Possibly apocryphal but plausible nonetheless, the story goes that a local landowner in the 1920s, noting the existence of a Cala Bona in Son Servera, decided to go one step further and create a Cala Millor. Good, better, and so the first buildings in Cala Millor, according to oral statements rather than written documents, appeared ninety-nine years ago. The landowner was Joan Servera Camps, whose possessions included the Ca s’Hereu estate. The land in question was known as Baix de s’Hort or Sa Vinya de s’Hort. Lots were sold off, and the first cottages and little houses began to emerge, so also did a beach bar.
Up to this point, the beach area of what became Cala Millor had generally been ignored, the main interest having typically been on the day of Sant Llorenç, Saint Lawrence (August 10). Villagers from the two neighbouring municipalities of Son Servera and Sant Llorenç would go to the beach, and so there was the germ of an idea that was to be developed decades later - a holiday resort shared by two municipalities. It might also be said that there was a ‘eureka’ moment that was to propel later activity - the opening of the Hotel Eureka in 1933.
Old photo of Hotel Eureka. Photo: Facebook
Since 2013, there has been a tourism consortium for Cala Millor. Comprising the town halls and the hoteliers association, it was the first public-private consortium of this type in the Balearics; it still is. A key advantage of this approach, the consortium’s manager, Pep Álvarez, said earlier this week, is that it provides a formula of understanding between the public and private sectors and allows current challenges to be addressed from multiple perspectives. While there is clearly cooperation of this sort elsewhere in tourist municipalities, the difference here lies with the fact that it is formalised. Álvarez, who in his other life has been the lead singer of the highly popular Mallorcan rock band, Anegats, stresses the importance of the consortium. Public-private collaboration such as this “is in our DNA”. He highlights the essentially local community character of Cala Millor’s hotels and tourism, the economy - as elsewhere in Mallorca - being inextricably linked to tourism.
“More than 85% of hotel facilities belong to owners from here. The word ‘host’ has its broadest meaning in Cala Millor and Cala Bona. This is a competitive advantage because there is an emotional connection between the business sector and the destination. A host who hosts visitors in his or her own town places more emphasis on why people come rather than on where they come from. This human aspect, which doesn’t have an account with Booking.com, is the difference.”
A graduate of the University of Barcelona and Nottingham Trent University, where he studied European economics, Álvarez is alluding to a sense of community revolving around local hotel businesses that exists in other parts of the island but which isn’t perhaps as strong as in Cala Millor. Community-level involvement is pertinent in the context of the criticisms of tourism and is something that hotel groups pursue but arguably not as much as they could do or should do. The greater the involvement, the closer the ties, the greater the understanding of differing interests and also the greater the possibility of enabling common interests. And when the businesses are overwhelming local, the greater this possibility exists. Current-day hoteliers are heirs to what Joan Servera and Jaume Vives established with the Eureka all those years ago. Other resorts have similar backgrounds, if they only but used them to mutual advantage.
Consortium’s manager, Pep Álvarez. Photo: A. Bassa
The beach itself perhaps represents the single most important common interest. It is the beach on which tourism was built and that has made this one of Mallorca’s most important tourist areas. In this regard there has been concern about the beach that dates back at least twenty years and to when a fierce storm highlighted the vulnerability of this natural resource on which the local community is so dependent. Subsequent storms, such as Gloria in January 2020, have merely served to reinforce the concern.
Climate-change projections almost inevitably vary. The impact of rising sea levels, warming seas and storms could, under the most extreme scenarios, lead to the loss of the entire beach. More conservative calculations of the effects of erosion are between 33% and 66% loss of Cala Millor beach by the start of the next century. This is where a project named LIFE AdaptCalaMillor comes into the story, Pep Álvarez having likened Cala Millor to Neil Armstrong on account of the pioneering nature of this project.
It is part of the EU’s LIFE programme, endowed with a budget of 280 million euros. Spanning the period 2023 to 2027, the Cala Millor project, which is an EU pilot scheme, is intended to strengthen the resilience of the beach system and the urban area and of ecosystems and local socioeconomics in the face of long-term climate change impacts. Álvarez says the scope of the project is “profound”. “Europe has chosen Cala Millor to conduct the most exhaustive scientific studies ever known on a European urban beach. Led by scientists and researchers of undisputed international reputation, the beach and the posidonia meadows are being fully monitored. They are the subject of constant study.”
For the EU, Cala Millor is most certainly not a one-off, Álvarez explaining that the methodology adopted in Mallorca, based on scientific investigation, must be replicable on all European beaches, making them more sustainable and resilient to climate change. “We’re talking thousands of beaches, with Cala Millor being a pioneer. It’s the Neil Armstrong of urban beaches of the future and, therefore, of the tourism industry of the future.”
Joaquín Tintoré of SOCIB, the Balearics Coastal Observatory System, is involved with the project. “Its greatest strength is the consensus that we must take care of the beach for the common good of everyone. We will have the data plus the will and confidence that measures will be designed jointly and which can then be implemented.”
When the project was presented to the tourism industry at the Fitur fair in Madrid in January 2024, the president of the hoteliers association, Inés Batle, called for courage and generosity in decision-making. She was appealing to hotels and the broader tourism sector but by implication she was reaching out to everyone. “The beach is our refuge, our meeting place, the place where we learn to swim, our connection with other municipalities. We will not lose our beach.”
More directly, Marta Seoane of the Conama Foundation, which coordinates the communication for LIFE AdaptCalaMillor, spoke about the participation of local people. “A process of communication and governance has been initiated for the local people.” The communication is all important. This is how community involvement is brought about, how an understanding of common interest is generated. In Cala Millor, the private sector (the hotels) are key to this process. As Pep Álvarez noted - “a formula of understanding” - designed to take the local people with it. And if this can be achievable in respect of the common interest of the beach, it can be achievable in other ways, while it can also be - to borrow from the EU - “replicable” to other resort areas of Mallorca. Cala Millor has experienced a sort of ‘eureka’ moment in appreciating the need for community. Others should look closely and learn.
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