A Thousand Years and a Seaplane

Before we set off, let me tell you where you are.

A hundred and fifty years ago there was nothing here. Pines, a rugged cove, the sea. This peninsula belonged to the family of Miquel Costa i Llobera, born in Pollença in 1854, the great poet of Mallorca. In 1875 he gave this place its words, in a poem about a single tree, El pi de Formentor:

Mon cor estima un arbre! Més vell que l'olivera, més poderós que el roure, més verd que el taronger.

My heart loves a tree. Older than the olive, stronger than the oak, greener than the orange tree.

For a thousand years, life here had hardly changed. Then, almost overnight, everything did.

In Paris, a writer and patron of the arts from Buenos Aires, Adán Diehl, had a friend: a young Argentine painter called Tito Cittadini. Cittadini introduced him to his master, Anglada Camarasa, and told him he had to see Pollença. Diehl came in 1926, fell in love, and in 1928 bought this whole peninsula from the poet's heirs. On the 24th of August 1929 this hotel opened its doors, reachable only by sea.

A thousand years of the same world, and then a seaplane in the bay.

The cultured, the wealthy and the curious of Europe and the Americas had begun to travel for pleasure, and this was one of the first places they came. You are standing in one of the places where modern tourism was born.

There was music every night. One of the bands was a local group, the Pollença Jazz Band, and at the piano sat a young woman from the town, Catalina Vicens, known as Moreta. Remember her name.

Today we cross the water and travel back in time, to find out why all this happened here. And at the end of the day we will come back to these pines and look at them in a way you have not looked at them before.

(Before departure.)

This coastline has barely changed in a hundred years. It is what the painters saw.

(Then silence until the boat reaches the calm water of the bay.)

Up on that point is La Fortalesa. In 1919, ten years before your hotel, an Argentine painter called Roberto Ramaugé bought this 17th-century fort and turned it into a retreat for artists and friends: guesthouses, a pool lined with columns, terraced gardens among the pines, sculptures by Josep de Creeft.

The dream of a beautiful place by the sea for cultured people existed here first. Diehl's hotel was the same dream, on a grand scale.

Why would an Argentine painter buy a fortress here? Because of what was waiting across the bay.

(Case open: paintings and old photographs of the waterfront.)

Look at the port as it was, and as it is. A few fishermen's houses, a handful of inns. By 1930 this corner of Mallorca had more hotels than anywhere else on the island.

Let's find out why.

This is where it began.

A Port de Pollença fisherman's son, Antoni Borràs, spent years in Argentina, in the household of the country's president. He came home with his wife, Francisca Martínez, and opened a shop and a small inn on this waterfront. It became the Hotel Miramar, and its terrace became the meeting place for everyone who mattered here. The Borràs family still runs it.

On that terrace sat the man who drew them all. Around 1900, Hermen Anglada Camarasa was one of the most celebrated painters in Europe. In Paris he painted the night: cabarets, electric light, the new colours of nightlife. In Barcelona in 1900, a young Picasso sat in a café called Els Quatre Gats and sketched him. That drawing is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Then Cubism arrived, and almost overnight Anglada looked old-fashioned. He came to Mallorca, settled on this bay in 1914, and turned from the city to the sea. He came looking for a different kind of light.

(At Can Pescador.)

This is the last of the old fishing huts on this shore. Today it is a restaurant. Anglada used it as his studio. One of the most famous painters in Europe chose a fisherman's hut on the sand, for the light.

His pupils followed him here, and the walk we are standing on carries his name.

Anglada's favourite pupil followed him here in 1914: Tito Cittadini, the same man who sent Diehl to Formentor.

But where Anglada and the foreign painters kept a little apart, Cittadini became a man of Pollença. The town loved him, and he painted its streets. Let's go and see his town.

(Case open: Cittadini's paintings of these streets.)

This is Pollença as Cittadini saw it: carts, market days, a farming town that had lived the same way for centuries. And Cittadini noticed something the others did not: a young local man with an extraordinary eye.

Dionís Bennàssar was born in 1904 on a farm in the valley of Son March, just outside this town, into a family that had farmed the same way for generations. At five he was herding pigs. He called his father El Campesino de Oro, the golden peasant, a man whose only gold was in his heart.

He wanted to fly. At eighteen he joined the army hoping to train as a pilot, and was sent to the war in Morocco instead. At midday on the last day of 1924, a bullet struck the base of his neck and damaged his right arm. He survived. He could no longer hold a fine line with his right hand, so he taught himself to paint with his left. The army kept him on its rolls for life, with a modest salary, and it bought him what almost no painter of his background ever had: time.

Back home, Cittadini became his mentor and his friend. In 1934 Dionís held his first exhibition, in Palma, and some critics called him the first modern painter in Mallorca. Cittadini later wrote of his work: his art is more than rhetoric; it is sensibility, pulsating, beauty.

And remember the pianist at your hotel? Catalina Vicens, Moreta. She was the woman Dionís loved.

He did not go to Mass, and he kept company the town disapproved of. When the war came and neighbours turned on neighbours, that was enough to make him a target.

In July 1936 the Civil War began. Pollença was the one town in Mallorca that rose against the coup, and it paid for it.

On the night of the 23rd of August 1936, at ten o'clock, armed men walked into this bar, the Alhambra, and took Dionís to the town hall. At three in the morning they led him onto the roof, stood him with his face to the wall, and staged his execution. He wrote that the purpose was to humiliate his dignity to the core.

(Walk on. Stop without announcing it. Wait for the group to notice the plaques.)

His execution was staged, and he lived. These were not.

(Pause.)

The world that built your hotel came apart in those years. By the end of 1934 Diehl's money had run out, and he left for Argentina. The war scattered the foreign painters. Anglada went into exile and did not return until 1948. Dionís stayed.

(On Carrer Major. Case open: a period photograph of the street.)

This was the high street: its bars, its shoemakers, the people in this photograph. And here, on the main street, is the house of the poet we met this morning, Costa i Llobera.

The poet has the main street. Dionís lived just round the corner, on a back street called Carrer de la Roca, the street of the rock, in the old parish priest's house. Let's go.

Welcome to Dionís's home.

After that night on the roof, he hid. In January 1937, at a place called Can Xura, he wrote in his journal:

I live without friends. There is neither war nor peace. The trees and the walls have ears. Everything and everyone breathes fear.

When the others had gone, he stayed. He married Catalina, the pianist from the jazz band, and they made their home here, in this parish house built in 1668. Their son Toni was born in 1945.

Through the long, closed years that followed, Dionís took his family out into the mountains, valleys and coves of this island, and painted them with an energy and a colour no one had brought to them before. In a time of fear, it was through his family that he found his voice.

(At the pine paintings.)

Look at how he painted the pines. He lived among them all his life.

Have a cup of tea, take your time, and look at how he saw this island.

(No script. Let guests talk about what they have seen.)

We started here this morning with a poem: the word for this tree. We end with the tree itself.

(Case open: Dionís's paintings of the Formentor pines.)

Words are symbols. A painting brings you closer to the thing. The poet gave the pine its words. Dionís shows us how to see it.

Now take one pine. Let go of its name. Look at its shadow, not as green or black, but for the colours actually in it: the blues, the violets, the warm reds in the bark.

(Silence.)

That is what Dionís saw.

Thank you.