The announced visit of the spectacular aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford – CVN 78 – (the largest and most modern in the US Navy and the first of a new series of three units) to Mallorca on the 3rd of next month, for a five-day stay, crowns a record of over 70 years of port calls, from the start of the Cold War to the present day.
It began in the 1950s when, to the first chords of rock and roll, the first US Navy aircraft carriers appeared in the Bay of Palma and also in that of Pollensa – on the occasion of successive naval exercises. Some of them were veterans of the Second World War, modernised and adapted to new times. Their presence, with vast decks packed with celebrated aircraft of various types and purposes, caught the public’s attention from the very beginning. Earlier, in the 1930s, such vessels had already been recorded, mainly under the command of the British Royal Navy.
But it was the Americans who stood out for their frequency and variety, with around 200 visits made by some 25 aircraft carriers between 1952 and 2022. Some were noted for their technical innovations, such as the USS Intrepid of the Essex class, which made ten calls between 1956 and 1973. Its original appearance had been altered by a new angled flight deck that set new standards. Today it serves as a floating museum in New York.
Others returned as many as 25 or even more than 30 times, such as the USS Forrestal, USS Saratoga or USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. The 1960s, when the port was open to the city, were especially favourable for these stopovers, which also had a social and leisure impact on Palma. At that time the population was much smaller and the number of sailors proportionally higher, all of them in uniform, so their presence in the streets of what was then a provincial city was striking, and common in certain neighbourhoods.
For many years the tradition of guided visits on board, open to the public, was also maintained. Access was arranged, as now, by tourist launches which for some citizens marked their first experience at sea. And there was also the thrill of seeing Top Gun protagonists up close, with aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat or the F/A-18 Super Hornet.
Conventional carriers reached their climax with the iconic USS John F. Kennedy and prevailed until the arrival of the famous USS Enterprise, the first nuclear carrier, commissioned in 1961 and making ten visits to Mallorca between 1963 and 2011. Unique in character and dimensions until the arrival of the Nimitz class in 1975, it has been the most famous of them all. With the nuclear carriers came controversy over their presence from the 1980s onwards, and the number of visits slowed compared with earlier decades. The last visit was in July 2022 by the USS Harry S. Truman.
The arrival of US carriers in Mallorca forms part of contemporary port history, encouraged by the cooperation agreements with Spain dating from 1953 – an event which, in a way, cast a veil over the memory of the Disaster of 1898 and the loss of the Overseas Colonies in the war with the United States. Thus, under the sign of a new friendship of geostrategic convenience, those visits began and have continued to the present day. They have coexisted with the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the conflicts in Libya and the Gulf, and later those in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 9/11, new security measures were introduced, visits became less frequent and access more restricted.
All this culminates now in the arrival of the new USS Gerald R. Ford, belonging to the eponymous class – the most powerful ever built, with a displacement of 100,000 tonnes, and making its debut in Palma. In these turbulent times, when the drums of war once again resound – now with global reverberations.