The long-abandoned power station in Alcanada and the peculiar development opposite go hand in hand. The power station opened in 1957 in the days when the gas and electricity company was GESA. The bungalows opposite formed the Poblat GESA. They were for power station workers and their families, who were tenants.
The architect behind the Poblat was Josep Ferragut, whose association with Alcudia was to also include the City of Lakes project - the largest tourist/residential development anywhere in Spain. Ferragut's GESA association later manifested itself with the building in Palma. The small estate of 29 bungalows (or cottages, if one prefers) plus chapel and school was thus not on the grand scale of other Ferragut projects.
But the architectural value has been equated to that of the GESA Building insofar as it is indicative of an island heritage - one commercial, the other residential. And in the case of the Poblat, it combines with the industrial heritage of the power station, this heritage being key to the determination to maintain the plant in as intact a form as possible, the chimneys most definitely.
Both the power station and the Poblat have listed status, meaning that any redevelopment is obliged to retain certain features. Endesa, who swallowed up GESA in 1983, sold the Poblat to a Madrid developer in 2017 for 3.1 million euros. The plan for luxury chalets required something of a rethink when the Poblat was declared a site in the cultural interest in 2023. There was an insistence on retaining the bungalows' appearance, while an idea for individual pools had to be scrapped. An existing communal pool will have to suffice.
Work on the redevelopment has now started, Endesa's interest in achieving something along these lines - it is argued - having stemmed from the absorption of GESA all those years ago. By 1983, the old power station was all but decommissioned, operations having been transferred to Es Murterar. Over the subsequent years, tenants argued, Endesa stopped maintaining the Poblat.
It was getting on for 20 years ago that I really started to take an interest in the Poblat. Weird it was, and the bungalows - most of them - were in a terrible state. The lack of attention to the whole estate was clear. The place was weird, but it rattled with the ghosts of a former time, the few bungalows still occupied (or not occupied by squatters) trying hard to keep up appearances with neat little gardens, while testaments to that past stared you in the face, such as the plaque where the school used to be.
The handful of remaining tenants reckoned Endesa was trying to force them out. In the end, they passed away or left, the Poblat then available for sale and redevelopment. It had to come because of the dereliction, and so there will be new occupants, some, one might hope, with an appreciation of the past. Mayor Fina Linares says "illegal occupation and vandalism" had led to a degradation, avoiding comment on what had come before. "The town hall is pleased that all the necessary permits have been obtained to carry out this comprehensive renovation, regeneration and urban development."
What prices the occupants might pay are as yet unclear. Whatever they pay, they will have a unique view - an abandoned power station, rusting and as derelict as the Poblat had become. For the developers, a renewed power station presumably can't come soon enough. But how soon might soon actually be?