Moors and Christians are on - but with crowd control?

Josep Lluís Pons is Pollensa’s councillor for fiestas. He hasn’t had a great deal to do over the past couple of years. But he now has fiesta organisation to get his teeth into, and this organisation doesn’t come any more important than for the Moors and Christians. He says that, “unless everything gets difficult”, preparations for “normal” fiestas will now start. And these include the battle.

The Balearic government has given its blessing to mass fiesta events taking place. For now, the regulation is that masks have to be worn if there are 3,000 or more people at an outdoor event. Soller’s Moors and Christians, some two months away, are being organised on the understanding that the usual thousands will be packed into the Plaça Constitució. But as things stand, they will have to wear masks.

In Pollensa, judging numbers isn’t as comparatively straightforward as it is in Soller because a main square doesn’t feature. Masks, with any luck, will not be necessary at all by August, so a problem with counting people - for Covid purposes - won’t arise. However, the town hall is said to be contemplating a similar arrangement to Soller for crowd safety reasons. Pre-pandemic, Soller introduced a system with wristbands. These were to control the numbers of people in the square.

An awful lot of people do get pressed into the narrow streets in Pollensa, and so some control on their number does now appear to be on the cards.