An honour to have served

But from where I sit writing this in the newsroom of the Majorca Daily Bulletin, which he founded against all odds in 1962, all of the great memories come flooding back of the hundreds of stories I have covered, fascinating, if not controversial and unsavoury, people and personalities I have met, tragedies I have documented in pictures and the rich, famous and royalty I have photographed over the 20-plus years I have been with the newspaper.

Over the years, many of my colleagues working on the nationals in the UK have been envious of the wide range of stories I and my colleague Jason Moore have covered and the free range we have always been given to go out and get the news with the best interests of the readers always first and foremost.

I can safely say that every journalist and photographer who has passed through the Grup Serra media organisation has picked up a few, if not many, tricks of the trade from Don Pedro as he steered the group to becoming the largest private media group in the Balearics, if not Spain, and to have the only non-British owned daily English language newspaper in Spain and one of the few in Europe, certainly the first.

He believed in his publications and he believed in his people and while these are very sad days, there are also many reasons to celebrate a wonderful life well lived which brought happiness to millions of people all over the world.