The Fitur tourism fair as ever offered the opportunity for town hall representatives to escape the island for a couple of days and to have their photos taken - as if they don’t enough photos taken of themselves anyway.
Last year’s Fitur was held back until May, when Alcudia stole the photographic show by a country kilometre. Even Tomeu Cifre was barely evident. Words must have been had. The balance needed redressing. And so it was, right down to Alcudia and Pollensa being named on the same display panel.
In keeping with this exhibition sharing, the snaps featured the whole Alcudia and Pollensa family, the pack shuffled and moved along, depending on how many others needed to be included. Politically, Tomeu isn’t close to Francina Armengol, but Pollensa’s mayor was there with zero social distancing right next to the president, to the other side of whom was Alcudia’s Barbara Rebassa, who is of a similar political persuasion to Francina.
Gathered with them, though it can at times be difficult to tell for sure behind the mask, was who looked like Sa Pobla’s Biel Ferragut, one-time mayor and now the councillor for tourism and the cemetery (not that these two areas of responsibility have a direct correlation). Sa Pobla didn’t have a panel, but then Sa Pobla doesn’t have a golf course. Both Alcudia and Pollensa do have one, and so golf was the chosen publicity image at Fitur.
The first thing you would associate with the two? Not really. As a seasonality-busting image, Alcudia would perhaps have preferred Iron men and women splashing in the bay. For Pollensa, a binoculars-wielding twitcher scanning Albufereta.
But they probably needed to come up with something in common, so golf it was, an emphasis not reflected in official statements. Maria Buades, Pollensa’s tourism councillor, observed that national tourism is an important supplier market for Pollensa.
Tourists from the mainland, she observed, stay in hotels as well as in holiday rentals and second homes. “In addition, they give a lot of business to local trade, shops and restaurants.” Who would have thought?