Miquel del Sants Oliver, one of the great promoters of the island's tourism industry, writes here about the Grand Hotel.
There, in the magnificent hall doused in electric light, almost all the rooms were full. Those who travelled out of necessity and those for pleasure could be distinguished immediately: they either wore evening wear or morning wear. Of the former, some were accompanied by their wives or daughters: Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen. The others ate alone, reading telegrams or notes between courses. [...] Waiters came and went, loaded with plates, silver sauce boats, sparkling crystalware. Amongst the tables of the sumptuous dining room were scattered the many guests, some announced, others entirely mysterious, who came from the unknown to return to the anonymous, leaving no trace. Straight after, you discovered the pure-bred tourist, who had grown old in hotels, a tireless wanderer of the known planet.
La Ciutat de Mallorques (The City of Mallorques), 1906
Translated by Richard Mansell.
(Campanet, 1864 – Barcelona, 1920). Miquel dels Sants Oliver stands out in 19th-20th century Majorca as an intellectual committed to his country and with a clear will to push the island to modernise from the starting point of recognising its own identity, culture and language. To achieve this, he thought that it was essential to have a solid cultural and political plan, and he formulated a regionalist political ideology linked to a Europeanisation of society. He was one of the great promotors of modernisation in the islands, suggesting the creation of a tourist industry to drive the island’s economy, which at the time was essentially rural. For most of his adult life he worked in the press and was the editor of the newspapers La Almudaina, Diario de Barcelona and La Vanguardia. His literary production crossed literary genres and themes, and are little more than a suggestion of his intellectual capacity. He wrote essays, historical research, poetry and novels.
The novel La Ciutat de Mallorques (The city of Mallorques) is presented as a travelogue and it focuses on one of the themes that most interested the author: the willingness to make the society of the time more open and more progressive. It is split into chapters that are descriptive scenes of situations or landscapes which allow Oliver to release his critical voice and reflect on subjects such as social immobility, the “Castilianisation” of Majorca and the emergence of new artistic tendencies.
The Grand Hotel opened its doors in 1903 to welcome the “high-quality” tourist sector that was beginning to discover Majorca and which would allow the island to recover from the economic crisis it was in. The building, from the architect Lluís Domènech i Muntaner, is one of the most beautiful examples of modernism in the city. It stands out above all for the magnificent usage of new materials and the decoration of the façade. Paintings inside were the work of Santiago Russinyol and Joaquim Mir, two of the greatest of the time. Amongst the celebrities who were residents there are Azorín and Joaquin Sorolla. In 1941 it closed as a hotel and since 1993 it has been a cultural centre.
