Introduction

In February 2014, socialist ex-mayor of Palma, Ramon Aguiló, criticised the current governing party’s defence of Mallorca’s identity (“lo nostro”) as something allegedly rural, practical, traditional and attached to the countryside (diariodemallorca.com, Aguiló, 2014). The discursive clash between Palma (as modern, cosmopolitan, progressive) opposed to the countryside (traditional, local, conservative) is not a new one. Nor just local. This ongoing opposition is all-too blatantly present in the travel accounts of British travellers in the first half of the twentieth century. In the late nineteenth century, Mallorca had appeared as the “Forgotten Island” of the Mediterranean. Its defining traits, in the eyes of travel writers, had consisted of ancient modes of living and pastoral settings. Mallorca and its capital city Palma were essentially pre-industrial and quaint. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, Palma emerged as a city worth visiting with a promising network of hotels and organised tours. The capital city that had adopted the quiet winter life of cosmopolitan expatriates and artists soon became an urban playground for British bohemians and socialites. Their notion of leisure and pleasure (on a faraway island) provided the leitmotiv for the years to come (Moyà, 2013). Escaping from this loud urban and touristic scenario, the allegedly ‘true’ traveller tried to find the ‘authentic’ Mallorcan traits in the countryside and in rural towns like Deià, Fornalutx and Pollença. The tension between the urban/suburban (as cosmopolitan, not authentic-enough, and touristic) and the countryside (as truly Mallorcan, authentic and prone to inspire) created in the British travel narratives of the time two clear and opposed representations of the city, on the one hand, and the island, on the other.

This article reflects upon the discourses of representation of both the city of Palma and the island of Mallorca as two different entities embedded in separate and somewhat conflicting discourses subjected to the ideological prism of the travel writer. In this paper, I use the case of the city of Palma in the early twentieth century to contest the notions of centrality and periphery as constructs subjected to the standpoint of visitors (Grydehøj, 2014). The paper considers the tools of imagology to examine the varied images of the city and the island proposed by such travellers and their weight in the eventual consolidation of fixed imagotypes and real social practices today. The purpose of this paper, consequently, is to inspect the extent of which the different discourses adopted by British travel writers in the beginning of the twentieth century (coinciding with the birth of modern tourism on the island) have worked to conform a contemporary vision of Palma and its coastal suburban areas (such as Magaluf or El Arenal) as opposed to the (rural and allegedly ‘authentic’) rest of the island.

In the first section of this study I highlight the necessity of inspecting the notion of urban and island development from the point of view of discourse. The construction of the city and the island through different discourses is at stake here. Secondly, after examining the development of tourism and travel writing on the islands, this paper examines the evolution of the images of the “city” and the “island” understanding their ideological and, in cases, utopian nature. Finally, I suggest two contemporary imagotypes of the island as a produce of the images proposed by travel writers a hundred years ago.

Constructing islands with words

In recent years new fields of study such as Island Studies and Imagology have emerged and consolidated in the world of research and academia. Island Studies have tried to examine the notion of islands and archipelagos in their insular context breaking assumed notions of dependence to grander structures such as the mainland or the continent (McCall, 1994; Baldacchino, 2006, 2008; Stradford et al., 2011). Also, the study of Imagology has recently focused on the importance of analysing national stereotypes as social and discursive constructs subjected to relations of power (Beller and Leerssen, 2007; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; De Cillia et al., 1999). With regards islands, and in the case of this paper, those in the Mediterranean, there has been a need to examine the stress of many historical discourses that describe the islands as exotic and unique abodes onto which visitors project their fantasies (Baum, 1996; Baldacchino, 2006; King, 1993; Long, 2014; Trauer and Ryan, 2005). Unique spaces—islands, in this case—“are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures” (Urry, 2002, p. 3). Tourism seeks to preserve the fantasy through the commodification of that gaze. It is of paramount importance, nonetheless, to inspect the extent of which these fantasies have eventually shaped the imagery of the spaces visited. In words of Pèrcopo, “this overpowering narrative of uniqueness fails to elaborate on how such uniqueness has been achieved” (Pèrcopo, 2011, p. 92). It is the intention of this paper to implement and strengthen the scope of Island Studies deploying the analytic tools of imagology. Critic Moll (2002) defines imagology as the study of images, prejudices, clichés, stereotypes and, in general, of whatever opinions literature transmits from other peoples and cultures. This stems from the belief that these ‘images’, as they are commonly defined, have an importance that goes beyond the mere literary fact, the study of ideas and the author’s imagination. The number of persistent images creates a set of patterns of thought, giving voice to a particular discourse. Examination of the travel texts reveals several discourses in play. As much as imagology studies notions of ‘nation’, ‘national identities’, and stereotypes, it has been seldom applied to the case of the islands as such, within their context of ‘islandness’. This article engages in the examining of the construction of the island and its city, Palma, with words.

Additionally, to examine the discursive construction Palma and the island, this article examines the discourse of binaries proposed by Gibson-Graham (1998) where the continent equals sufficiency, positivity and completeness, while the island entices insufficiency, negativity and need. In the particular case of Mallorca, a hundred years ago, Edwardians seem to revert this discourse due to an acute disbelief towards the values of the Empire and an ideological move towards Nature (Alcorn, 1977). Travellers at the beginning of the twentieth century find the necessity to compensate the insufficiency of certain values of the continent: it is the birth of the Mediterranean islands as heterotopias (places other) of compensation. Geographer Richard J. Buswell describes Mallorca as a ‘place apart’: “a microscomic world where a different life could be experienced by the visitor […], where perhaps the normal rules of behaviour did not apply, a perception built upon, manufactured by the early travel writers” (2011, p. 7). Isolation and transgression make a promising formula for the discursive construction of the island.

Some research has been performed on Mallorca within the academic framework of the Island Studies. Royle (2009), for instance, studies tourism development and heritage management policies on the island. Other recent articles map the development of tourist accommodation in the Balearics in the times of mass tourism on the islands (Pons et al., 2014), which proves particularly useful here since it understands tourism as the driving force for the urbanisation of Mallorca and the rest of the archipelago. My current research proposes the discourses of the first travellers to Mallorca as the driving force for the touristisation of Mallorca in the following decades of the twentieth century. This article also shares with Ribera Llopis (2002) and Picornell (2014) an interest in the representation of the symbolic opposition between Palma and the rest of the island. In the case of this article, however, emphasis is given not to locally-constructed images nor to contemporary representations, but to their discursive seeds: the specific proto-images of the city and the island given by British travellers in the particular context of the birth of tourism on Mallorca. Thus, the viewpoint of the first visitors, rather than the auto-image of the islanders, is taken here as the discursive engine of several ‘imagined’ sceneries of the island.

If it is local (and quaint and old and unintelligible) it is worth seeing (1903–1914)

The beginning of the tourist industry in Mallorca can be traced in the first years of the twentieth century (Alcover, 1970; Buswell, 2007; Cirer-Costa, 2012). Several events mark the birth: the opening of the Gran Hotel (1903), the first luxury hotel of the island; the foundation of the first local institution for the promotion of tourism, Fomento de Turismo in 1905; and the first mention of the Balearic Islands by Baedeker (1901). Prior to these events, Palma consisted of a provincial port-town with very little industry and a scarce number of pensions and hostels. The outskirts of Palma, as the rest of the island, were pretty much terrain for adventurers, engineers at work and Romantic travellers in search of picturesqueness. The beach scene of Mallorca, as impossible as it may seem nowadays, was inexistent:

To the visitors before the mid-19th century, the mountains and much of the coast were difficult to access despite their obvious attractions thanks largely to an absence of decent roads. The beaches and bays –and the coast generally— were deserted […] (Buswell, 2007, p.8).

It is in this context where the first travel accounts of the new century appear through the hands of D’Este (1907) and Boyd (1911). These narratives distance themselves from the patronising and superior tone of some of the previous accounts on the island (Bidwell, 1876; Clayton, 1869; Wood, 1888). What is more, the technological slowness of the locals and their rural modes of living (mainly observed in the interior of the island) are, from an Edwardian viewpoint, seen as exotic traits worth preserving. On the other hand, they do adopt some of the images proposed by previous travellers such as the idealisation of the Mallorcan countryside, the orientalisation of the island, and the “sharp division between the Ciutat, the city, and part forana, the remainder of the island” (Buswell, 2007, p. 8). D’Este and Boyd are the first two travel writers, in the era of the first hotels on the island, to portray a peripheral world “menaced” by modernity (in the shape of tourism and its results). Modernity, it goes without saying, set its first eyes on the capital city of Palma.

Margaret D’Este states in her travel narrative a clear gap between the progressive city and the island threaten by modernity. The account begins in the modern capital of the island, the city of Palma, and later ventures to the unknown and rural interior. At first, in Palma, “so little known to the world at large” (D’Este, 1907, p. 23), she lodges at the Gran Hotel, “a recent institution even in Palma itself”, the opening of which “three years ago may be said to have inaugurated a new era” (p. 23). Palma, despite being the capital city is “barely aware of the presence of the tourist” (p. 23). The old town atmosphere, however, appears to be threatened by an obliterating modernity: “Modern science has rendered the old walls” (p. 1) considered not “hygienic enough” (p. 1). With the modernisation of Palma the old romantic scenery of “oriental looking houses” (p. 127), “entrance gates” (p. 12), “scutcheons and turrets … where lurks the douanier watching for his prey” (p. 12) are effaced forever: “Gone alas! will be one of Palma’s most picturesque figures” (p. 12). Picturesqueness understood as the authentic islandness is soon to be sought beyond the walls of the city.

Margaret D’Este, before the gloomy prospect of demolishing modern times, seeks for her fantasy island in the in “the interior of Majorca [which] enjoys an almost perpetual immunity from tourists, most of whom are far from enterprising” (p. 45). There is precisely where D’Este sets foot: “Our driver … in all the years he had driven hotel carriages, had never been asked to conduct anybody across the island. It was indeed an unheard-of thing to do” (p. 45). A trip to the ‘real’ island away from the comfortable urban scene of Palma helps the “eccentric British ladies … carry out their wishes, whether wise or foolish” (p. 45). It is important to notice here the weight of the traveller’s fantasies, the soothing of her wishes (whether sensible or irrational) and the first signs of the urban/rural tension in the representation of authenticity on the isle. The journey to the island, especially to its forgotten interior, signifies not only a passage to the margin of the known/classified; it also works as a voyage to the realms of fantasy, to a land far away from the civilised mind. As an example, mountain towns like Sóller is called the “Garden of Hesperides” (p. 88), and does not hesitate to recommend the old towns of Pollença and Alcudia (p. 45), not particularly for its beauty but because of their old age.

Mary Stuart Boyd in The Fortunate Isles (1911) is very aware that she travels in an age when tourism is threatening an old way of travelling. The traveller recalls in the preface her reasons to visit Mallorca: “There are no tourists. Not a soul understands a word of English, and there’s nothing whatever to do” (1911, p. i). The spirit of leisure on a faraway island is good enough for travellers escaping dull England. Boyd rents a local house. She does not stay at a hotel like tourists do. Renting a house is Boyd’s step towards attaining a close look into the ‘authentic’. As opposed to Margaret D’Este (who mainly stayed in the Gran Hotel in the centre of Palma), Mary Stuart Boyd, her husband and son rent a house in the outskirts of Palma (Son Espanyolet, out of the city walls), beginning a tradition to be followed eventually by a number of British, German and American visitors. Boyd is discouraged by the consul to go to suburbs like El Terreno or Porto Pi, emergent local summer resorts: “At Porto Pi or the Terreno you might chance on one [house]. But these are summer seaside places. Most of the houses there are shut up now. You’d find it dull and inconvenient in winter” (p. 15). El Terreno, as mentioned later in this paper, becomes very shortly a common destination for bohemian winter dwellers and party-goers (Walton, 2005).

Palma in Boyd’s narrative is a town blessed by the weather and ideal for its leisurely inactivity. At the very beginning of the account Boyd contrasts the dim atmosphere of northern cities compared to the bright south: “We had left grey gloom in London and in Paris. Here [in Palma] all was vivid and sparkling” (Boyd, 1911, p. 4). In this scene where everything is “bright and full of movement and of cheerful sounds, it is an adorable place to be lazy in” (p. 28). It is only when the tourist arrives that Palma awakens to the rhythms of car engines and coaches ready to fetch the visitors:

Sometimes a leviathan-like liner, making a holiday tour of Mediterranean ports, anchors by the wharf, and her tourists, eager to make the most of the hours at their disposal, hasten on shore to pack themselves into every available form of conveyance and drive off, enclosed in a pillar of dust of their own raising, to enjoy a hasty glance at Valldemosa, Miramar and Soller. When at sunset they steam out of the harbour it is with the pleasantly erroneous conviction that they have exhausted the attractions of the island (p. 28).

The little port of Palma, unaccustomed to big masses of tourists, soon experiences “the element of the unexpected” (p. 28). This influx of visitors makes its entrance and exit through the city to penetrate in haste into the interior of the island. Palma, in the first days of organised tourism, sees its slow dynamics altered and call for rapid adaptation to the needs of the modern visitors. More hotels, hostels and car services develop in the city (Cirer-Costa, 2012). New districts such as El Terreno are part of “a planned extension of Palma, and planning already considered tourism to be a key element of the ‘urban growth machine’” (Pons et al., 2014, p. 244). Another figure, eventually, becomes visible: the winter visitor who, initially, dedicates his and her time to painting or writing. The winter dweller, like Boyd or poet Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, attracted by the prospect of a quiet yet well-conditioned city, becomes more visible as the century develops.

The interior of the island, on the other hand, offers in the first decade of the twentieth century its mysteries to the most daring type of traveller: “for the adventurous, Majorca has plenty of peaks to climb, coasts to navigate, shrines to visit, caves to explore” (Boyd, 1911, p. 88). It is far from the racket of the tram and the buzz of the city where the travellers take pleasure in. Around Deià the travellers come across a French artist who “was enthusiastic about the pictorial quality of his surroundings. ‘Deya,’ he declared, was ‘un paradis pour les peintres’” (p. 60). This pictorial quality provides the landscape or rather, the eye, with ample aesthetic references and utopian yearnings: “[W]e watched the sun sink in a golden glory over the misty blue sea. Then, lamenting the inevitable close of another perfect day, we drove back down the vagrant deviating way [to the city], feeling as though we had for a brief space been translated to a new and inspiring world” (p. 258). The oxymoronic construction of a new paradise derived from the old landscape becomes a leitmotiv and the stage of nostalgic travellers in years to come. As Edward Said comments: “the Orient is the stage in which the whole East [in this case the Balearics] is confined” (Said, 1978, p. 63). It is this scenery, suspended in time and in the fantasy of artists and poets that the future traveller, more sophisticated than the tourist, is going to seek. If the city is not quaint enough, it is not worth describing.

With Margaret D’Este and Mary Stuart Boyd the concepts of city and island start to become two distinctive and separate representational entities. Palma, the city, equals comfort, hotels, and continental food together with good weather. As Boyd puts it, in the city “[t]he sunshine and soft air foster indolence” (Boyd, 1911, p. 28). The beach as a space of solace and leisure has not made its appearance yet. The unknown countryside, however, is of scant interest for the tourist. The discoverer, the photographer, or the artist—as D’Este and Boyd claim themselves to be—goes to unknown places. Boyd, as a self-appointed discoverer, directs her steps to places “where there was no attraction” (p. 111). When she travels through this peripheral space, Boyd likes to point to their joy in finding that their “journey ended in a place where German waiters were unknown” (p. 9). Travelling away from the tourist centre (and marking the margin) makes the experience—and therefore the new place—exclusive.

1918–1929: When leisure meets the city (and ‘true’ travellers flee)

If travellers to Mallorca before the First World War flirt with the idea of paradise in the margin far from the rushed rhythms of the northern cities, after the war the rural space of the island gains a utopian value (Moyà, 2012). The city represents the modern world of the machine and the industrialised world which has led civilisation to war, dehumanisation and decay (Hynes, 1990). The prospect of sunny weather far from the cold and haunting trauma of the trenches and the allure constructed by many intellectuals makes the Mediterranean a perfect destination to regain one’s senses away from home. It is not casual that the intellectual and bohemian Gertrude Stein resolves, in the midst of the conflict, to give herself and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, a rest: “We decided we would go to Palma too and forget the war a little” (Stein, 1990, p.161). The artist, the poet and the philosopher find the essence of a pre-modern civilisation on the islands. Islands represent the last heir of that spirit. Mallorca, close enough to the European continent, cheap and heir of the luminous appeal constructed by earlier travellers, appears as the most convenient of all islands. There is only one problem for the artist-traveller: the democratisation of travel and the incipient tourism.

The general rejection of tourism on behalf of a vast number of travel writers and artists in the first third of the twentieth century in Mallorca has much to do with its implications regarding modern industrialisation and its social effects (Pemble, 1987; Porter, 1991; Wiener, 1981). At a time of industrial production and transactions, travel adopts a new image: travel and place become commodities to be sold, bought and consumed. The new ‘consumer society’ sees the birth of a new social practice and the pre-mass tourist is born: “This touristic system accompanies and is tied with the world system of multinational capitalism, which has created much of the infrastructure […] on which tourism depends” (Culler, 1988, p.166). This infrastructure is to be found in the city of Palma with the opening of new hotels which eventually expand to the suburban areas by the sea in the twenties (Seguí-Aznar, 2001; Buswell, 2007; Cirer-Costa, 2012). The attraction for the sea develops after the Great War in a turn to a more material and leisurely way of understanding travel on the island (Moyà, 2013). The turn to the (urban, well assorted) beach takes place not without local opposition. This new kind of seaside tourism is seen by the locals as performed by “a strange horde of savages that naked of apparel and dignity [which] invade the streets and roads of our towns and villages, our hotels, our beaches” with the only wish to convert Mallorca “into a brothel of their vices and a playground reserved for their nudity and scandalous exhibitions” (Waxman, 1933, p. 46).

Travellers who oppose to this new kind of leisurely travel find their inspiration in authors such as Havelock Ellis and J. E. Crawford Flitch, former travel writers on the island, to try to go beyond the comfortable city. Ellis and Flitch believe that the true ‘spirit of the place’ is found in the silence of the old countryside: a spirit reflected in the landscape that carries a code of connotations and values supporting Flitch’s utopian discourse in the confrontation of an industrialised North versus an agricultural South. This “international and cosmopolitan” (Flitch, 1911, p. 33) North works “to impose uniformity upon the world” (p. 33), representing a soulless modernity, and substituting local languages with “a colourless mercantile idiom” (p. 33):

Our present civilisation, which is the civilisation of cities, orders it that we shall not wake until the day has become commonplace. But some day, when they have tired of reversing so many natural customs, I think men will again be eager to hear the heart of nature beating at daybreak (p. 229).

In the city, Flitch attends the Teatro Balear expecting to observe a passionate dance with castanets but he finds that the cinema had already arrived on the islands: “Tradition had led me to associate the dance and not the Cine with his ardent southern temperament” (p. 31). To his dismay, the film “reflected the purposeless hurry of our modern society” (p. 32). Flitch feels “a grievance against the Mallorquin” (p. 31) for wanting to be “unromantic and Anglo-Saxon” (p. 32), therefore modern. Cinema, as the epitome of modernity, “expresses the lowest denominator of our modern civilisation” (p. 34). It is a civilisation of the machine and over-consumption that proves, to the traveller, hasty, monotonous and tasteless.

It is this lack of taste what travellers after the war criticise in the development of Palma as a new tourist resort. The neighbourhood of El Terreno in Palma and its development is a good example. As Walton has observed, El Terreno changes its physiognomy and its uses due to the great affluence of foreign visitors and an ever-growing expatriate community (Walton, 2005). If Catalan artist and poet Santiago Russinyol had described El Terreno in 1899 as a white swan and every house in it as a white feather (Russinyol, 1980), Henry C. Shelley depicts it years later as “[t]he fashionable suburb […] where the simplicity of the native summer cottage of white walls and green shutters is being marred by pretentious ‘villa’ with hideous sugar-loaf and other nondescript excrescences” (Shelley, 1926, p.122). American author of Mallorca the Magnificent (1927), Nina Larrey Duryea shares the opinion of Shelley regarding El Terreno. She states that this suburb in Palma “where these villas are to be rented, is an absurdity architecturally. Never was there such a jumble of nondescript pink, yellow, white, and even mauve façades or such a chaos of towers, pergolas, turrets, Moorish outlooks, and battlemented plaster cupolas” (Duryea, 1927, p. 270). What the travellers understand as essential Mallorcan traits are not to be found in the space they visit anymore. The character of the city changes mainly due to “the influence of the English colony—in the houses, in the shops, and in the Hotel Mediterraneo” (West, 1929, p. 76). The tram from Palma to El Terreno soon links seaside urban suburbs such as Porto Pi to Cas Catalá following a stretch of the coast constructed with summer villas and hotels devoted to the solace of the visitor. The chasm between the city and the rest of the island is no longer representational, but also architectural, social and performative.

The decade of the twenties, consequently, not only sees on the island the formation of two different scenarios, but also the birth of two type of visitors with different aims: the short-stay urban visitor dedicated to find solace by the sea and social activity in international clubs in the evening; and secondly, the more bohemian and art oriented one searching for, in their eyes, more authentic experiences in a cheap and quiet place to work. According to Buswell this second “wider artistic community” soon discovers the attraction of the island far from the urban resorts: “They looked for relatively cheap hotels […] in similarly quiet locations. […] The low cost of living, the good light and the tolerance of a bohemian lifestyle by the Mallorcans all added to the attraction for painters and poets” (2011, p. 41). Novelist Douglas Goldring and poet Robert Graves are good examples of new visitors.

Douglas Goldring travels to Mallorca in the twenties looking for some tranquillity and inspiration to write in an exotic setting. What he finds in Palma deceives his expectations. The southern old city described by earlier travellers is too modern and too busy. Palma is “less purely ‘native’ than any other place in the island” (Goldring, 1925, p. 20) and its inhabitants “appear to take no interest whatever in the ancient buildings, and even show an active delight in pulling them down and destroying them (p. 14)”. Goldring, as D’Este before him, seems to follow a nostalgic discourse and accuses the philistinism of the locals for the eagerness to progress and develop following modern standards. The author blames money (which mainly comes from tourism) as the main factor of such mutation:

All traces of the old patriarchal life of the island will soon have gone forever. The Mallorca of to-day contains its full quota of profiteers and parvenus. The island did well during the [Great] war, and is determined to do better. And so rich and prosperous is now Palma become, and so determined is it at all costs to expand, that it has swept away it massive mediaeval ramparts and pushed its tram-lines in all directions (p. 15).

In view of this modern scenery, new destinations appear with the charm of an exotic getaway and the promise of an ‘authentic’ experience: towns like Pollença, Deià and Fornalutx appear in the eye of the artist as the promised (is)land. Goldring, tired of Palma, wonders whether to move away from the city to head towards the faraway rural north. To their question a local responds: “‘Puerto de Pollensa? No good. Nothing to see. Not worth going to.’ All the same, we went” (Goldring, 1925, p. 36). The spell of the unbeaten track is more charming than the tourist resort for Goldring. What initially started as a few days’ visit, it turned into a vision come true: “I grew less and less inclined to tear myself away from this place which God had designed so tenderly and assuredly smiled upon after He had made it, I began to feel […] I had found my anchorage” (p. 38). In words of the novelist, the repellent respectability of Palma (p. 17) is not found in Pollença. The periphery lives also in the margins of the modern and corrupting influence of “law and order” of the city. What is more, the ancient laws of the island regulate and ensure peace and prosperity: “If Puerto de Pollensa could be taken as an example of the world under Anarchy, I should become an anarchist to-morrow” (p. 50). Palma bores the writer and distracts him from its duty, whereas the quiet Port of Pollença provides with inspiration: “I think I wrote a couple of chapters of a novel and one or two stories. And certainly I thought a great deal about writing. Indeed, I have never before been so filled with bright ideas and with such firm intentions of setting them down on paper” (p. 44). In Goldring’s narrative, Palma is to be avoided if one is looking for adventure, inspiration and a place to write. Paradise in the twenties leaves the city.

1929–1936: The quiet country and the joyful town

In the thirties, Palma, on the one hand, and the rest of the island, on the other, consolidate as two clearly distinguishable discursive entities. The poet Robert Graves epitomises the heterotopian discourse of the island suspended on pleasing periphery. Artists such as Francis Caron, on the other hand, represent the clear chasm between the two worlds: the mysterious island and the pleasures of the city.

Critics Ruiz Mas (2006) and Presley (2002) coincide in appointing Robert Graves as the quintessence of the British expatriate looking for an idyllic life away from a madding crowd of tourists. Graves travels to Mallorca in 1929 under the recommendation of Gertrude Stein. He explains: “from all Mallorca I chose Deyà, a small fishing and olive-producing village on the mountainous north-west coast of the island […] where I found everything I wanted as a background to my work as a writer: sun, sea, mountains, spring water, shady trees, no politics […]” (Graves, 1965, p. 7). Contrarily to Stein, who had lived in the lively neighbourhood of El Terreno, the poet prefers a different angle: “I wanted to go where town is still town; and country, country” (p. 7). Secluded in his village, the poet lives according to the ancient rhythms of the farmers and the fishermen oblivious of the stir of the city. Graves, however, is very conscious of the ever-growing name of Mallorca as a resort. In his short story “A Bicycle in Majorca” written after the Spanish Civil War, the poet states that: “British, French and American travellers accepted the Island of Majorca as the Isle of Love, the Isle of Tranquility, the Paradise where the sun always shines and where one can live like a fighting cock on a dollar a day, drinks included” (Graves, 1955, p.184). It is around the discourse of ‘love in paradise’ where Graves constructs, in some poems, the imagotype of the Mallorcan country as blameless, permanent, and superior to the superficial experience of suburban coastal areas of El Terreno and Ca’s Català around Palma. In his poem “Under the Olives”, the poet sings to love in a timeless scenario:

We never would have loved had loved not struck
Swifter than reason, and despite reason:
Under the olives, our hands interlocked,
We both fell silent:
Each listened for the other’s answering
Sigh of unreasonableness –
Innocent, gentle, bold, enduring, proud (Graves, 1995, p. 498).

The use of the olive tree to sketch the ancientness and positive value of the island becomes a recurring trope since the utopian travel narratives of Edwardian travellers on Mallorca (Moyà, 2006). The reader assumes through the metaphor that the narrator’s love works in a crafty “innocent”, “enduring” and “proud” manner the same way that a perdurable olive tree shapes itself along the course of time.

Contrasting with ‘authentic’ love found in rural Majorca, Graves presents a completely different scenario in his poem “Beach in Spain”:

Young wives enjoy the statutory right
To slam the door, whether by day or night;
Young husbands, too, are privileged to spend
Long hours in bars, each with a chosen friend.
But tell me can such independence prove
More than a simple lack of love,
More than a simple lack of love?
O how can you regain
Love lost on honeymoon in sunny Spain? (Graves, 1995, p. 776)

Love consecrated in the tranquillity of the country is lost in the hustle and bustle of the seaside suburbs. Husbands and wives separate instead of rejoicing together. Slamming of doors, late hours in bars and a modern ‘independence’ portray the new and cosmopolitan island of pleasure. Artist Francis Caron in Majorca: the Diary of a Painter (1939) refers to similar scenes in which young wives take a trip to the island under the spell of romance: “Women like that often decide to go to Majorca. They like the idea of a warm climate combined with the famous Spanish temperament, which they think must be highly developed within the limit of so small an island” (1939, p. 84). The discourse of feverish pleasure evolves in the city amongst visitors, near the sea.

Walton (2005) indicates a shift in the representation of the suburb of El Terreno, and eventually of the island, from a peaceful, natural and simple place to a hedonistic and sensual adventure. This shift happens, according to the critic, during the 1930s, and consolidates in the 1950s. In the 1930s, Lindo-Webb asserts in his visitor’s guide to the island that El Terreno is: “the most important suburb of Palma” (p. 45). Travel writer Lady Sheppard resides in Hotel El Terreno in pursue of a villa on the island. On the neighbourhood she notices: “the sinfulness of the Island in these summer days” (Sheppard, 1936, p. 113) and decides to move to the mountains in Fornalutx, where she eventually finds a house and writes A Cottage in Majorca (1936). The abovementioned Francis Caron also identifies the district of El Terreno as the absolute heart of his narrative which develops as a sexual bildungsroman around Palma’s swimming resorts and night-clubs.

The construct of amusement and pleasure evolves with Caron, and namely a wide generation of visitors in the 1930s to the island, around the sea during the day and in music halls, terraces and international clubs at night. It is on the shores of El Terreno where the protagonist of the travel account meets Gloria with whom he leaves the island at the end of the narrative. In his first encounter with Gloria, the protagonist swims with her in the bay of Palma. The scene follows: “We swam together to the shore, and I ran to get her a bath wrap and some oranges”. The reader may recall echoes of biblical passages of Paradise where Eve is seduced by the snake with an apple. In this case, temptation is in the form of an orange. Caron continues: “I was entranced when she ate my oranges—she ate slowly and lazily with her unbelievable mouth which was ready for anything and looked at me with her grey eyes” (p. 120). The symbolism and eroticism is clear. From that first encounter and her first bite, the traveller declares: “I looked at her mouth and for the first time in my life I felt mad love” (p. 120). Elements such as the orange provide with the right amount of southern exoticism. The sea offers anonymity and a certain legitimacy to perform one’s fantasies at will: “I swam along in Gloria’s wake. The feeling of the cool water was like Gloria’s soft skin. I wanted to touch her in the water, her body, her legs” (p. 122). By the same token, the night works metaphorically the same way as the sea in Palma. At El Terreno’s International Club the artist acquaints young women who model for him during the day and test his sexual prowess during the night. Rosemary, a young French on holiday is an example. After a brief first he meeting at the club he instructs her: “Rosemary, take off your clothes. I don’t really know you. Take off your clothes” (p. 25). The anonymity of the protagonists together with the constructed charm of the city through many travel narratives, makes the space fitting for romance. Interestingly, it is not only Caron the only possessor of the “masculine eye of survey, ownership and control” (Taylor, 1994, p. 10), as it had been the case in earlier travel tradition. (International/tourist) women in Mallorca also perform: “‘take off my clothes,’ she whispered. ‘Quite slowly. I will stand still. But don’t touch me with your hands. Just touch my clothes. Slowly. Quite slowly and softly’” (Caron, 1939, p. 25). In the uncertain light the protagonist grasps the signs of the sunny daily pleasure: “She leaned back against the white wall. She was sunburned, but where her bathing dress had been she was excitingly white” (p. 25). In only one scene, Francis Caron combines the two elements that will prove fundamental in the years to come in the discursive construction of Mallorca as paradise of the senses: the sea and the sun imprinted on the body of desire.

A discourse of pleasure for an imagined island

How have those images of the idyllic south, on the one hand, and the loud and carefree playground, on the other, developed in today’s imaginary of the island? It could be argued that the discourse of leisure and pleasure has developed in two clear scenes: one more intellectual, artistic and literary evolving away from the city. The latter suburban, coastal and boisterous along the coastal districts around Palma. The first scenery is found in the rural areas and little towns such as Deià, Fornalutx, and Pollença. Despite their aura of privacy and uniqueness, these spaces, with time and the allure given by the first artists, have also become resorts. As an example we count with Hotel Formentor near Pollença. Founded in 1929, it soon became the meeting point for writers and poets as well as the venue for the international literary awards ‘Premis Formentor’. The town of Deià, located in the little accessible north coast, is nowadays a hub for artists and literary encounters around the figure of Robert Graves. In addition, figures like artist Mati Klahrwein, choreographer Andrew Lloyd Weber and eccentric entrepreneur Richard Branson, amongst many, conform to what has been called the ‘Deya Heyday’ (http://www.cafecody.com/deya, Deia Heyday/Apoteosi Deia 1960-1980, 2012). On the other hand we find the discourse of the “rapture of the senses” (Goldring, 1925, p.74), which swirls around the sun and the sea. As aforementioned, it started in urban swimming resorts such as El Terreno and Cas Català. Due to the need of further urban development, this space expanded geographically from Palma along the coast in super fun resorts such as El Arenal to the West (for the German tourist) and Palmanova and Magaluf (towards the east coast and haven for Irish and British low-budget tourists).

Despite the allegedly off-the-beaten-track viewpoint, world-bestselling guides such as Lonely Planet continue to promote the binary and opposed sceneries portrayed years earlier. Travel guide author Kerry Christiani in “Why I Love Majorca” (lonelyplanet.com, Christiani, 2014) first describes the mountains by mentioning the relation between them and their artistic magnetism: artist Miró is mentioned because of his love for the Mallorcan light. The guide encourages the traveller not only to “find your own muse” but also to “engrave Mallorca’s lyrical landscapes to memory”. The guide opens the north-coast section by stating that “Deià was once a second home to writers, actors and musicians, the best known of whom (to Anglo-Saxons at any rate) was the English poet Robert Graves”. It is clear that the charm of the island for the cultivated and artistic, according to many travel guides, lies in the quiet of rural and mountainous Mallorca.

As regards the rowdier scenery, the guide asserts: “Palmanova and Magaluf have merged to form what is the epitome of the sea, sand, sangria and shagging (not necessarily in that order) holiday that has lent all of Mallorca an undeserved notoriety” (lonelyplanet.com, 2014). It seems that in the twenty-first century the scenes portrayed by Caron in the thirties and criticised by Robert Graves in the fifties still prevail nowadays. American anthropologist and Deià’s local Jacqueline Waldren, continues establishing the link between El Terreno and Punta Ballena (Magaluf) as a realm for the outsider’s pleasure as opposed to the insider’s Isle of Tranquillity (diariodemallorca.com, Waldren, 2014). This first setting works as a “bad boy’s island” (lonelyplanet.com, 2014) whose appeal is for the unsophisticated. Contrasting with the heavenly landscapes less than forty kilometres away, the view from a hotel in Magaluf is described by journalist Camilla Long as follows: “On a balcony two 17-year-old boys drink vodka out of large wine glasses. A man is exposing himself to a group of girls on the balcony opposite, who are playing music at him through a megaphone as he chants: ‘Get them out for the lads’” (thesundaytimes.com).

These contemporary images of the press and some travel guides do share much of the imagery proposed by the travellers a century ago. Moreover, as it happened a hundred years ago, these fixed images all too often confront two imagotypes under the discourse of pleasure. Critics Beller and Leerssen (2007) define this opposition as imageme, the ultimate cliché of a land of contrasts, showing “contradictory counter-images [which] will boil down to a characteristic, or quasi-characterological, polarity” (p. 344). What these imagemes arguably show is ignorance towards the place visited. Once again, the island appears as an empty box to be fulfilled with fantasies. The island, in words of Rojek and Urry is “not only a showplace for commodities, it is the material register of our inner fantasies and dreams” (Rojek and Urry, 1997, p. 58). These fantasies, whether intellectual, artistic or sexual have developed into real performances and real sceneries of leisure and pleasure on the island. The island, and in this case Mallorca, a hundred years later, commodifies the travellers’ fantasies, wishes and insufficiencies. Further studies should take into consideration the paradigm of Mallorca and its discursive construction studied within the parameters of Island Studies and Imagology. This article works to conform and promote newer ways of understanding the construction of islands, the Mediterranean, and the history of pleasure.

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