On July 23, 1914, Rafel Blanes Tolosa presented a plan for a railway line between Manacor and Arta. Over a year later, on 8 September, 1915, ‘La Gaceta de Madrid’, a newspaper which dated from the seventeenth century and which was to eventually become (along with other major cities’ ‘gacetas’) the ‘Boletín Oficial del Estado’, announced the bidding for the line. The state would guarantee a five per cent stake for what was otherwise a private initiative. On 12 November that year, the result of the bidding process became known. The concession was awarded not to Blanes Tolosa but to Sebastián Felíu Pons, but Blanes Tolosa was not out of the picture. Far from it. Felíu Pons was a proxy for the company S.A. Ferrocarriles de Mallorca. Blanes Tolosa was a director. It was he and his father who were feted for having been behind the whole project.
Roughly half of the finance came from the Banco de Crédito Balear in the form of a two million pesetas loan (Blanes Tolosa was also a director of the bank.). There were four sub-contractors who were responsible for the four municipalities through which the line would run - Manacor, Sant Llorenç, Son Servera and Arta. Work on the line took until 1921. On 16 July, 1921, the final stage, to Arta, was inaugurated. There was, however, one part of the line that was missing and so one municipality that wasn’t included in the project. It should have been, but it wasn’t. The line was meant to have gone on to Cala Ratjada in Capdepera. It didn’t and it never did.
The year before Blanes Tolosa presented his plan, the mayor of Capdepera had been one of those who had requested that the railway line from Manacor be built. Why Cala Ratjada was eventually excluded is a good question. Its port had been thriving since the previous century. Connecting the railway to the port would have been important. But Mallorca’s ports have never been well served by the railway.
One theory as to what happened concerned rivalries between Arta and Capdepera and specifically between wealthy landowners. Blanes Tolosa was a wealthy man. He owned a large chunk of Arta. But though he had some aristocratic blood, he wasn’t of the higher order of Mallorcan nobility. Capdepera, on other hand, was largely owned by this higher order, and it was one that wanted nothing to do with anything that smacked of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and some lower-order upstart from the next town.
Image of the train in Sant Llorenç, from the album Imatges per un poble by Joan Genovart.
This story of the railway line that never was - it wasn’t the only one - is pertinent to the current-day desire for enhanced and cleaner public transport in Mallorca and to what took place in Inca last Sunday. They had the bunting out, as this was to mark the 150th anniversary of the inaugural train journey from Palma to Inca. The railway arrived in Mallorca on February 24, 1875 - it was more convenient to hold the celebration on Sunday rather than Monday - even if this was some twenty years overdue. A railway project for Mallorca was first presented in 1853; nothing was to come of it.
The Inca train was undoubtedly important for the island’s economic development. Miquel Àngel Riera of the Balearics railway association says the railway of the nineteenth century was both practical and effective. It raised Mallorca’s agriculture and industry to a new level. Whereas it had taken a day to transport goods by cart, from 1875 the journey took only an hour. Palma-Inca demonstrated the possibilities, and so further projects were planned, some of which came to fruition.
But Manacor to Arta points to what was a less-than-joined-up approach to the development of the rail network. A national railways law of 1908 should have given this development added impetus. By 1908, Palma-Inca had been joined by branches to Sa Pobla, Sineu and Manacor, by a line from Santa Maria to Felanitx and the short lines of under four kilometres that connected Consell and Alaro and the port of Palma to the city centre. It was the latter which, in a way, was to prove to be a killer.
In December 1912, there was a ceremony for the laying of the first stone for the railway in Pollensa. The bigwigs turned out for this. Pere Joan Campins i Barceló, the Bishop of Mallorca, was numbered among them, as was the Pollensa priest and poet, Miquel Costa i Llobera. The station in Pollensa was part of the plan of the Ferrocarril del Norte de Mallorca company to build a railway to branch off from the Inca line, to go through Selva and Campanet to Pollensa and Puerto Pollensa and then onto Alcudia. The track was meant to have been laid next to the coast of Pollensa Bay, precisely where the coast road was eventually built.
Image taken on February 24, 1875, at the inauguration of the Palma-Inca train line.
The plan for the Pollensa railway was to break the monopoly of Palma by strengthening the transport connections with the ports of both Pollensa and Alcudia. It came to nothing because of the intrigues behind the scenes. There were powerful business interests concerned with preventing railways ever reaching the coast, except in Palma.
The Pollensa project coincided with that for Palma to Soller, the 1908 law having envisaged connections to ports such as Puerto Soller. Those interests in Palma, as things were to turn out, were challenged by the Soller Train, but only because of the improvisation which led to the building of the tram. Had the length of the Palma to Soller line been that much longer, it is quite likely there would never have been a tram. It was felt that it was impossible to make the Soller line any longer, but length determined the provision of a state grant. The tram was the solution.
Blanes Tolosa’s vision of the line to Cala Ratjada and indeed a branch line to Porto Cristo quite probably ran up against the Palma interests as much as it did the rivalry with Capdepera. The opportunities for a rail network, a meaningful network to integrate transport communications by having these with the ports, were lost. As they were to also be lost under different and less pleasant circumstances some years later.
During the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath, plans for Puerto Pollensa and Puerto Alcudia were devised. It is reckoned that up to 75% of the track for Puerto Pollensa was in fact laid by Republican prisoners before being abandoned. The extension from Sa Pobla to Alcudia and onto the port was agreed in 1938. Militarily there were good reasons for both - the seaplanes base in Puerto Pollensa and the submarines base in Puerto Alcudia. The Alcudia scheme was scrapped in 1941.
Prior to the revival of interest in the railway initiated by the reopening of the Inca-Sa Pobla stretch at the start of the millennium, it is argued that it was the construction of the Palma-Inca motorway in the seventies that truly did for the railways. Perhaps so, but the fact was that the roads had already had an impact before the Civil War. In Sa Pobla, for example, they celebrate the anniversary for the arrival of the train in 1878 but also remember the first bus service from Palma in 1924. Sa Pobla wasn’t on the tourist excursion routes, but there were parts of Mallorca which were, and it was coaches that there were to be of key importance. The emphasis, for tourism purposes, was on road-building, not on railways.
Inca’s 150th anniversary recalls an era when Mallorca was to undergo transformation because of rail transport. But it is also an anniversary that highlights all the missed opportunities. Viewed as now being essential to sustainable mobility in Mallorca, there might nowadays be fewer issues in realising this if it hadn’t been for the historical obstacles and the huge bet that was made on road transport and which brought about line closures. Will Mallorca now finally get its long-promised rail network?
Mallorca needs more railway connections.
Manacor to Arta/Alcudia.
Sa Pobla to Alcudia.
The sudden lack of Finance to complete these rail routes is pathetic.
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Mallorca needs more railway connections. Manacor to Arta/Alcudia. Sa Pobla to Alcudia. The sudden lack of Finance to complete these rail routes is pathetic.