B
beadnut
New member
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2010
- Messages
- 3
Gosh what lovely feedback from you all on my little ol' family pictures. Little did granny and grandpa know how their photos would spread!
What else can I share with you? Well as a kid, most afternoons - after the enforced siesta when all the shops closed (bliss!) - we would walk into the village for icecream at the Brisas, Iru or Cactus bar which always intrigued me as they sort of merged together, but you could tell where one ended and the next began as the chairs changed! There was an old guy on a push bike with a big refridgerated cart at the front who would go along the beach front shouting "Helado!" at the top of his voice.
A local fisherman took us in his boat called "Byp" across to Cala caletes for a swim and a picnic, and then introduced us to the delights of eating raw spiny sea urchins. In the 1960s this was like a local secret in that there were no organised tours etc, so it was an eye opener to go back to Cala Caletes in summer 2010 and find it mobbed by pleasure craft and jet skis.
As a 6 year old I remember the regular visits we made walking up a quiet valley in the heat to Castell del Rei - a ruined mysterious castle built for (I think) Jaime Primero.
My dad was daft on bird watching, so he would get very excited when he spotted an Eleonora falcon circling above in the thermals. His favourite bird spotting treks would be up the Boquer valley, to the salt flats near Alcudia (all drained now perhaps?) and a long days outing to the lighthouse at Cabo salinas on the southernmost tip of the island. At night we would listen to Poop's owl calling as we enjoyed the cool of the evening, and having had a proper afternoon siesta, us kids were fresh as daisies and would play ping pong, card games, charades and read old copies of the Reader's Digest.
Our parents took us to the Roman ruins in Alcudia, the old Roman bridge in Pollensa and showed us the prehistoric talaiots at Ses Païsses. I guess dad just found out about these places by asking at the hotel and our lovely, ever-smiling guide who drove the hotel minibus. Us three kids just soaked it all up without a thought. Oh the joys of no Nintedos!
We became friends with Miguel Pericas who later became mayor of Pollensa or the Puerto, and went out to his father Lorenzo's finca one afternoon before the plain between the puerto and Pollensa became built up with holiday villas. I remember eating ripe figs off the trees. The straight "back" road to Pollensa that runs from Llenaire restaurant was an unsurfaced dust-bowl of a track and when we heard a tinkling sound we couldn't place what it was, thinking it might be running water, but as we passed a hedge, we found a flock of sheep rust-red from the soil and it was their sheep bells that we had heard in the distance! The roadside was ablaze with delicate blood red poppies.
OK - enough of me waxing lyrical about the 1960s and the lack of folk!
Oh one last thing to share - I was brought up with the story that in order to develop Mallorca for tourism, Franco divided up a map of Mallorca and designated different areas to different tour operators. Puerto Pollensa and Alcudia were "given" to a Glaswegian travel agent called Llewellyn Davies, and that is why so many Scottish families go there, and why you will find predominantly other nationalities (German and French for example) in other areas of the island. I just wondered if anyone else was aware of that?
Shutting up now.....
What else can I share with you? Well as a kid, most afternoons - after the enforced siesta when all the shops closed (bliss!) - we would walk into the village for icecream at the Brisas, Iru or Cactus bar which always intrigued me as they sort of merged together, but you could tell where one ended and the next began as the chairs changed! There was an old guy on a push bike with a big refridgerated cart at the front who would go along the beach front shouting "Helado!" at the top of his voice.
A local fisherman took us in his boat called "Byp" across to Cala caletes for a swim and a picnic, and then introduced us to the delights of eating raw spiny sea urchins. In the 1960s this was like a local secret in that there were no organised tours etc, so it was an eye opener to go back to Cala Caletes in summer 2010 and find it mobbed by pleasure craft and jet skis.
As a 6 year old I remember the regular visits we made walking up a quiet valley in the heat to Castell del Rei - a ruined mysterious castle built for (I think) Jaime Primero.
My dad was daft on bird watching, so he would get very excited when he spotted an Eleonora falcon circling above in the thermals. His favourite bird spotting treks would be up the Boquer valley, to the salt flats near Alcudia (all drained now perhaps?) and a long days outing to the lighthouse at Cabo salinas on the southernmost tip of the island. At night we would listen to Poop's owl calling as we enjoyed the cool of the evening, and having had a proper afternoon siesta, us kids were fresh as daisies and would play ping pong, card games, charades and read old copies of the Reader's Digest.
Our parents took us to the Roman ruins in Alcudia, the old Roman bridge in Pollensa and showed us the prehistoric talaiots at Ses Païsses. I guess dad just found out about these places by asking at the hotel and our lovely, ever-smiling guide who drove the hotel minibus. Us three kids just soaked it all up without a thought. Oh the joys of no Nintedos!
We became friends with Miguel Pericas who later became mayor of Pollensa or the Puerto, and went out to his father Lorenzo's finca one afternoon before the plain between the puerto and Pollensa became built up with holiday villas. I remember eating ripe figs off the trees. The straight "back" road to Pollensa that runs from Llenaire restaurant was an unsurfaced dust-bowl of a track and when we heard a tinkling sound we couldn't place what it was, thinking it might be running water, but as we passed a hedge, we found a flock of sheep rust-red from the soil and it was their sheep bells that we had heard in the distance! The roadside was ablaze with delicate blood red poppies.
OK - enough of me waxing lyrical about the 1960s and the lack of folk!
Oh one last thing to share - I was brought up with the story that in order to develop Mallorca for tourism, Franco divided up a map of Mallorca and designated different areas to different tour operators. Puerto Pollensa and Alcudia were "given" to a Glaswegian travel agent called Llewellyn Davies, and that is why so many Scottish families go there, and why you will find predominantly other nationalities (German and French for example) in other areas of the island. I just wondered if anyone else was aware of that?
Shutting up now.....
