In Mallorca, there are places from antiquity, the names of which continue to reside in the present, even if they, as places, have long since disappeared. Or perhaps one should say that they have been revived to reside. Their memory had lived on, but it was at the back of the mind. Returning it to the front of the mind owes much to an assiduous research of the past and to a reclaiming of roots in face of the onslaught of the tourism revolution that broke ties with the past but which then required mending and also because, more simply, the collective memory had in any event faded.
These are names that have re-emerged in popular culture. In Santa Margalida, for example, evidence of the revival of Hiachat can be found with the fire-running demons. Dimonis d’Hiachat remember a one-time farm settlement, a Muslim alqueria to which the centre of the current-day village roughly corresponds. Hiachat, it has been assumed, was one of the most populated settlements from those times. The other was a place called Hero, which in one respect hasn’t totally disappeared. That’s because of the well - Pou d’Hero, Pozo de Hero.
Hiachat came to form the main nucleus of the village, while Hero was outside. But it was the practice to concentrate the people of settlements into one place as much as possible. Why? Different reasons. Defence could be one, but there were also efficiencies to be gained for cultivation and simply for everyday living. Hero was abandoned by some time in the sixteenth century, but its well remained and quite probably continued to be exploited. Over time, though, it and Hero were neglected. Excavations were to re-establish where Hero had been. The well, in danger of disappearing completely, was restored, and it is not far from the centre of the village on the road to Petra.
A landmark from the past, the well has a sort of legendary status because it represents the site of this place, Hero, about which there is all manner of debate as to its origins and what it means. It had existed from at least Roman times, a view being that the name came from the old Castilian (’ero’ or ‘eiro’) to mean a cultivated field, which sounds plausible but doesn’t adhere to evidence that Hero was where there had been a Talayotic settlement.
There was a Celtic divinity that had the name Hero (and variants thereof). This was a divinity related to deep waters, to lagoons and to wells. Historical research has shown that a people of Celtiberia in pre-Roman times venerated this divinity. They were the Lusones people, and the Lusones came from what is nowadays part of Aragon. Further research points to the status that Hero had in Celtic culture. In Rellinars in Catalonia, a sacrificial stone altar was discovered with an inscription referring to ‘Deo Hero’, God Hero.
If all this does explain the Santa Margalida Hero, then it is actually quite significant. There has never been certainty as to where the people who formed the Talayotic culture came from. But Hero would appear to point to at least one place - precisely the same region from which the Christian conquest of 1229 was led, namely Aragon. It’s argued that the Romans latinised what was a variant of Hero, either Oyro or Ayro, and made it Hero.
It would be nice, I guess, to discover that Hero had a hero. But that’s not what the name means, and no heroes really spring to mind, unless one includes followers of Jaume I in 1229 - the Count of Empúries, Ponç Hug, who was initially given Hero after the conquest, and Berenguer Arnau d’Illa, a knight to whom Hero was ceded by the count. They were hardly heroes, though. The conquerors were in it for what they could get at least as much as they were on a mission to drive Islam out of Mallorca.
It is nevertheless possible to say that there was something heroic about Hero in the sense of the effort that must have been made to create the well - a “magnificent communal well”, as one source has put it. And then there was the effort that went into building the original church. Dedicated to Santa Margalida (Saint Margaret of Antioch), the first Christian settlers in Hero at one point observed a “mysterious and supernatural light” emanating from a cavity - Cueva des Moro. With trepidation they approached the cave. The glow, legend has it, was almost blinding. But in the cave they came across the image of the saint. They took it to the settlement near to the well. The next day, it had gone. On three consecutive days, the same thing happened. They would take the image from the cavity but it would return there. And so they took this to mean that the saint was indicating where she wanted a church in her honour to be built.
So, that was how Santa Margalida came to be Santa Margalida, and it was thanks to the people of Hero, whose ancestors may well have honoured a divinity bearing their name.