Rafel Ginard’s Mallorca Folklore Calendar, winter edition, is now complete. The Fundación Mallorca Literaria has co-published – together with Saïm Ediciones – the fourth and last volume, the winter edition, which is now available in bookshops. The curators of the texts are Andreu Ramis and Miquel Sbert, while the author of the illustrations is Toni Galmés.

The publication of this fourth volume is the culmination of an enormous task of the Fundació Mallorca Literària, which began in 2015 with the identification of this valuable unpublished material, as part of the process of digitising Rafel Ginard’s legacy. The first release was the Autumn volume in 2020, followed by Summer in 2021 and Spring and Winter in 2022.

Rafel Ginard and the Mallorca Folklore Calendar

Rafel Ginard Bauçà (San Juan, Mallorca, 1899 – 1976) was a Franciscan priest, poet and prose writer, and he excelled in his work as a folklorist, thanks to which the people of Mallorca today enjoy a rich and well-documented cultural memory. Ginard compiled the most extensive collection of popular cançonística popular in the Catalan language, the Cançoner Popular de Mallorca, compiled over a lifetime and published in four volumes by Editorial Moll between 1966 and 1975: this is, without a doubt, the author’s greatest work, recognised, along with the Alcover-Moll Dictionary and the Encuentro de Rondaies Mallorquinas, as one of the three pillars on which Catalan culture in Mallorca is based.

This edition of the Folklore Calendar of Mallorca refers to the material compiled by the author during a lifetime as a folklorist, collecting songs, fables, sayings… as well as other information on rituals, celebrations, customs and beliefs throughout Mallorca.

Between 2014 and 2018, the Literary Mallorca Foundation – which manages the Museum of the Word. Casa Padre Ginard, in the house where San Juan was born – carried out the cataloguing and digitisation of the author’s documentary legacy. From the very first moment of the inventory, the discovery of the set of Calendar sheets was identified as an event. Since then, this material has motivated numerous initiatives promoted by the Literary Mallorca Foundation, with the aim of making the most of this legacy as a first-rate asset in the dissemination and vindication of the culture of Mallorca’s roots.