During her stay in Port de Pollença, in 1935, Agatha Christie wrote the story "Problem at Pollensa Bay".
After they had passed through the narrow streets of Pollensa and were following the curved line of the seashore, they came to the Hotel Pino d’Oro – a small hotel standing on the edge of the sea looking out over a view that in the misty haze of a fine morning that had the exquisite vagueness of a Japonese print. At once Mr Parker Pyne knew that this, and this only, was what he was looking for. He stopped the taxi, passed through the painted gate with the hope that he would find a resting place. Mr. Parker Pyne settled down at the Pino d’Oro very happily. There was a larger hotel not far off, the Mariposa, where a good many English people stayed. There was also quite an artist colony living all around. You could walk along by the sea to the fishing village where there was a cocktail bar where people met - there were a few shops. It was all very peaceful and pleasant. Girls strolled about in trousers with brightly colored handkerchiefs tied round the upper halves of their bodies. Young men in berets with rather long hair held forth in “Mac’s Bar” on such subjects as plastic values and abstraction in art.
Problem at Pollensa Bay, 1932
Performed by Kimberly Hunn.
(Devonshire, England, 1891 – Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England, 1976). Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, Agatha Christie is one of the masters of detective fiction, and created characters such as Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple among others. Her work has inspired television series and films, such as Evil under the Sun, set in Formentor. In 1935 she published Problem at Pollensa Bay. Christie visited Majorca for the first time in 1932, coming from the Middle East, and stayed in a hotel in Port de Pollença: Hotel Illa d’Or, which was new at the time. In the novel, the Illa d’Or is the Pino d’Oro and the Hotel Mar i Cel becomes the Mariposa. The protagonist is Parker Pyne, who had already appeared in previous works, and the novel recounts his surprise at discovering on Majorca a significant influx of British and American tourists during the winter. He also seems to pass unnoticed, perhaps like the author herself. There are accounts of the Christie’s love for the landscape around Pollença and her walks to the lighthouse. The descendants of the former owners of the hotel still remembered her as “the English writer” and it is thought she stayed there many more times. The text connects us with an idyllic Port de Pollença in the 1930s, with small hotels, splendid views, and long-haired Bohemians speaking of art in cafés and girls with bright scarves filling the streets with life.
The hotel Illa d'Or was opened in 1929, in Port de Pollença. It seems that the warm welcome and the splendid landscape convinced Agatha Christie to locate one of her stories there. Twenty-five years later, in Port de Pollença there were a dozen hotels, and today there must be many more. In 1954 Hotel del Puerto put in its advertising that it enjoyed a "splendid situation", "central heating" as well as "select cuisine". Things have changed in the bay since the photographer from Pollença Guillem Bestard began to record the landscape in the early 20th century, becoming a guide for artists who arrived ready to work there, such as Guillaume Degouve de Nuncques, Joaquim Mir, Santiago Russinyol, Tito Cittadini and more. The relationship between those early photographers and artists is clear, and they often worked in parallel, almost complementing each other, with each one recording the same place in their own way.
