not just to the summer-employed population of Mallorca, now with so much free time that they can to go into Facebook overdrive when not standing in the "paro" queues. No, it's more useful than this and more useful than appealing to the agitating duck-fanciers of Can Picafort.

It has occurred to me to wonder quite why so many resources, mainly money, are piled into the creation of governmental and local authority tourism websites, especially as most of them are completely useless or are embarrassing in their use of English. Facebook's free. And there are all manner of people knocking around who do pages which serve a similar sort of purpose. Like myself. At least I was doing so until I started to get bored with it all towards the end of the season.

But with the Facebooks and indeed websites that are privately operated, there is an enormous resource that basically does the job of the tourism authorities for them. Moreover, they often speak to the audience in a far more comprehensible and helpful fashion than the "official" sites.

Of course, these alternatives would never be sanctioned as being real mouthpieces because they might - and do - say things that the authorities do not care for. You are more likely to get information and opinion, warts and all. This doesn't square with the default mode of websites and their descriptions of everything as "beautiful" or "paradise", the sea as "turquoise" or the natives as "welcoming and friendly". And you might also get, because this is the nature of Facebook, pages that are friends with or who like gays kissing in front of the Pope or illegally live ducks quacking in the sea off Can Picafort. Tut, tut, that would never do.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Double Fault: Nadal and celebrity advertising

Rafael Nadal has played his last match as the promotional face of the Balearics. An amicable parting of the ways between the Manacor muscle and the tourism ministry means that the latter will not have to cough up for the final part of its contract, some two million euros.

Is this a case of seeing sense that Nadal's celebrity amounted to buying a pig in a poke when it came to the islands' promotion? Actually not. There is an altogether different reason. The tourism ministry is technically bankrupt. It owes 47 million euros, much of the debt being in the form of repayments to financial institutions. The regional government has had to step in and find around 20 million to help the ministry out. The remaining 27 million will need to be recouped from what Joana Barceló terms a "stability plan".

Stability and the tourism ministry. Chance would be a fine thing. One has to have some sympathy for the minister Barceló, only the fifth incumbent in the post since the current administration took office in 2007. We have come to appreciate, thanks to the various corruption charges and hearings, that the ministry, via its agencies, was out of control. We hadn't appreciated, until now, just how much out of control it was. The ministry's debt equates to 70% of its entire budget.

Some months ago, I spoke to Antoni Munar the new director-general of tourism development. Pleasant chap, Sr. Munar, jocularly telling me that there wasn't any money. I knew about all the problems, he asked. Yes, I joshed in return. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. Munar and Barceló face one hell of a challenge.

The first challenge is knowing where on earth the money's coming from for promotion. The second is knowing on what to spend it. Wisely. And the celebrity promotion has been anything but wise: Douglas, Schiffer, de Lucia, Kournikova (Kournikova for heaven's sake!) and Nadal - where has any of it led to?

The casting of celebrities has, to an extent, been understandable, assuming, that is, you adhere to the principle of celebrity obsession. In no small part, the use of celebrities reflects the perception, of some, that Mallorca is a celebrity island. Perhaps it is, but such a perception creates a falsehood of shallowness and an image that is unrelated to the lives of many who live in Mallorca and, more importantly, who come to Mallorca on holiday.

Just one of the problems with celebrity advertising, and indeed much of the tourism advertising full stop, is that it treats its market as being one. This is a nonsense. There is no one tourism market, be it in terms of geography, age, income, and any other distinction you care to mention. It treats its market as one, but in reality speaks to hardly any of it. Nadal might have seemed appropriate, but he is also immensely wealthy and he was careering around on a luxury boat.

As a consequence, the advertising excludes the "ordinary" tourist. There may be an element of aspiration, but this is meaningless to an altogether more savvy and cost-conscious tourist than might once have been the case. Turn the celebrity image around, if you will, and imagine someone more "ordinary". For sake of argument, an actor such as Philip Glenister, one with some Mallorcan connection. Ordinary bloke. Believable enough. But ordinary blokes mean ordinary tourists. And this is exactly the point. Extraordinary celebrities mean extraordinary tourists, and they alone. Extraordinary tourists do not mean tourism in a Mallorcan style.

There were also logisitical and branding problems with the Nadal promotion. Adverts either not appearing or doing so at strange times of the night or on obscure channels. Nadal promoting a brand which doesn't exist - the Balearics - as opposed to those which do, the Mallorcan brand or those of the other islands.

It is not as though this latter aspect and the need to differentiate between different groups of tourist are not understood. Looking back at the 2009 season, in an interview with "abcmallorca" given by the then director of IBATUR Susanna Sciacovelli, she said that "we want to address customers by areas of interest" and that "every island needs its very own brand image". So what was with the Nadal promotion, then?

Celebrity advertising is well-established, but its effectiveness is very much open to debate. In India, cricketers are paid huge sums to endorse products. An article from rediff.com of September 2003 by Madhukar Sabnavis, the Ogilvy & Mather agency's country manager, pointed to advantages, such as the attention-grabbing nature of such advertising, but also to negatives. Take these. "Celebrity advertising is seen as a substitute for absence of ideas." "(The client) feels that the presence of a well-known face is an easy way out" (when a better alternative can't be thought of). "Few agencies actually present celebrity advertising as a solution to client problems."

Nadal was probably an easy way out. Mallorcan, famous, successful. He'll do. Here's Sciacovelli again: "TV advertisements featuring him ... in the UK and Germany ... are (were) highly effective." They were? And they and Nadal cost a fair wedge. Money that is no longer available, if it ever was. Joana Barceló is hinting that, though there is a hope that Nadal can still perform a promotional function, the days of celebrity advertising are over.

With less money around, let us hope that what there is will be spent wisely, but don't discount the celebrity making a return. Sabnavis also said that a further reason for celebrity advertising was "a desire to rub shoulders with the glitterati". And such a desire is the fault not just of those who commission such advertising. It is the double fault of an element of local society that is in thrall to celebrity. Be very careful what you wish for.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

On The Dunes: Can Picafort and Playa de Muro

I am looking at some old photos of Can Picafort. Circa 1960. Two people are walking along what is recognisable as a road but which has no tarmac. It is made of sand. It became the Via Suiza. In the distance you can't make out the sea. Not because of buildings, because there aren't any, but because of something else that is obscuring the view. In another photo there is a boy sitting on a deckchair on the beach. You might expect to be able to see, in the background, the Via Suiza from a different angle. But you can't. Because there is something in the way. Dunes.

Can Picafort, in keeping with much of the bay of Alcúdia and with other stretches of Mallorcan coastline, is made up of dunes. Or rather, it used to be. The only dunes now are at the resort's eastern Son Bauló end, extending into what is the "rustic" coast past the Son Real finca. The dunes in Can Picafort can no longer be seen. Because they are no longer there.

The loss of the dunes along the bay is evident in Alcúdia. But here the beach is wide. Nothing sits on top of the sea. Nor does it in much of adjoining Playa de Muro. Only once past the canal that connects Albufera with the sea does the beach start to become appreciably narrower. This is what has now been lovingly signposted as "Sector 2". The resort as military installation.

Where the hotels in Playa de Muro finish there is a stretch of some two kilometres of rustic beach, backed by dunes and forest. There are no buildings. They only re-emerge as you come into Can Picafort. The dunes end abruptly. Can Picafort is built on dunes.

The creation of the resort was not so much environmental vandalism as environmental rape and pillage. The dunes were levelled and what was formed was a generally charmless front line of barn-style restaurants only a short distance from the shoreline. The restaurants, for the most part, are unremarkable. And there is probably a good reason. Being so close to the sea and being so undefended, in winter sand and water encroach. Until recently, before some new drainage, there used to be regular and damaging floods. Why create something of beauty if it's going to be ravaged by nature.

Behind the front line is a town. Shops and hotel after hotel. The dunes and what lay behind them were destroyed in constructing an urban development.

One of the points of contention surrounding the Costas demarcation plan for Playa de Muro is Can Picafort. With no small amount of justification, the murers point to what happened to what was once hardly even a village, just a bit of a fishing harbour and the old fincas of Sr. Picafort. In Playa de Muro, where the environmental destruction has been less extreme, it might just be that the destruction is reversible. In Can Picafort, it can't be reversed. But the targeting of Playa de Muro by the Costas strikes many as supremely unfair when compared with the wholesale degradation of the natural environment just a few kilometres away.

The language and the actions of the Costas in Playa de Muro have been ratcheted up since the demonstration against the demarcation took place. Celestí Alomar, the boss of the Costas in the Balearics, talks of there being "many people and organisations without any sort of consideration". He has taken particular exception to the fact that gardens have been created and that volleyball is played on the dunes. But note the words. On the dunes. They are still there. They may be subject to what Alomar calls "degradation", but they haven't all been taken away. Unlike in Can Picafort.

Meanwhile, Alomar has been suggesting that the holiday homes of Ses Casetes des Capellans could have a reprieve by their being ceded to Muro town hall and escaping any threat of demolition. Good news perhaps, and aimed at the ordinary people of Muro who own the bungalows. But it smacks of politicking, driving a wedge between the holiday-home owners and the businesses and residents of the resort.

Alomar wants an improvement to the beach in Playa de Muro, one that will create "tourism of more quality" and one that, with greater respect for nature, will offset the seasonality that local hoteliers bemoan. Who is he trying to kid? The nature is now just something to admire from a distance. The Costas has made and is making the dunes no-go areas in Playa de Muro. There may be sound environmental reasons for doing so, but what they are becoming are things to just look at. You can no longer wander in the forest and dunes areas in the way you used to be able to. Yet isn't this public land? Isn't there meant to be public access? It's contradictory, just as much as a short walk along the beach from where dunes do still exist confirms that there is a place where they no longer do.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Over And Over Again: Too many hotel beds

Over-regulation and over-supply. Over and over we go. And so do Mallorca's hotels.

At the conference into tourism law and rights that was held last week, the hoteliers pleaded for less regulation while also admitting that they were part of the problem of Mallorca's tourism industry because they create too many places.

It seems an extraordinary admission, but it was one backed by the national secretary-general for tourism, the Mallorcan Joan Mesquida. The hotels spoke of the need for "legal formulae" to enable both investment in the hotel sector and the departure from the market of establishments with no business future. A cynical, but probably accurate view, is that the latter - the departure - has to do with finding a convenient way of re-classifying the real estate for different usage.

The admission isn't so extraordinary, however, when you take into consideration the age of some hotel stock (and the cost of renovating it), the drive towards higher standards led by the regional government, tour operators and indeed customers, the lower margins caused by the over-supply in alliance with other destination competition, and the unprofitability of a goodly percentage of tourists.

The over-supply hypothesis is not simply a case of hotels generating superior profits, it is one that goes to the heart of a strategic vision of Mallorca's tourism that successive governments have spoken about but have singularly failed to come up with. One reason for this failure is because it requires facing up to something which few politicians wish to - reduced numbers of tourists.

There are all manner of reasons why politicians wouldn't wish this. Employment is one. Unfortunately, however, there is employment in Mallorca which exists solely for the purpose of serving an element of the tourist market that does not pay for it. Over-supply? There most certainly is. And it is made up of that percentage which contributes zilch.

For years there has been a desire in Mallorca for higher "quality" tourism. It is a term that I detest, mainly because of the pejorative that it implies: tourists without money are of no value. Detest it I may do, on the grounds of egalitarianism that anyone, regardless of income or socioeconomics, is free to come and vomit into an all-inclusive pool, but I am of course being ruled by the heart. Tourism is, or should be, about the head.

The "head" of tourism strategy has ruled, but it has been the wrong head. The numbers game is all that has mattered. The hoteliers have finally fingered the culprit of the cause of some of Mallorca's tourism malaise, but they are doing so in an entirely disingenuous fashion. They do this because they like to believe, and make governments similarly believe, that they are the only game in town.

Let's take a town, shall we? Puerto Pollensa. This is a town, a resort, in which there has been considerable talk of the need for more hotels. The notion seems utterly contrary, given what is now being said. But it isn't because of the strategy of tourism based on hotel accommodation.

Puerto Pollensa doesn't have that many hotels, and only one that might be considered "big". It is a resort that is quite different to many, such as its neighbours Alcúdia and Can Picafort. Considerable snobbery emanates from Puerto Pollensa, but not without good reason. It isn't like other resorts because its profile is also unlike others: its tourism market is geared towards residential tourism as much, if not more, than hotels. It is a profile, therefore, which is more inclined to spend money than that of resorts with an over-supply of hotels.

But such a profile runs up against the hotel dogma and the hotel lobby, one that would rather the holiday-let market was cast adrift in the bay of Pollensa and elsewhere on the island. The hoteliers then display more disingenuousness by criticising what they call a "lack of homogeneity" as being one impediment to tourism. In other words, they would rather that everything was the same. The same, presumably, on their terms.

Over-supply there is, for sure, and in resorts which - and the hoteliers are wrong - do conform to homogeneity, resorts for which there has been little or no strategic vision in terms of their image, their inherent qualities and differences. This has been the failure. Puerto Pollensa isn't like this. It has its own image and there is no over-supply. But perhaps there is an under-supply of the type of accommodation the hoteliers would resent. Or would they? They're not stupid. And that brings us back to the departure from the market. What do you do with old hotels that are no longer any use?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Your Swaying Arms: End of season

1 May. Optimism mixed with anxiety. 31 October. Anxiety. And above us only sky. Rains and storms come tumbling from appropriately grey heavens to tail a season which, on its first "working" day (3 May), was topped by floods of biblical proportions, ominous in being a metaphor for what was feared was going to be a wash-out of a summer. Maybe the May rains did some good though and washed away the ash cloud of strangling the season at birth.

Above us only sky. The sun up in the sky. During the summer I littered the HOT! Facebook page with musical references. One, for no particularly good reason, was the "sun ain't gonna shine anymore". It will continue to shine, from up there in the sky, but not for so long nor with as great an intensity. The "warmth of the sun" that wraps you in its swaying arms from the moment of its first vernal embrace and dance turns its lights off as certainly as the "long hot summer" passes us by.

I hate this time of year. Hate it for the taking away of summer. How dare it? Maybe a reason why I don't subscribe to much of the claptrap that is spoken about winter tourism is that it makes no sense. The connection with beach, sea and sun is too powerful to allow for any sense. Remove this connection, break it and you are left with something that isn't Mallorca, just its empty shell smashed by the breakers as the autumn winds whip the sea into a fury of spite caused by its own fading warmth.

November, with the deliciously evil contrivance of its opening days of the dead, is the zomboid month. The white faces of the living dead of summer, all those who slog through six months or so of breakfasts and beers with barely a caress from the sun, stumble around in confusion. This curious life of being here in the sun, but never seeing it or actually living it, and when time comes to be given the opportunity ... the sun has gone or has at least decided to operate on only one engine. The season over, and now what's there to do?

You have to reconcile this. It takes much of November to do so; it is a period of mourning. What you have to conclude is that there are two states - dead and alive Mallorca. Stretching ahead now is the dead time, the dead air of paused life. To fill this dead time, it is necessary to construct an alternative Mallorca. It is not solely the time for planning to do those things which, because it is too damn hot during summer to worry about (such as decorating), are always put off, but planning also the realisation of an alternative Mallorca. Well, it is for me.

Summer, for all its warmth, can be enervating. It saps you not just of energy but also of concentration. It provides an excuse for inaction, but with its passing you can't play that card any longer. October's end may herald a sense of anxiety but it also brings the opportunity for what's to come. And where I'm concerned this means finally beginning to undertake the sorts of projects I have been threatening myself with doing.

One of them has to do with Dolores. Or Dolly, to give her her diminutive. She's diminutive in a different sense, as she's petite. I know what she looks like, having constructed her from the fragmented memory of a dream in which she appeared. The question I still haven't completely answered is what Dolly is. But I think I know. She is a metaphor for Mallorca. She sucks you in, so to speak, but she isn't quite as she seems. She is contradictory, at times infuriatingly superficial but at others mystifyingly intense. She is insular and defensive, and then cosmopolitan and open. By looks, she isn't Mallorcan, she is a hybrid of northern European "mezcla". Rightly so, as the northern European grafts a cultural and physical aspect onto Mallorca in making it a mixture. She is also, of course, summer and winter - warm and cold; outgoing and introspective; loving and obnoxious; optimistic but also anxious.

Dolly's story. Imagine that. Chapter One ...


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.




Index for October 2010
Academia, conferences and tourism - 23 October 2010
Airport charges and air taxes - 17 October 2010
Are you the right man for me? - 24 October 2010
Bad weather, tourism and - 12 October 2010
Bingo and betting - 21 October 2010
Bullfighting and culture - 7 October 2010
Coal transportation in Alcúdia - 15 October 2010
Corruption in the Balearics - 6 October 2010
End of season - 31 October 2010
Expats and multiculturalism - 18 October 2010
Fairs, Mallorca's - 4 October 2010
Felipe and Letizia - 13 October 2010
Fire fair and event publicity - 16 October 2010
Gran Hermano - 20 October 2010
Homelessness and poverty - 26 October 2010
Lidl in Alcúdia - 8 October 2010
Mixed all-inclusive in Santa Ponsa - 27 October 2010
October, the paradox of a Mallorcan - 9 October 2010
Paco de Lucia, flamenco music and - 3 October 2010
Partido Popular and language policy - 10 October 2010
Partido Popular and regionalism - 28 October 2010
Peguera's Oktoberfest - 11 October 2010
Playa de Muro, Costas' demarcation and - 25 October 2010
Ryder Cup - 5 October 2010
Sports tourism - 29 October 2010
Technology future in Mallorca - 14 October 2010
Thomas Cook and its hotel payments' "discount" - 22 October 2010
Tintin in Palma - 1 October 2010
Tourism spend statistics - 30 October 2010
Units under apartments, empty - 19 October 2010
Voting rights, residency and - 2 October 2010

Spend, Spend, Spend: Tourists and their money

I was waiting at the head of what became a lengthening queue at the local tabacs. All I wanted to do was hand over my euro for "The Bulletin" (and, yes, I pay for my copy). I could have just plonked the coin down on the counter and cleared off, but the wait promised to be productive, more so than that of the Guardia officer who wasn't prepared to tarry long in his quest for a pack of 20.

The queue developed because of Brit tourists, wristband wearing and cleaning the place out of cigarettes. The whole exchange was fascinating to observe, right down to the production of a sealed brown envelope with its bung of snout spondulicks. When finally all the booty was assembled on the counter, out came the calculator. "Nine hundred and four euros," said the girl. The envelope was emptied of its folding notes.

Nine hundred euros, thought I. There's a convenient amount. Where had I heard nine hundred euros, more or less, mentioned before? If I had forgotten, which I hadn't, I was to find out when thumbing through the newspaper. Tourism spend. The average spend per stay. It's always in the 900 region, a bit more. 900 euros on Super Kings and whatever else being handed over to the tobacco companies. 900 euros worth of fags being carted back to the all-inclusive. I wonder what else the Brits had been spending their money on, if anything.

The statistics on tourism spend come from something known as Egatur ("Encuesta de Gasto Turístico" - the tourist expenditure survey). The information it provides, so the blurb goes, "makes it possible to ascertain with a greater degree of precision the volume of tourist expenditure by foreign visitors". Moreover, it can "improve strategic knowledge of variables regarding fundamental expenditure and tourist behaviour by visitors from other countries".

These are bold claims for information that the casual reader of it in the press is often disinclined to believe, especially when it shows an upward trend.

What the tourism spend stats are not are exact figures. They are an estimation. They are arrived at through questionnaire-based interviews at border road crossings, airports and ports. A minimum of just over 100,000 interviews are conducted annually, the majority of them at airports (and this is nationally, by the way, not just in Mallorca). When the national statistics office speaks of "fundamental expenditure", what it is referring to are five key components which contribute to total tourist spend. Of these, two, spend in restaurants and on excursions and "others", amount to a third of the total. The rest comprises spend on accommodation, transport and the tourism package.

The tourism spend stats are also not, therefore, indications of what is actually being spent on what. Take the tobacco. Unless this is included under "others" (and I don't think for one moment that it is), then where is this spend in the equation, or that in other shops, come to that? And what of that in the chemists? Spend on mosquito-bite treatment alone must run into the many thousands.

The collection of data is also reliant on the interviewee giving accurate numbers. They are more than likely also to be estimations. Come on, how many of you can say precisely how much you spend on restaurants? Unless you are one of a small breed who writes all expenditure down in a diary, then you can't be 100% certain. It is just this sort of exact data capture that tourism spend surveys should require, but it is just this sort of exact data capture that isn't being conducted. And where higher spend is registered, to what extent does this reflect an increase in prices? If it does, then any increased spend is not necessarily one in real terms. Just to take an example, has the IVA rise been discounted in figures since 1 July which suggest an improvement in tourism spend?

Much time and many column inches are devoted to the various statistics, but in truth, and God knows I have spent a sadly large amount of time myself over the years discussing them, they really aren't of any great consequence. Certainly not when it comes to providing an accurate picture of activity in the resorts. The value of the tourism spend statistics, such as it is, lies in the contribution to a calculation of overall economic performance. As for "fundamental expenditure", yes that on restaurants and excursions is fundamental, but so also, for many tourists, is that over the counter in the tobacconists.

Tourism spend statistics? Ignore them.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Sport For All (Except Mallorca)

The World Travel Market in London takes place from 8 to 11 November. What is described as "the premier global event for the travel industry" will this year be devoting considerable attention to sports tourism. Which is why the Balearics will be concentrating on promoting wine.

At the WTM a report on sports tourism will be launched, one that will present a "road map for lucrative opportunities within the sports tourism industry". According to the WTM organisation, sports tourism is flourishing where traditional tourism is in decline. It goes on to say that tourism boards need "to be more proactive in identifying events and activities which (will) attract visitors and promote their destination to a wider audience".

Sports tourism falls into two categories - spectator events and participation. The reporting of the WTM in November has focussed on the first, with particular attention being given to the "legacy" and "minefield" of major sporting events. For Mallorca, this is something of an irrelevance. There have been attempts, unsuccessful ones, at staging major events - well, one, the America's Cup - but otherwise they have been pipe dreams, such as Formula 1 in the streets of Palma. This was the brainwave of former president Jaume Matas. A trip he made to Valencia as part of this idea is just one of the many items that has cropped up in the list of allegations he faces.

Unfortunately, anything that smacks of something even vaguely "major" ends up smelling less than rosy. Another great Matas venture, the Palma Arena velodrome, was the prime cause of all the allegations that started to flow in his direction. The velodrome itself has hardly been a huge success. The Mallorca Classic golf tournament, from which the current government pulled the financing some three years ago, even managed to find itself caught up in corruption investigations when the police paid the Pula golf course a visit earlier this summer. Then there were the ambitions for Real Mallorca, further pipe dreams, those of the man with the piping business, Paul Davidson. All those tourists flocking to watch the team - so he had hoped. Last heard of, Davidson, having been removed from the board of his own company, was in the US looking to flog a gadget that plugs oil leaks. Shame he couldn't have come up with something that plugs leaks in a football club's finances.

When it comes to the "lucrative opportunities" of sports tourism, Mallorca probably has to settle for less of the lucre through participation rather than events. Which brings us inevitably to the familiar themes: golf, cycling, canoeing, Nordic walking. Stifle that yawn.

If only the promotion of this tourism was done effectively, there might be grounds for some optimism. But it isn't. Take golf. In 2008 a promotional campaign was devised under the bizarre slogan of "much more than golf". What was this supposed to mean? It is probably as well that the tourism promotion agency IBATUR has been scrapped. Not because it was allegedly up to its neck in corruption, but because it was useless.

At least we can console ourselves that the bay of Alcúdia "Bienestar Activo" brand of canoeing, hiking etc., etc. has been revived, albeit with far less money. I say console ourselves, not that it is any clearer what it all entails than it was when it was ditched in September because of lack of central funding.

The WTM organisation very kindly points out that sports tourism "will post record profits and contribute an astonishing 14% of overall travel and tourism receipts by the end of 2010". There's a nice thought. For someone. Somewhere other than Mallorca. But if not sports tourism, then how about a bit of sacred-sites tourism? At the WTM there will also be sessions on what is a fast-growing sector of tourism - visits to ancient places of worship. Well, I suppose there is always Palma's cathedral.

Sports tourism. Sacred-sites tourism. It sounds like things will be a bit slow for Mallorca and the Balearics at this year's WTM. Just as well there's all that vino for them to get stuck into and to promote. And all those thousands of wine-buff tourists to anticipate. If only.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Pastoral Care: The Partido Popular's woes

The Partido Popular is the natural party of Balearic government. Since autonomy and the creation of the first government in 1983, it has been the dominant party, save for the two periods of administration under coalitions led by the socialists (PSOE/PSIB). It should regain power in the elections this coming May, but it is doing everything it can to prevent this.

If the PP's leader, José Ramón Bauzá, were a football team manager, he would now face the terraces of his party shouting "you don't know what you're doing". He has managed to alienate different factions, firstly by his policy of selection, secondly by making a pig's ear of the language issue and upsetting the Catalanists, thirdly by seeming to be controlled by the right-wing mayor of Calvia, Carlos Delgado, fourthly by appearing to set the local party on a lurch to the right and one that goes against the notion of regionalism and fifthly by, to the utter amazement of many, overlooking the likes of the mayor of Manacor and the ex-mayor of Inca as candidate for the presidency of the Council of Mallorca in favour of someone called Maria Salom, a member of Congress in Madrid.

It's an impressive charge sheet, one to which can be added the hand of the party centrally in helping to make Bauzá's decisions for him, as with Salom, an apparent lack of openness in selection and an underlying tension of not so much a north-south divide but a Palma-Calvia versus everywhere else schism.

It is this final element that underpins the problems that Bauzá has brought upon himself. It is hardly a new issue. Other parties in Mallorca have faced the same internal antagonisms caused by the dominance of the Palma-Calvia axis. The nationalist Unió Mallorquina (UM) party, undergoing one of its regular periods of bloodletting, did this in spectacular style some while back when "choosing" Palma man Miguel Nadal to succeed Maria Antònia Munar as party leader. Its leadership election saw the then mayor of Alcúdia, Miguel Ferrer, vanquished at the end of a process that had at one point seen Nadal take his bat home in a fit of pique, only to return to the fray and be anointed by Munar.

The polemic within the PP is concerned not only with regionalism in terms of the interests of Mallorca and the islands but also in terms of the towns around the island. Martí Torres, the PP mayor of Santa Margalida has said that the "rest of Mallorca's municipalities should carry as much weight as Palma or Calvia". Other PP mayors in the "comarcas" (regions) have said similar things.

Torres is a supporter of one Antoni Pastor, the mayor of Manacor. Where Bauzá is the ashen-faced manager of the PP, Pastor is a bald-headed refereeing Pierluigi Collina, blowing his whistle on the in-fighting, while also contributing to it, but hoping to bring back some "morals" to the PP. Crucially though, Pastor is the flag-waver for the PP and its regionalist tendency, the left wing of the party which has become disgruntled enough to have suffered a defection to the nationalist UM. The issue of regionalism, bound up in matters to do with language policy, domination or not by Madrid and equality for the towns of Mallorca outside of Palma and Calvia, is the local party's Europe question. It is one that divides the PP down the middle, and Bauzá has proved to so far be incapable of creating unity. Quite the opposite. He has promoted division.

The Palma-Calvia dominance is entirely to be expected. With 70% of the island's population residing in Palma and Calvia it couldn't be anything other. Palma, as the capital, is "serious". It is the centre of commerce as well as government. It is from where and to where you should anticipate the professional and political elite to have emerged and to have gravitated. But the Palma connection has problems. Especially for the PP. The former president Jaume Matas, embroiled in corruption allegations, and the grandfather of Mallorcan politics, Gabriel Cañellas who was not without his own problems when it came to accusations (he was absolved), are both Palma men.

This history should not be underestimated. It colours what is happening in the PP at the moment. It may be under the surface, but it is there all the same. The regions might once have produced some old farmer who got lucky as the local mayor, but they are now bringing forth a new and more professional political class in different parties - the businessman Fornes in Muro, the admirable Llompart in Alcúdia, the impressive Pastor in Manacor.

The old boys' network is still very much at play, especially in the towns around the island. There is still a sense in which politics are the adults' version of playground spats among peers who have grown up with each other. This isn't about to go away, but nevertheless there is a further sense in which some growing up has occurred and that a new political maturity away from the Palma epicentre is bedding in, but is still being pushed onto the subs' bench.

Bauzá threatens to undermine his party through a Palma and Calvia-centric arrogance, one allied to Madrid, and by alienating a coherent and confident left wing in the regions. The goal for election victory in 2011 is wide open, but unless he sets about repairing the damage, the cuddly current president, Francesc Antich, can even now, much against expectation, anticipate stroking home the penalty shoot-out winner.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

New For Old: The all-inclusive mixed message

"Mallorca has worked as an example of tourism development except in the case of all-inclusive."

So says Michael Tenzer, a senior director of Thomas Cook. A different company director had suggested that the "battle for the all-inclusive" had ended. It would appear not to have; next year will witness a 10% increase in the number of places Thomas Cook offers which are all-inclusive. In the name of tourism development, one takes it, comes more all-inclusive.

When Herr Tenzer suggests all-inclusive underperformance, he is not talking solely about the volume of AI. There is also the issue of its quality. Never fear. There is always Joana Barceló and her tourism ministry quality inspectorate which has stepped up its scrutiny of the low-grade lager.

Whether the all-inclusive "battle" is over or still being waged, at the same time as Thomas Cook is announcing an increase in its AI offer, the research organisation, the Gadeso Foundation, is reporting that the so-called complementary offer (bars, restaurants etc.) appears "mortally wounded". Every battle has its victims.

It befits a victor to be magnanimous. Thomas Cook is due to roll out a project in Santa Ponsa in 2011 which is designed to take all-inclusive out of the confines of the hotel and onto the terraces of neighbouring bars and restaurants. It sounds a good idea, but how on earth is it supposed to work?

The notion of a sort of mixed all-inclusive whereby guests could go to nearby establishments and still benefit from brandishing their wristbands was flagged up back in March this year. A "nuevo concepto" of all-inclusive was how it was being branded. I understand that such a system already operates in a limited way in Playa de Palma, but there it involves hotels and outside restaurants within the same group of ownership. In March, the reaction to the new concept from the hotel federations, the association of small- to medium-sized businesses and restaurant associations was underwhelming. They couldn't see how it could be viable, given the complexity of administration.

Why is such a system being contemplated? The altruistic interpretation is that tour operators wish to help the mortally wounded bars and restaurants. I can break thee, but I can re-make thee. For all the lambasting of hotels that subscribe to the AI doctrine, it might be considered who have been driving it - the tour operators. One can also interpret the mixed AI as an admission of responsibility for problems that have arisen within the bar and restaurant sector.

A second interpretation is that the tour operators are acting as economic engineers, assuming leadership for establishing arrangements which benefit more than simply themselves and the hotels. Sound social responsibility perhaps, but one based on countering the endless moans of a complementary sector that has done precious little for itself in trying to combat the onward march of AI. If they, the bars and restaurants, can't do it for themselves, i.e. forge relationships with hotels and/or new products, then someone has to do it for them.

Then, however, there is the issue of quality. Anecdotes in resorts such as the AI-abundant Alcúdia or Can Picafort are legion when it comes to holidaymakers seeking out better food and drink than that served up in many an all-inclusive hotel. Notwithstanding Sra. Barceló's army of inspectors, perhaps there is a recognition that some hotels are simply incapable of providing good service. And this isn't totally their fault. They have to work within the constraints of their own economics.

And then there are the guests themselves. True, there are those who are totally disinclined to shift themselves from the poolside. It's the mentality that "Benidorm" captured so perfectly. "Why go outside, when it's all free?" It might remain "free" under the mixed AI arrangement, but it creates an impulse to step outside the hotel walls, even if it would be to just go across the street. There are though many AI guests who don't want to remain confined, and it is the recognition of this fact that speaks volumes for why Mallorca has not developed in terms of AI as Thomas Cook might have liked it to.

All-inclusive in Mallorca both works and doesn't work. And it doesn't work for the very simple reason that there is so much outside the hotel. Neither the island's resorts nor many of its hotels are designed with AI in mind. The symbiosis between the hotels and the outside bars and restaurants and their shared living space are fundamental to the ongoing success of Mallorca. Disrupt this relationship, wound it so badly, and you cease to have resorts. The new concept of AI is something of the old concept of mutual benefit that worked well for so many years dressed up in newspeak.

How this new concept could work, whether it could work is yet to be answered. The practicalities are not insignificant, and quite what benefits the bars and restaurants would derive, and which bars and restaurants would derive them, are open to question. But the concept deserves to be given a go. The experiences in Santa Ponsa in 2011 could be very important.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Another Day In Paradise: Homelessness

He had a pretty impressive suntan. His feet, open to the elements thanks to the flip-flops, were a mahogany colour. He wasn't doing anything. Just sitting there on a wall by the Eroski supermarket in Can Picafort. His company was a plastic bag. Inside which was a bottle. I knew who he was. Or at least he fit the description. He's the German who lives in an abandoned house. To be more accurate, a house that the family which owns it cannot agree as to what to do with it. Somehow, he had come to be living there. When a member of the family had been to the house, she had been shocked to find it inhabited. Along with all the junk that had come to be stored in it was this German, together with no electricity and no water.

He wasn't doing any harm, so he stayed on. Maybe it was an advantage. Someone to watch over the place. To stop youths getting in. Having a "botellón", taking drugs. It didn't really matter how he had come to be in the house. He couldn't exactly go back. Back to Germany, that is. His passport had long expired. He was a non-person. Time was when he used to work over in Alcúdia. But now he had no bike, and when the weather was bad that was a nightmare to use anyway. He might occasionally get some work around and about. Otherwise, he would wash in a bar in the morning. And in the evening he would be at another bar to take the odd coffee and a leak before bedtime. And at other times he would sit on a wall.

Outside a different Eroski, one in Alcúdia, a gaggle of the outer edges of society gathers to pass the time of day, to shout, to bring the dogs, to raise the plastic bags. Strictly speaking, it is an offence to drink alcohol on the streets. Sometimes they are a nuisance, but there's not trouble like that elsewhere: at the derelict, former nightspot palace of Es Fogueró, the imposingly mysterious ruin by the industrial estate in Alcúdia that gives a similar impression as to having been abandoned, despite its being new.

In Es Fogueró there was a body back in the summer. "El Gallego" was dead. He'd been killed, so the Guardia were to reveal. A brother and sister, also "residents" of the ruin, face a homicide charge. In the building where Julio Iglesias had once performed, the dance had stopped for the Galician. When you end the beguine.

It was a perishing late afternoon in January. Outside yet another Eroski. He was crouching in the walkway to the supermarket. You can forget just how cold it can get during a Mallorcan winter. A coin or a few. What does it take? How utterly merciless I had been. It would have taken very little. Little to shrug off a foul mood and a memory of the "aggressive begging" of London. Because his hadn't been.

While there isn't much overt evidence as to homelessness in places such as Alcúdia, it exists all the same. It is the lie to the nonsensically unthinking rote-speak of "this paradise island". Paradise found and paradise lost.

No one much talks about or wants to know about poverty and homelessness in Mallorca. It's not what the brochures would have you think about. The exact scale of homelessness is hard to put a finger on, in Mallorca and across Spain. Some town halls are now conducting censuses. What is reckoned is that a half of the homeless are foreigners. But not all are recent immigrants. The German has been in Can Picafort for years.

In addition to much low-paid employment in Mallorca, there is now the issue of reductions in assistance from the state. Compounding this are the increased costs of energy - electricity and butane both on the rise again. How many live in fuel poverty in Mallorca? A Mediterranean climate might make you believe such a thing couldn't exist. It does. In housing wholly inadequate in terms of insulation, draught exclusion and damp-coursing. Where the housing exists of course. Because not everyone's that lucky. So they end up on the streets and, in the case of Palma, have a council that wants to impound their consolatory alcohol.

Much of the help extended to the homeless comes through the offices of the Cruz Roja (Red Cross). In 2009 the level of help it gave in the Balearics rose by 38%. Back in 2007, the number of individuals either socially excluded or at risk of being so that it assisted was 697. The actual homeless figure it dealt with then amounted to 547 people. With the withdrawal of much state-based "ayuda", the 2009 percentage rise is unlikely to fall.

The numbers may not sound as though there is a crisis. But these scratch the surface of poverty and of those at the breadline. To whom you have to add the homeless. The soup kitchens of Mallorca have already announced a marked rise in "business" this autumn.

There is an unedifying aspect to Mallorca. It is one of real-estate division. In winter you can walk past the second homes, the villa rentals and hotels of Playa de Muro. You can repeat the exercise elsewhere. Empty. They aren't of course about to be opened up to the homeless. This isn't the point. What is, is the insult of so much land in non-productive use for so long a period. Through the winters.

At least in an abandoned house in Can Picafort, the German has a roof over his head.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Nowhere To Go: Playa de Muro and Costas' demarcation

A year on from a demonstration against the threat of demolition of the old church bungalows of Ses Casetes des Capellans, there was another demonstration in Playa de Muro this past weekend. Unlike that of the owners of what are now holiday homes in Ses Casetes, this one was corporate; led by the big beasts of the hotel trade in the resort. The target, though, was the same - the Costas authority.

The Costas is a division of the national government's environment ministry, but such a seemingly subordinate function disguises its power. The name alone commands anxiety; it has acquired a reputation akin to the Inquisition. It scours the coastlines of Mallorca and Spain, handing out decrees that, many will argue, seem arbitrary and unfair. It appears to make things up as it goes along, applying interpretations to the law on the demarcation of coasts.

The law itself is not unreasonable. It is an attempt to right the wrongs of coastal building and environmental destruction and to maintain public access. The problems occur with interpretations as to what is "public domain", what is urban, what is legal, what is illegal, what is land "influenced" by the sea, what falls within one distance from the shorelines, within another one and then yet another. To all this can be added a history of unregulated building and dubious practice as well as the demands of tourism and of business.

The job of untangling the mess in Mallorca is that of the boss of the Costas in the Balearics. His name is Celestí Alomar. You might remember him from some years ago. It was he who fronted the eco-tax debacle when he was tourism minister in the previous Antich administration. He's no great friend to the hotels who were the ones expected to collect the eco-tax. When Antich became president again in 2007, Alomar was conspicuous by his absence from the list of new ministers. The reason was that he had fallen out so badly with business.

In Playa de Muro, there are indeed some big beasts of the hotel industry. They don't come much more respected than Iberostar. It has five hotels in the resort. They don't come much more representative of Muro business than Grupotel. This chain virtually is Muro. Its president is a former mayor, and the current mayor, Martí Fornes, is a former director of the company. The problem for Playa de Muro, though, is that it has been, along with parts of the coastlines in Pollensa and Son Servera, the target of the "new" law of demarcation in Mallorca, the determination of which has sped up considerably under Alomar's direction.

The other problem for the resort is its geography. It is essentially a strip of land with the sea to one side and the Albufera wetlands nature park to the other. The distance between shoreline and wetlands, at its shortest, is only some 200 metres, if that. In terms of "influence" by the sea, there is no land in Playa de Muro that hasn't been influenced. Last year, Alomar set the alarm bells ringing by referring to dried-out "salinas" (salt deposit/marsh). Natural, and they are evidence of influence by the sea. The interpretation is that they are public domain. And that means much of the resort. Playa de Muro was a totally artificial creation on top of what were dunes, scrub, forest and lagoon.

According to the "platform" leading the protests, some two million square metres of land are set to be reclassified as public domain, reversing the provisional demarcation made as a consequence of the law of 1988. Playa de Muro barely existed forty years ago. Much of it has been built since the late '80s, and that which was built before, even many years before, i.e. the bungalows of Ses Casetes, falls foul of that 1988 law on land demarcation, now being pursued with vigour.

What this all means is that property - of all types - is subject to the thirty year rule. It can remain, but it can't be sold. Any development, either new or additional, would be most unlikely to be approved (not of course that this always stops it being done). After the thirty years, there is the likelihood, as the land would revert to state ownership, of having to pay for the privilege to keep the property: an illogical outcome. If the buildings are environmentally harmful, then no amount of handing over money to the government makes them less so.

On the face of it, the Costas decision is madness. But whether the authority would see it through must be open to doubt. The feeling is that there will be some "horse-trading", while the big beasts, together with Muro town hall, will not take the ruling lying down.

There is, however, a different scenario. The Costas decision could well be seen as hypothetical, because thirty, forty or fifty years from now, the threat of rising sea levels will have done its work for them. It isn't a threat that should be ignored. But for Playa de Muro, for its hotels and residences, there is nowhere to go other than further inland. And further inland means one thing and one thing alone - a damn great legally protected wetlands nature park. There is nowhere to go.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Are You The Right Man For Me?

A story for the season's end.

She sits by the bar, and you wonder if she takes a glance into the mirrored glass behind the shelves opposite. And if she does, what she sees. The music video is playing on the TV, and she sings down low, mumbling the words that would be less tuneless were she to sing loudly, as her diaphragm has closed around the melody and strangled it into the chill of a beer glass. She sits by the bar in an endless wait. She smiles at the occasional guy who comes in, makes her time seem important by thumbing a mobile, takes another cigarette, and then shifts on her stool as someone suggests to her another beer, which she accepts with a coy shrug and a throaty thanks that comes out as a part laugh and then cough.

She sits by the bar. It could be seedy; it could be exotic. It could be non-descript and, in a less charitable moment, you might believe the same of her and that were she with some bloke, were she another tourist wandering sad-faced into a bar for a no-thought-applied beer of cold lack of comfort, you would pay little attention. Except she isn't. She waits. Some she knows. Some she waits to know. And one appears, sits at the next stool and orders a beer and another for her. So she places a jacket on the back of her stool and takes one more cigarette.

Are you the right man for me?

Her summer has moved her to a moisture-destroying pursuit of tanning that may somehow be attractive, or so she may believe, but is vanity in pursuit of the passing, the passing fancies of a midday or midnight dream; it matters little what time it is. And she clouds the invasion of the sun's rays with the fogs and mists of twenty cadged from someone she knew earlier, the twenty, forty that day that crease and wreck and wrinkle as sure as the sun has created havoc and has cratered the skin. And all, perhaps, in the expectation of a moisture-creating moment of passing fantasy if this is the right man for her, except he is another who has wrinkled, creaked and been wrecked under the sun. And he sits by the bar, and you wonder if he takes a glance into the mirrored glass behind the shelves opposite, and if he does what he sees.

Are you safe? Are you my friend?

The music channel retreats decades. She smiles, moves her shoulders. She is back in seventies time, back in a playground with a skipping-rope and pigtails that some boy tugs, and so she runs and cries and forgets about anything of the future. And somehow she came to be here. She has another beer and another cigarette, and she's not sure. He, the guy on the stool next to her, smokes and strokes a beard, discolouring his face with beer and a never-ending filter of nicotine. He says things, but she doesn't really hear. She is tumbling down a dip in a playing-field, laughing and shouting and then, suddenly, going blank. She stares at him, at the tattoos and rings on his fingers, and, for a moment, she is frightened.

Or are you toxic for me?

She composes herself, starts to sing more loudly. The tourists, pale, pierced and pissed, clap and encourage this burst of spontaneous karaoke. They seek a similar small enjoyment and solace amidst the fags of their fag-end season holiday. And at some point, she disappears out the back. Cats, alert and nervous, crouch and stare and then scurry for cover beneath cars, from where they watch and wait for her to go. And for him to go. The evening has a dampness, a mistiness; not cold but humid and dank. The outside wall feels similarly moist. She makes no noise and does not see the cats' inquisitive and startled eyes.

Will you mistreat me?

He leaves, not through the bar but down an alleyway into the night. She is back on her stool. Another beer? Why not, she croaks and half-laughs, the recent past drifting away as she thumbs the mobile for any contacts. And there is one. She smiles and nods knowingly to the barman. "A promise?" he asks. She says nothing, just grins and puffs on her cigarette. She has, she thinks, an offer out, away, to somewhere else, to something else, to another bar, to another low-sung karaoke. Is he the right man for her? At the end of the season, she doesn't think of that. Just the next bar stool, the next beer and the next moisture of a dark wall.

With acknowledgement to lyrics from "Bluebeard" by the Cocteau Twins.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Divorced From Realities: Conferences and academia

Two conferences. One just finished. One taking place this coming week. Both important, and both representative of something which Mallorca does rather well - tourism research. A welcome by-product of a one-product economy, such as Mallorca's, is that it has spawned a world-class faculty at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, one dedicated to the application of academic research to the practicalities of tourism and its relationship with the economy, the environment and consumerism.

The conference that has finished was an international seminar held at the ParcBit technology park. The seventh International Seminar on Innovation in Tourism (INTO 2010) considered the ways in which tourism knowledge is transferred from academia and research into the business world. What might sound like dry academics talking to other academics overlooks the contributions of the likes of Sol Meliá's chief marketing officer and representatives of Bicycle Holidays and Expedia.

The one that takes place on 28 and 29 October is the first national congress on tourism rights; one that covers, among other things, air travel, contraction in the tourism industry and tourist consumer protection.

Does any of this matter? The answer is that it should matter a great deal. Academia, in particular, has a crucial role to play in the moulding of strategies at governmental level and at that of the über-professional - hotel managements, tour operators and so on. But to what extent it ever deals with the realities of tourism is another matter. Sometimes it does seem to, but it merely acts to emphasise the apparent impotence of governments and elements of business to take any action to tackle these tourism realities.

Let me give two examples. The most startling pieces of research that I have come across from the university relate to all-inclusives and to the actual value of different "groups" of tourist. The first, discovering the bleeding obvious probably, sought to place a figure on how little the all-inclusive guest contributes in terms of spend by comparison with visitors in other types of accommodation. The second, more startling, was the revelation that at least ten per cent of tourists amount to, in effect, a net loss. It costs more to have them as visitors than they contribute. And this was research that goes back many years. Instinctively, one finds it hard not to conclude that the percentage has risen. It was also research conducted well before the onset of the all-inclusive.

Both these pieces of research should have set alarm bells ringing. Maybe they did, but in the case of the latter (and the former, by implication), it is politically expedient to have tourism that contributes little, nothing or less than nothing. Why? So the tourism numbers and the numbers passing through the airports continue to look good.

A problem with the sort of worthy work that comes from academia or is spouted at conferences is that it might just be self-serving. The congress on tourism rights is organised by the islands' college of lawyers. Not that they don't have much to offer that is sensible in considering tourists' rights; they certainly do. But they also tend to rather like legislation. And this can have a significant impact on the realities of tourism.

When one refers to tourism rights, the other side of the coin should also be considered: the rights of tourism to, in effect, leech off the resources of Mallorca (or anywhere) and offer nothing by way of return. Is it, or should it be, the right of anyone to do this? Notwithstanding the fact that tourism made Mallorca, there is such a thing as reciprocity. Rights work both ways. For the tourist and for the tourist resorts, their people and their businesses.

Fundamentally though, the problem with the conferences, with academia is that what they talk about, what they find is completely meaningless to the front-line operators in the bars, the restaurants and the rest. They are a part of the same elite formed also by government which produces statistics no one can get their heads around. We have just learned that tourism numbers for 2010 have been superior to those in 2009; that tourism spend for the first eight months of 2010 rose by 6%. I don't personally dispute either figure, but I can well understand a response along the lines of - "and your point is?". Occupancy numbers are an irrelevance, if you take into account the percentage that might as well not be here, while spend is a generally arrived at figure, rather than one broken down by resorts and even parts of a resort.

Academia cannot be wholly blamed. It is not its fault that it may have unearthed certain findings, such as the net-lossmaking tourists, and that no one has taken any notice. Or been able or willing to do anything about it. You would hope, however, that something really meaningful does come out of these two conferences. There was one session at the INTO 2010 meeting that really stood out. Its title was "How To Develop Value In A Destination". We should be told and specifically we should be told for whom value is to be developed. My fear is that you and I know the answer, and that it ain't you, if you happen to be a bar-owner.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.