The day we discovered the sea
When the first foreign women arrived in Mallorca and stretched out on the sandy beaches in their bikinis, scores of young Mallorcan women ran off to beg their local parish priest for permission to bathe in the sea, if not in bikinis, in swimsuits at least. That was quite a few summers ago now.
text César Mateu Moyà
The concept of the sea and the beach as places of recreation where one can sunbathe, swim or relax is relatively recent in history. Since time immemorial, the sea was seen as a dangerous place inhabited by terrible creatures, and so its waters were deemed unsafe and unknown.
Until three hundred years ago, when some English doctors started prescribing sea baths for their patients as a way of controlling melancholy, rickets, Hansen’s disease, gout or hysteria, among other ailments. And during Romanticism, painters and writers mirrored the bucolic idea of the sea as the perfect place in which to relax.
On Mallorca things were certainly very different to how they are today. Historically, places close to beaches were of little value. When a couple’s children inherited their estate, it was customary for the lands lying further inland to be left to the firstborn, because they could be farmed and as such were more profitable, whilst the younger sons received the lands near the sea, which were seen as inferior as little could be grown on them.
The first “influencer” to visit and fall madly in love with Mallorca was Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, who travelled to the island under the pseudonym of Count Neudorf. Here he wrote his book Die Balearen, detailing his experiences on “an unspoilt island in the middle of the Mediterranean”. This book caught the attention of many members of the European nobility and bourgeoisie, who started to travel to Mallorca more and more frequently in order to witness first-hand the wonders the Archduke spoke of in his publication.
In the first third of the 20th century the two main focal points of tourism were El Terreno, in Palma, where great intellectuals like Gertrude Stein, Robert Graves or Georges Bernanos stayed; and Formentor, where the poet and millionaire Alan Diehl built the legendary Hotel Formentor, which attracted the leading figures of the period, from the Prince of Wales to Charles Chaplin, along with the crème de la crème of Europe and America’s intelligentsia.
While those early tourists were busy falling in love with a near-desert island [...]
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