I was encouraged to join the Last on the Card when you said phone pix were acceptable, Brian as I can no longer handle a camera with confidence due to my failing eyesight and have to rely on my phone camera which I haven’t mastered yet.
The above image is from the current exhibition at Dimbola Lodge (Isle of Wight home of world famous photographer Julia Margaret Cameron) of the work of the late Gemma Bell, a talented young artist who some years ago re-interpreted the Isle of Wight Pop Festivals since 1969, in a series of paintings now being re-shown in this exhibition. Her images include iconic stars like Hendrix, Bowie, Iggy Pop ,Jagger, and others, in a mixed-media format.
I haven’t done Pingback for some time so I’m hoping it’s worked.
Vintage tram in Sóller. Photo courtesy of Christian B via Pixabay
When I first visited Sóller, 50 years ago or more, I was not interested in its history. At that period in my life, Mallorca was an exotic holiday playground, a place that offered respite from winter in the UK, where sea, sand and blue skies dominated daytime activities, and where the landscapes and seascapes offered a vista of paradise.
Later, I learned the fascinating history of Sóller which inspired in me a desire to return and experience the town’s strangeness, but the opportunity didn’t arise until April of this year when I managed to fit in a day trip from our base in Palma.
Vintage Train travels over Viaduct on its journey between Palma and Soller. Image courtesy of Ramon Rullan via Pixabay.
My first visit was by train from Palma – the only method of getting there. It was called “the Lemon Express” or maybe it was “the Orange Express” and I remember still being overwhelmed by the perfume from the orange blossom that drifted through the open window of the carriage, and I remember too, my excitement at glimpsing lemon and orange fruits peeking through the dark green leaves of the citrus trees. I guess that was the start of my love affair with Spain.
It would have been nice to replicate the journey this time but that wasn’t possible.
The Vintage Tram still runs through Sóller’s streets. Photo courtesy of Nicole Pankalla, via Pixabay
Once at the railway station one boarded the tram, a vintage vehicle that is still in service and in use as a means of getting from one place to another and as a valued tourist attraction.
Sóller’s Recent Past
Sóller lies in the northwest of Mallorca, now an area where the super rich live in mansions hidden in gated communities, and where million-pound yachts are moored in the marinas.
Photo courtesy of ralph.rybak via Pixabay.
In the 19th century, the area was isolated from the rest of Mallorca by mountains. An abundance of citrus groves dotted the valley but as it was difficult to get them to Palma, the farmers had the ingenious idea of selling their oranges to France, and so they started to ship their oranges to France by boat from the nearby West coast. This direct exportation to France effectively made the farmers and the town extremely wealthy.
It was a two-way trade, not only did the citrus fruits make the journey to France but locals also crossed the water to work in France and many French came to work in Sóller. Fortunes were made in France and many of those who amassed riches eventually returned to Sóller to build large houses, some of which can still be seen today. French companies opened offices in Sóller, French as well as Spanish was spoken in the town and to this day, French is still spoken in Sóller by many people.
The train and tram system worked up to a point, but more was needed, and in 1989 excavations began for a tunnel through the mountains to provide an easier route to Palma and the rest of Mallorca. This Toll Road opened in 1997 and at approximately £5 a time, was the most expensive in Europe: all toll charges were dropped in 1917 and it is now a free road, so cars, buses, and coaches, can all get to and from Sóller in approximately 30 minutes. Not so romantic, but more practical.
Sóller from the Port. Photo courtesy of effekt99 via Pixabay
You Can Still Travel by Train and Tram from Palma
If circumstances had been different my preference would have been to taken the 60-minute historic wooden train (the FerrocarrilTrende Sóller) from Palma to Sóller: this vintage train has run between Palma and Soller since 1912 and is nowadays a famous attraction in itself. It chugs on its 27kilometre journey through the majestic Sierra de Tramuntana, navigating the 13 tunnels cut through the mountains. The contrast between the inky blackness of the tunnels and the beauty of the rural landscape is spectacular, ranging from fields of almond and orange trees to ancient viaducts and small villages.
What to do in Sóller
The Sant Bartomeu Church, photo courtest of effeck99 via Pixabay
Plaza de la Constitución is the heart of Sóller, dominated by Sant Bartomeu church and from here you can wander the narrow streets lined with shops and bars, where traditional goods and locally made craft items are a good buy, visit an art gallery, or hop on the antique open-air tram and head down to the Port in about 20 minutes. The many hikers and Nordic walkers you will see in the town are heading for the Serra de Tramuntana’s long-distance path – the Dry Stone Route.
Art lovers should head for the Art Nouveau mansion, Can Prunera, which has a very fine permanent collection, including Kandinsky, Picasso, Miro and Warhol, alongside local artists Miquel Barceló and Francesca Martí). Temporary exhibitions are a regular feature in Can Prunera and for a small town, they can be exceptional.
Once in the Port, much changed since my earlier trip. a pre-lunch walk walk along the Promenade is a relaxing way to view the natural, sheltered bay, sandy beaches, seafood restaurants, and scenic boardwalks.
Sóller is a glorious place in which to spend a few hours. It is not only a unique town, but a very beautiful town in a picturesque setting with a history like no other.
Photo courtesy of effeck99 via Pixabay
PS. I haven’t been but I’ve been told that the Spring Orange Festival – theFira de la Taronja – is a spectacular introduction to Sóller’s citrus culture. It spans a couple of weeks of citrus-themed food tasting events. Contact the Tourist Board for dates. The event usually takes place end March-early April.
An easy 20-minute drive from Palma, capital city of Mallorca, lies the lovely little town of Valldemossa set in the Tramuntana mountains that form the backbone of Mallorca, a town that seems a world away from the busy capital.
Federic Chopin, Valldemossa’s most famous resident, along with George Sand.
Perched on a hilltop and with car-free cobbled streets and alleys, Valldemossa, the highest town in Mallorca, is best known as the place where Federic Chopin and his lover, the French writer George Sand, spent the winter of 1828/9 in Cell No. 4 (a suite of 3 rooms) in the town’s famous Carthusian Monastery. George Sand’s book about their stay there, A Winter in Majorca, is on sale in virtually every bookshop in Valldemossa in a variety of languages.
Wiki Image from Pixabay
A ticket to the Real Cartuja (Royal Carthusian Monastery) including the church, cloisters, the old pharmacy and Chopin’s apartment which contains his original piano and other artefacts, includes a short Chopin piano recital, highly recommended.
For something more up to date, a visit to Costa Nord, a contemporary cultural centre established by actor Michael Douglas in 2,000, is well worth a visit. Created by the Hollywood actor (who spends half the year there on his estate and is active in local affairs) as a way to celebrate the cultural and natural heritage of the UNESCO World Heritage site Serra de Tramuntana, the backbone of Mallorca, visitors can explore the history, traditions and landscapes of Mallorca’s northern coast through exhibits that cover everything from agriculture and seafaring to architecture and Folklore, with opportunities to taste local produce and experience local cooking.
Photo by Pixel-Sepp
Local Mallorcans however, say that Valldemossa has a more important claim to fame: it was the birthplace of the island’s only saint: Santa Catalina Thomas.
If you want to visit her tiny birthplace and shrine it lies just behind the church of Sant Bartomeu in peaceful Rectory Street (Calle Rectoria) a picturesque, narrow cobblestone alley.
Hiking and walking
You will see many hikers and walkers in the area as it is a popular venue for trekking into the mountains with both routes for experienced walkers and for the less adventurous. O
One of the most visited peaks in the Tramuntana mountain range is Puig des Teix, which is a trek of some 16km up through the Son Marroig estate, once the home of Austrian Archduke Lluis Salvador, to the 1064m summit. Once at the summit, the vistas that greet you are jaw-dropping. The only word to describe them are Awesome, an overworked adjective but right for the views from Puig des Teix. Details of all walks can be obtained from the Tourist Office in the village.
A Day Visit to Valldemossa
If on a day visit and with little time to spare, then Valledmossa will still charm. Its cobblesone streets lined with shops, boutiques, cafes and bars, means that pretty much every need can be met. Cocas de Potatas, Valldemossa’s famous biscuits, and rightly so, are found in every bakery. There is a colourful street market every Sunday morning, a great place to source quality local produce, including fruit and vegetables, cheeses and Spanish ham, artisan soaps and shampoos, and small leather goods. Some producers sell from stalls by their farm gates, with organic jams and olive oils the most popular items on sale.
Or just buy an ice-cream from one of the shops, wander to the edge of the town and look on the peaceful terraces that surround it, then find a cafe, tapas bar or ham-hung restaurant and enjoy some great Spanish food.
It was my first planned trip in 18 months following a series of health mishaps and a city break in Mallorca seemed just the ticket. My travelling companion, like me, hadn’t visited Mallorca for over 40 years and we’d planned to spend most of our days delving into the old town of which we had fond memories and re-visiting favourite spots.
Unfortunately, on our first day out to find the Tourist Office, Cathy ruptured her Achilles Heel and that was the end of our walking the lanes and alleyways of old Mallorca!
Photo by MarciMarc105 from Pixabay
Luckily, our chosen hotel, The Saratoga, on the edge of the Old Town knew of an osteopath whose treatment was brilliant and although we were still house-bound as it were, the pain was controlled. The hotel itself was perfect, the roof terrace bar with its comfortable sofas and chairs and its view of the Cathedral over the intervening rooftops was a good place to spend the after-dinner hours (and most of the daytime hours as well). We were limited as to where we could eat but the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant was amazing, so all was well.
I managed to go out alone a few times but felt guilty leaving Cathy alone so my jaunts out were just to stroll arond the nearby streets and to El Corte Ingles for a few hours of retail therapy.
A nearby canal which seemed odd in the middle of Palma but was interesting.
The Old Town was no longer the Bohemian place I remembered, but an area full of artisan coffee shops, art studios and craft outlets. Still, it was engaging and elegantly laid out, the coffee was good and the street art attractive.
We booked a car and driver one day for an outing that include Valldemossa, which was one of the places we’d earmarked for a visit, and I’ll write about this in a follow-up blog, and another day we did the same to Soller – again a happy outing to a spot we both remembered well from years gone by.
A Street in Old Palma
And that was Mallorca – my first holiday in ages. And what was to be my return blog here is more of a damp squib.
But I’m back, and since then I’ve also managed to get to Crete which was relaxing and re-charged the batteries although I was sad not to be able to do the walking I once did in that lovely island.
So, hello again. Looking forward to posting more often, though not as often as before as I still have ongoing eye problems which prohibits computer use.
I’ve also got to get to grips with WP again as I can’t remember how to re-size photos and set them out properly. Hey Ho! Another fine mess I’ve got myself into!
The phrase ‘One Day’ set me thinking of a poem by Alun Lewis whose work I’d recently been re-reading, and try as I might I can’t get it out of my mind. One Day is not the same as All Day, yet the two phrases seemed to fuse. The Lewis poem, All Day It Has Rained, is about one day in the life of a group of soldiers stationed in Hampshire, during the Great War.
All Day It Has Rained
This is one of Lewis’s greatest poems, one of the great World War 1 poems even if guns and five-nines aren’t even mentioned. The wealth of observation and the matter-of-fact vocabulary lifts the poem from the everyday: nothing about the poem is predictable, from the down to earth vocabulary to rhythm and metre.
And now I shall have to read something else to get it out of my mind!
Here is the first part of the poem. If you don’t know it and would like to read the rest of it, it can be found online.
All Day It Has Rained
All day it has rained, and we on the edge of the moors Have sprawled in our bell-tents, moody and dull as boors, Groundsheets and blankets spread on the muddy ground And from the first grey wakening we have found No refuge from the skirmishing fine rain And the wind that made the canvas heave and flap And the taut wet guy-ropes ravel out and snap. All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream, Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream Too light to stir the acorns that suddenly Snatched from their cups by the wild south-westerly Pattered against the tent and our upturned dreaming faces. And we stretched out, unbuttoning our braces, Smoking a Woodbine, darning dirty socks, Reading the Sunday papers – I saw a fox And mentioned it in the note I scribbled home; – And we talked of girls and dropping bombs on Rome, And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees:
…….
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.
Having just seen Jo’s Bench challenge and realising i have a lot of benches amongst my images, I thought I’d make an easy comeback to WP and dip my foot into the water again as it were, by posting “a bench” and re-joining the community. So, a stone bench with shadow!
I’m not even sure I know how to do this properly any more!
A resting place in the Botanical Gardens at Blanes, Spain
Image posted as part of the Bench photo challenge but I’m not sure if I link to Jo, Jude or Cee.
Strolling through old Hastings a few days ago, I saw this lovely old door. There were many rare looking doors and doorways but it’s high season and all seemed to have resting visitors. I could quite understand as it was one of England’s hottest days.
They work in silence over a hole in the ground, on their knees, lying flat on their stomachs to access the dig. On a table nearby are some bones, skulls too. The harsh sun has bleached the surrounding terrain but there is a little shade in the nearby wooded area and under the gazebo tented area in which they work.
The Barranco de Viznar has been declared a Place of Historical Memory in Granada, Spain, and as a life-long student of the Spanish Civil War, standing in this sloping, wooded area of about 10,000 square meters on a sharp curve of the road between Alfacar and Viznar, just has to be one of the best moment of 2024 for me.
We know where the bodies are
Imagine being given the opportunity to visit the site where the exhumation of thousands of young men assassinated by Franco’s troops during the Spanish civil war is taking place. Between September and November 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), it is reckoned that at least 173 people were killed here and thrown into mass graves. Even earlier, in July and August, just after the coup d’état that triggered the war, there had been other assassinations, including that of the poet Federico García Lorca, but no record was left of them.
Imagine how overwhelming it was , as a lover of Lorca’s poetry and plays, to be given the privilege of visiting the place where his assassination is presumed to have taken place in the opening days of that terrible conflict, and to talk with those involved in the ‘dig’.
In Lorca’s Footsteps in Granada
That is what happened when my friend Kathleen and I visited Granada recently to renew our acquaintance with a city that had charmed us both decades ago. We found it virtually unchanged, still intensely Spanish, catering mainly to Spanish visitors and still with the best tapas bars in Spain, but giving nods to a more modern vibe with the addition of Gin bars!
Our idea was to walk In the Footsteps of Federico Garcia Lorca, guided by the Ian Gibson book of the same name, and it was while we were doing this that we had a serendipitous encounter with a Granada local who shared our enthusiasm and who invited us to visit the dig in Viznar.
The Barranco de Viznar and its secrets
The Barranco de Víznar is a ravine in the province of Granada, Spain, where a team of researchers made up of archaeologists, geophysicists, anthropologists, forensic experts and historians led by Francisco Carrión Méndez, a Senior Lecturer in Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Granada has been searching for the bodies of the those assassinated during the Spanish Civil War, and searching for one in particular, the poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, one of the first to be killed.
How Many Assassinations
No one knows exactly how many were assassinated in the Spanish Civil War but it is estimated that it was more than 500,000, thousands of whom were massacred in the Province of Granada, some, including Lorca, even before Franco’s military coup.
In the area of Viznar, to date, they have located 16 mass graves and recovered 124 bodies. In one mass grave they found the bodies of 10 people with gunshot wounds to the head and their hands tied behind their backs.
The area of Barranco de Víznar was replanted with a thick forest of pine trees which has covered up the graves left after the mass executions committed by platoons of assault guards, part of the ferocious repression that followed the uprising.
How is the Dig Funded
The project is funded by the state and the regional government and is being conducted under the 1922 Democratic Memory Lawwhich was enacted following the coming to power of the government of Pedro Sánchez. However, there are fears that this could be in jeopardy and the excavation stopped under a new government.
Some scenes of the Barranco, above. Throughout the woods are dotted tents where the archaeologists and forensic scientists are working, in difficult terrain and extreme heat.
One of the volunteers told me it usually takes four to six weeks to complete an exhumation, to excavate the personal effects and log, photograph and do the paperwork. Fortunately, the soil in the ravine of Víznar has managed to preserve the bones remarkably well, helpful in identifying the age and sex of the victims, as well as the injuries and the type of violence to which they were subjected. The DNA results can take a long time to come in but when the families are re-united with a family member, it is a great moment.
Each tree could be a Memorial
When a family is linked with a body from one of the mass graves via the DNA their permission is requested for a photograph of the victim to be displayed on a tree. Most families agree and it was an emotional moment to wander amongst the trees, see the photographs and read the names and occupations – some academics, a bullfighter but mostly ordinary citizens, killed because of their sympathies with the legally elected Republican government.
Among the bones of those discovered is a former Rector of the University of Granada, Salvador Vila (above) who was brought from Salamanca to Granada and shot on October 22nd 1936. His wife, Gerda Leimdörfer, daughter of the editor-in-chief of Berlin’s leading Jewish newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, was spared thanks to the mediation of Manuel de Falla, the Spanish composer, who obtained a pardon in exchange for her conversion from Judaism to Catholicism.
The burial area is accessed over uneven terrain and a paved dirt path has been laid by the City Council of Víznar that after a detour, leads to the main grave which is surrounded by a stone gallery filled with small metal plaques bearing the names and circumstances of those killed, placed there by Historical Memory Associations and the heirs of those shot.
The modern road to Viznar and Alfacar with Granada in the distance
The Death of Lorca
Lorca was spending time in the home of family friends, the Rosales, on Angulo Street, on 17th August 1936, when he was arrested and taken just 300 metres away to the Civil Government building, at that time a centre of terror: from there he was quickly transferred to Alfacar and Víznar, two small towns located only ten kilometres away where Franco’s rebel army had created a centre for the extermination of left-wing sympathizers. He was assassinated not only because of his beliefs and his ideology, but because he was homosexual.
Memorial to Lorca
All Were Lorcamemorial stone
Within the area there is a simple stone with the legend “All were Lorca. 18-08-2002″ and each year, on August 19, a poetry event takes place here beginning at midnight and lasting until the early hours of the morning. This celebration of Lorca’s poetry originally started as a clandestine event during the last years of the dictatorship and was the first open-air commemoration of Lorca’s assassination.
The road to Al
To date, Lorca’s body has not been discovered but hope remains high that one day it will be among those exhumed.
Peceful looking woodsWork in ProgressLorca Park
Postscript:
The project in the ravine, which is in its fourth and final phase, is now funded by the state and the regional government and is being conducted under the new Democratic Memory Law passed in 2022. It is not certain that this will continue if a more right-wing government should be installed in Madrid.
Essential Reading
For the politics of Spain during the Civil War and since, anything by Peter Preston is to be recommended.
Ian Gibson: Federico García Lorca: A Life (Faber & Faber)
Ian Gibson: The Assassination of Federico García Lorca (Penguin)
Ian Gibson: Lorca’s Granada (Faber & Faber): This is a great guide book to Granada as it takes you on ten routes, step by step from his birthplace to the site of his execution outside the city via the poets best-loved places in Granada.
MARI'S TRAVELS WITH HER CAMERA 