The Mallorca that resists among carts, mules, and bales of straw

PineappleA few kilometers from the beaches and while we see planes pass every minute over our heads, there exists a Mallorca that works in another dimension. It is the Pla. We don't want to say it or shout it from the rooftops either, but we do collect it for you, the people from here, from the land, those who live with this same beat. Thus, in the very middle of the Pla, at any point on the Camí del camp de Pina to Lloret de Vistalegre, there is someone who carries the chimera of the old and gigantic race that Pere Capellà wrote and that Biel Majoral sings.

Here, the calendar is not dictated by tourist seasons, but by the seasons of the land. Now, in an August July, the Pla becomes the scene of a silent battle for the survival of memory. At sa Rota de sa Cova, Mateu Fontiroig, takes out the long cart and Blau, the mule, to go and bring in the bales of hay.

In the rest of Mallorca, newspapers open their front pages with figures of visitors, traffic jams, and saturated coves. But here we are made of different stuff, and on this occasion it is in Lloret, but it could be in any hedge or hollow of Sencelles, Sineu, Sant Joan, Petra, or Vilafranca. A farmer, a cart, a mule, and infinite patience.

We arrange to meet Mateu, not without having to beg him a little, who tells us to meet him "when the sun is not so scorching", in other words, after the Tour de France stage is over. Blau shakes off the flies and gets going. We leave the farmstead, moving slowly with the measured rocking of the mule and the cart. Along the entire route to the plot where the barley used to be and now there is stubble and straw, we find almost no one, and the few neighbours who pass by also pay little attention to seeing the mule and the cart.

Once at the plot, we load the bales, "40 fit on the long cart and two to sit on," Mateu tells Pere Antoni and Tomeu, who are helping him with the task. The image of the cart with the straw bales becomes more bucolic each time. Seeing a mule pulling a cart loaded with straw while the farmer accompanies it without haste is almost an act of poetic rebellion. It is the absolute antithesis of the immediacy that dominates us; a job that requires looking at the sky, putting your feet on the ground, respecting the animal's strength, and accepting that things take the time they take. Not a minute less. When visualizing the scene, we can't believe we are in Mallorca; it's not the Instagram Mallorca we know, it's the Mallorca we've seen in black and white.

And the fact is that these rural activities that survive sheltered from modernity hold up an uncomfortable mirror to the overcrowded Mallorca. They remind us of where we come from and, above all, what we are willing to lose. Mass tourism and mass residents consume the territory at a voracious speed, homogenize the landscapes and turn identity into a cardboard set for an Instagram photo. We repeat it, but only for you, for the people of here, the Pla maintains its authenticity precisely because it resists being a theme park. The sweat of those who carry straw by hand is real; the dust raised by the cart is true, and they don't make a show of it, nor do they want to. It is simply their passion, their way of understanding Mallorca and its surroundings. Animals, tools from another time that are preserved with patience and love.

Nor is it about falling into idealized nostalgia or wanting the peasantry to live in the past for our aesthetic delight. Country life is hard, often thankless, and poorly valued economically. But we must indeed reclaim these last refuges of calm and craft as the island's greatest treasure.

Mateu and Blau are going their way. While Mallorca fills with noise, the Pla offers us silence, broken only by the rocking of a cart and the passage of a mule. There, among bales of straw and golden dust, beats the Mallorca that still knows who it is. Protecting it is not a whim, it is a moral obligation before the frost, construction, and asphalt end up consuming it all.