MY MAGALUF
Nell Whittaker
The second annual Festival Literatura Expandida Magaluf took place this year over a weekend at the end of September. It was set up to expand the limits of what culture can be: what did it find?
† Myotragus balearicus had a brain half the weight of other mammals its size and spent much of its time basking in the sun. Bone density research indicates it couldn’t move fast, jump or run. Image courtesy www.researchgate.net
Somewhere in the middle of the third millennium BCE, humans arrived in wooden canoes on the shores of what are now known as the Balearic Islands, their boats clinking gently with the clay beakers after which the people were named. They proceeded to wipe out the three terrestrial mammals unique to Mallorca and its neighbour, Menorca: a little shrew, a giant dormouse with a brushy tail and Myotragus,† a cold-blooded dwarf goat-antelope with a large flat face.
Over the next few thousand years the island (the largest of the Balearics: Maiorca, “the larger one”) was repeatedly colonised, including by the Phoenicians in the eighth century BCE, the Romans after they defeated the Carthaginians in 210 BCE and the Vandals (from what is now southern Poland), who held the island for about 40 years from 427 until the Romans took it back again in 465. The Romans brought Christianity and salt mines before Issam al-Khawlani made it part of the Emirate of Córdoba in 902. Mallorca was then contested between the Spanish and the Moors for the next few centuries, as well as fought over by different Spanish regions, until 1716, when the Nueva Planta decrees made Mallorca part of the Spanish province of Baleares.
Today, the canoes have been replaced by the 30,000 flights that arrive to and depart from Palma Airport every month, a number that has yet to reach pre-pandemic levels. Over 1.2 million people live here year-round; about 31% of its workers are in the tourism sector, which accounts in some reports for up to 75% of the island’s GDP.
I made landfall in Mallorca towards the end of September, when I flew to the island to attend the Festival Literatura Expandida Magaluf (FLEM) at INNSiDE CALVIÀ Beach, created by INNSiDE by Meliá and Rata Corner, an independent bookshop in Palma. The festival describes itself as “a weekend full of experiences linked to literature, books, art and music, which will challenge the limits of the usual spaces dedicated to culture”. It’s explicit about the unlikeliness of its location, “a place as unusual as it is necessary: Magaluf.”
The peak of Magaluf’s party reputation was in 2013, the year series one and two of Magaluf Weekender were filmed and series three of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, which opened in Magaluf, was broadcast. The year after, a video went viral of a young Northern Irish woman performing fellatio on around 20 men on a dancefloor. She had been promised a free holiday; it turned out to be the name of a cocktail. By that point, the extraordinary degree of intoxication every night of the long summer seasons was leading to several high-profile deaths every year and countless injuries, as well as presumably huge numbers of unreported sexual assaults – and, of course, the more visible damages: property vandalism, reputational harm and streets streaked with blood, piss and vomit. A wave of measures were brought in, including banning happy hours, two-for-one drinks, pub crawls organised by reps and booze cruises on party boats. All-inclusive resorts can now hand out only six free drinks a day and it’s illegal to sell alcohol after 9.30pm.
A festivalgoer sports a traditional Magalufian T-shirt.Other formulations available in the town were I ♡ SLUTS and I ♡ MILF’S.
The infrastructural side of this push is spearheaded by Mallorcan-born Meliá Hotels International (supported by the Ayuntamiento de Calviá), which owns the hotel I’m staying in and has ploughed over €250 million into the town. The attack is three-pronged: luxury (the hotel and a new open plaza); family (a big resort called Sol Kathmandu); and cultural: FLEM. “We think Magaluf is the place to be because people from Mallorca don’t come to Magaluf,” Miquel Ferrer, head of Rata Corner and one of the event’s organisers told me. “Most people here this weekend, it’s the first time they’ve come to Magaluf. The press is noisy, and always talking about the same topic, but Magaluf is more than this.” He was being polite with me: the press is always talking about the British. The Germans keep to Palma.
A view of one of the festival stages through the rooftop pool.
† Graves’ book greatly influenced Sylvia Plath and her poetic vernacular. Her poem “Moonrise” opens “Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves. / I’ll go out and sit in white like they do, / Doing nothing.”
The British poet Robert Graves lived and died on the island in a village named Deià. On the north-west coast, it faces out to the Balearic Sea. It was here that he wrote his book The White Goddess (1948), in which he laid out his thesis that poetic language derives from a Europe-wide pre-Christian cult of a goddess. It is an argument that has never been taken too seriously by scholars, but the book has, nevertheless, never been out of print.† Graves was looking to reanimate a poetic sensibility that reflects an engagement with nature, claiming that, “‘Nowadays’ is a civilisation in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and coat to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the earth and woman reckoned as ‘auxiliary state personnel’.” A supposedly academic argument for poetic language’s folkloric origins becomes a parable for how to restore meaning to the world itself; to re-establish a kind of natural balance that had been disrupted through industrialisation and mass consumption, an imbalance expressed in the impotence of the image.
One of Graves’ ideas is that language itself derives from place, and that the letters of the alphabet originated as crude drawings of trees in the order in which they come into leaf (ash, beech, cedar). Other calendars and letters correspond: the God Bran uses a ten-part alphabet that aligns with the planets, which can be traced back to the Dactyls (another word for which is fingers), “five beings created by the White Goddess Rhea, while Zeus was still an infant in the Dictaean Cave”. The vowel sounds supposedly sung by Egyptian priests correspond to the seven vowel sounds (J, I, E, V, O, A, O¯), which in turn refer to the days of the week. In this configuration the calendar, the year, parts of the body and lettering are all ways of comprehending time and its passing, a thesis surely informed by Graves’ decision to live in what was a small, agrarian community: “I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle.” Mallorca represented a purer form of access to the sacred – though much has changed here since then, I don’t think that fact has. The landscape feels almost conscious, as if a god could erupt from behind a hill at any point.
On Saturday, I walked from the hotel down the beachfront and to the lip of the bay. The town felt sun-dazed and mildly hungover. People were lying on the beach or halfway through pints in the seafront cafes and I took pictures of handwritten signs for full Englishes. I walked along the beach and around the bay, where collapsing steps snake around the outcrop to flat concrete platforms poured over the rocks. There was a very young couple standing on one, not seemingly talking or taking pictures but looking placidly at the sea, which is an almost alarming shade of electric blue and sparkling like it had been put through a soft- focus filter. I scraped my ankle getting in the water – the rocks, volcanic and spiky where they were long-ago aerated with carbon dioxide bubbles, are now mossy with a purplish sea lichen under the waterline.
I swam out a little way, mindful of incoming boats. From the sea, Magaluf looks small and surprisingly underdeveloped. Five tower blocks protrude from the length of the town, looking like they had been put up with the expectation they would be joined together by more development that never came. You can see the bar of the glass-sided pool at the hotel, a bright blue hyphen between the hotel’s two wings. The beach is wide and sandy; along the arm of the bay the coastline is shrubby; yellow limestone drops straight down into the water.
Founded in 1956, Meliá Hotels International operates more than 380 hotels throughout more than 40 countries. The hotel at Calviá Beach joins three already on Mallorca, where the company was founded. Its commitment to environmentally responsible tourism meant it was the only Spanish travel company included in the list of Europe’s Climate Leaders 2021 by the Financial Times. The glass-bottomed pools that flank the hotel’s top floor are the largest hanging pools in Europe.
Magaluf’s general atmosphere feels in a sedate decline. I went for a walk down the strip at 11.30 on Saturday night, and nothing much happened except being invited to see the “lovely birds” in a strip club, and being accosted by a middle-aged British man who sang “Lady in Red” at my companion. Though people have clearly returned to party, there’s a sense that the height of the wave has passed.
In the afternoon, I go to a talk at the festival and realise that almost the entire festival is in Spanish, and the in-ear translating devices they keep in a trunk at the front desk work only from English to Spanish. The three writers who write in English – Chuck Palinuik, Elif Batuman, Caitlin Moran – are interviewed in English, but otherwise I sit and watch people talking energetically and incomprehensibly onstage. It occurs to me that my experience is not very far distinct from that of many people on the beach insofar that I have landed in this town largely unable to apprehend it, mainly absorbing my own culture reflected back at me, which in this case is Caitlin Moran who is doing her interminable thing in one of the festival’s main slots.
I am to speak to Elif Batuman, and I spend a lot of time thinking about her work on language and translation, how moving between languages exposes how “culture” is really a flimsy psychic structure easily knocked off balance by the introduction of the slightest difference. Recently, I found it difficult to immerse myself in the torturous longing of Annie Ernaux’s latest, Getting Lost (2022), because she’d write about her lover coming over for her to caress his sex with her mouth. I asked Elif later about why translated works have a particular kind of humour and she replied that it’s the result of the “extra mileage” that results “from accessing the whole other mental system where this is a normal way of seeing things”. In The Idiot, Batuman’s second 2022 novel, protagonist Selin studies a short story called “Nina in Siberia” in her Russian class at university and reflects that, “Of everything I had read that semester, it alone had seemed to speak to me directly, to promise to reveal something about the relationship between language and the world.” This might be because – being an educative text – it is less interested in narrative, and therefore social, convention.
Magaluf began to feel embossed with a particular literary character. The island is dense with imagery – wild thyme growing on the sparse, pubic mountains, the pale limestone bluffs, the grated tomato pulp that is the island’s speciality rubbed onto bread, pink and foamy as viscera. The signs offering British sausages and British bacon strike me too as a facet of literary displacement, signifiers lifted from one culture and deposited in another. They represent the essentially successful establishment of a national mythology in the full understanding that it is in a foreign setting that identity becomes most un-abstracted; by becoming foreign itself it becomes clean and clear, more legible. Yet, ironically, it also becomes foreign itself – in other words, ridiculous. Batuman is an adherent of the idea that Don Quixote was the first ever novel, because it invented “novelistic alienation… the realisation that lived experience doesn’t resemble literature”; an advanced version of ordinary alienation, the realisation that lived experience doesn’t resemble anything. By the hotel poolside, I watched the lifeguard remonstrate with a drone.
Graves had left Britain twitching with shell-shock and unable to support himself or his family financially. He built a theory of poetry that propels itself towards universalism, that conjures up a goddess to reach from Portsmouth to Palma. Islands abound in his book, from a rain-pelted pre-Roman Britain to Irish poets writing of fantastical enchanted islands; chapter 20 describes Graves overhearing a conversation at Paphos, ancient Crete, between Syrian-Greek historian Theophilus and Lucius Sergius Paulus, Roman governor-general of Cyprus, in which they discuss the connection between the sacred image of the fish and the notion of the sea-goddess. Individual bodies joined together by a singular ideology; the British ur-mythology that underpinned centuries of colonial expansion and now tenuously binds the union.
Belonging is subject to interpretation (the TV playing adverts for the hotel chain in my room tells me that “belonging means redeeming your points for our service”). Magaluf is no longer for British people looking to party without limits, but it was never a cultural desert. Appearing at FLEM was Carles Garcia O’Dowd, or Carles G.O.D., a Spanish-Irish New York-based artist who grew up on Mallorca. His large work Shagaluf (2016–18) was made in his hometown of Palma and London, a densely layered multi-panel fresco that depicts little pink bald people with wide mouths hobnailed with teeth, naked and displaying little bald vulvas or penises, drinking and having sex and hanging from balconies.
On O’Dowd’s website he claims that the work “establishes a dialogue between workers and consumers, locals and visitors, colonisers and natives in an excessive, delirious and humorous graphic extravaganza”. Spiritual metaphor abounds, even here: the artist’s “personal cosmology” to which Shagaluf belongs is called the World of Eden; the figures in this fresco are adrift on a lake of fire. “Burn in heaven!” declares a sign held up by a little red figure next to a big rat that holds a sign that says “G.O.D. LOVES CHAVS”. The spritely energy is hysterical and disruptive, which literature – constrained, controlled, coherent – rarely gets to be. The festival, rather than papering over the reality of Magaluf and its history, synthesises and responds to it, cracking open the staid spaces that culture tends to make for itself. It celebrates culture as a mesh of mental systems, not as a monolith – limit-expanding working both ways. ◉
All photography by the author
Carles Garcia O’Dowd’s World of Eden is a cosmology populated with gods, corporations, mythologies, individuals, and cycles of expansion and collapse. Everything is connected, just as on an island, where entire natural and social ecosystems concentrate in place. Image courtesy the artist