A German real-estate businessman, Kristian Worbs, now owns the mansion in Santa Margalida that John Barry commissioned in 1974. The composer of Bond scores and many others was, to quote the mayor of Santa Margalida, “swindled”. Joan Monjo has explained that funds for the construction were diverted into the building of a hotel in Can Picafort. He was able to get his money back, but by then he wanted nothing more to do with the project. The mansion was never finished. He never lived in it.
Worbs acquired the property from the Barry estate in 2016. Under agreements with the town hall, he has planning permission for what is hoped will be the eventual completion. There is to be a form of Barry museum, and work to the mansion has to retain essential features of what was originally developed. So that this preservation is observed, the property has to be listed. At the most recent Santa Margalida council meeting, this was made official. There was unanimous support from all parties for the mansion to be catalogued as a protected building.
It is one of fourteen new buildings and structures in Santa Margalida that are now listed in the municipal catalogue. These include five old summer houses in Can Picafort and the one-time Guardia Civil barracks in Santa Margalida itself. The town hall didn’t have a catalogue until 2014. This meant that some buildings with heritage value were demolished and lost forever. There will be no such fate for John Barry’s mansion.
Pancaritat in Muro.
The post-Easter parties more popular than ever
There is a greater concentration of the pancaritat pilgrimages/fiestas in northern Mallorca than elsewhere on the island. Alcudia, Campanet, Muro, Pollensa and Sa Pobla all have a pancaritat, the pilgrimages being to religious sites such as the oratory in Crestatx.
Sa Pobla’s celebration, always on the Tuesday following Easter, is the biggest of all, the participation growing year by year, as it is for the others. In Pollensa, where the pancaritat is always at the Puig Maria sanctuary on Easter Monday, the Obreria, the entity that is responsible for maintenance, had reckoned on needing one hundred rations of arròs brut. By the Saturday, 180 tickets had been sold; proceeds are for work at the sanctuary.
The pancaritats are simple affairs - pilgrimage, followed by mass, folk dance, lunch and some entertainment for the kids. Riotous occasions they are not, though in the past there have been some issues in Muro. The ‘quintos’, who this year are the ‘06’ quintos because they were born in 2006, caused some problems a few years ago. The police and town hall had to give them a stern talking-to; the pancaritat is not an occasion for drunken antics. When is?
These celebrations have more and more become events for all ages, with the quintos having been given an increasingly central role. This is so in Campanet, where the pancaritat is over two days - Easter Monday and Tuesday - and in effect starts and finishes with the quintos: they sing the ‘goigs’ (songs of joy) prior to the procession on Monday morning and take up the challenge of the pine climb late on Tuesday afternoon.
The word quintos now applies to young people when reaching the age of majority. The origin of the word, which translates as a fifth, refers to the discriminatory system of recruitment to the army first initiated during the reign of Juan II of Castile in the fifteenth century - one in every five males had to serve in the army.
Tomeu Cifre is one of Pollensa’s most prominent politicians. No, make that the most prominent. Involved with the town hall as councillor and mayor for some 25 years, he is now in opposition, the leader of the party he formed in 2015, Tots per Pollença.
Controversy has at times followed him, an example having been the case that was brought against him in 2014 (when he was mayor) for alleged “prevaricación” and the intentional paralysis of environmentally sensitive developments, e.g. El Vilà and La Font. Ten years on, and the courts in Inca have found that there was no evidence of a criminal offence. The case has been closed. Speaking after the ruling, Cifre linked the case to the reason why he founded Tots. He had been a member of the Partido Popular. He was in 2014, by when José Ramón Bauzá of the PP had been Balearic president for three years. Bauzá’s was, he says, “a disastrous government”. Specifically, Cifre disagreed with the Bauzá language policy for education.
Abbreviated to TIL, the integrated treatment of language was perceived by Cifre (and many others) as a means of undermining Catalan. In turn, this was viewed as contrary to an historical PP philosophy in the Balearics of defending regionalist interests. Cifre was firmly in the regionalist camp. So were other PP mayors who had their differences with Bauzá.
Cifre believes that the Bauzá government had a hand in the criminal complaint that was made against him. “I believe that those who lodged the complaint passed information to the PP leadership at that time because it was good for them to silence the regionalists. I’m convinced that there was some direct or indirect contact between the complainants and the leaders.”
The leadership vetoed Cifre’s candidacy for mayor at the 2015 election as the party’s code of ethics did not allow him to stand - all to do with being implicated in a criminal investigation. He was expelled from the party, ostensibly because of the case. He formed Tots, who ended up with the most votes of any party, but there were not enough for him to be returned as mayor. He was four years later. He regrets the cost to the public purse arising from the case. As to a possible return to the PP, he’s clear: “I’m not considering this. It’s been a long time. We’ve made our way and we will continue.”
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