GOMILA MALLORCA
A neighbourhood reborn
During the first half of the 20th century El Terreno, with Plaza Gomila as its epicentre, was a fashionable district where aristocrats, local artists and foreigners lived side by side with bohemians and those early tourists who had discovered paradise. Until the mid-1990s, when a long, slow process of degradation took hold of the area. The Gomila Mallorca project is now laying the foundations to recover the soul of a neighbourhood that defined the life of several generations of residents of Palma.
photography Íñigo Vega, Daria Scagliola, Fotos Antiguas de Mallorca
In its heyday, it was commonplace to see Errol Flynn, Camilo José Cela, Robert Graves, Patrice Wymore, Gabriel Alomar, William E. Cook or Gertrude Stein strolling around the streets of El Terreno: just some of the writers, painters and actors who lived through the neighbourhood’s golden age, turning it into a kind of little Paris. “A network was set up which organised talks in establishments in Plaza Gomila, films were screened in their original language and the Bellver instruction society was founded, with the aim of teaching the neighbourhood about culture, through sessions in which intellectuals such as Jorge Luis Borges took part”, say Eduard Moyà and Pere Lacomba, the authors of the book A Rose is a Rose, which narrates the contemporary history of El Terreno in collaboration with Casa Planas and the Camper Foundation.
And it was precisely the Fluxà family – the owners of Camper – who acquired a series of buildings near Plaza Gomila during that period, with the aim of creating a residential zone in harmony with the philosophy of [...]
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