To all intents and purposes, I can consider myself Mallorcan. Well, all right, as you like: an outsider (foraster)…
My parents brought me to the island in 1955, when I was nine years old; in Palma, at the San Francisco school, I studied what at that time was the elementary baccalaureate and then the higher secondary school. After a few years’ break to begin my university studies in Madrid, I returned to Mallorca before finishing them. I then pursued an academic degree at the UIB, which ended about a decade ago, when I retired. Well, in the end, after a whole life – first in Son Armadans, then in El Terreno and finally in Bonanova – it turns out that I have also left the island.
Why?
I have always said that for someone who loves the sea, as is my case, the bay of Palma is the best enclave in the world: sheltered from the tramontana, enjoying pleasant temperatures, with a thermal breeze every day during the summer, without currents or tides, there is no better place to stick to the wind. Not even the jellyfish, common everywhere, upset the balance.
But in the end I fled. First to Menorca, in the mistaken idea that I would find there a new Mallorca like the one I was allowed to discover as a child. From Ciutadella I went to Madrid to continue on my way to my father’s homeland. My mother’s would also have been suitable because the Basques, like the Galicians, are so far spared the worst of climate change.
It would be a mistake, however, to maintain that it was the heat that drove me away from Mallorca. Even an inferno would have been bearable for my wife and me as long as the island retained the charms that would have been, after all, its undoing. You’ll love Mallorca as long as you can stand paradise, Gertrude Stein is said to have told Robert Graves. The bad news is that those who went in search of that non-existent Eden in prosperous Europe became legion. The Tourism Promotion Board was set up at the dawn of the 20th century with the declared aim of getting the English and French to come to the island in the summer as well.
Having succeeded in getting them to do so, the Swedes took over from the mass influx in those years in the middle of the last century when the dangers of the tourist boom reared their heads.
The German market completed the conversion of the island into a crowd-puller. Thus the death of Mallorca’s attractiveness was brought about by, oh the paradoxes, its triumph. Now that we realise that beauty is incompatible with crowds, now that gentrification transforms cities into something even worse and the mountains are the pasture of those devoted to taking pictures with their mobile phones, now that the now has arrived, there are those who throw in the towel unable to endure paradise in its 21st century version.
This is my case.
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