Palmafew things bother me more, as a Palma resident, than hearing Palma de Mallorca. Or, even worse, when you say Palma and they ask you: “From Mallorca?”. And you have no choice but to answer yes. Lest they confuse it with Palma del Río, La Palma del Condado, La Palma or Las Palmas. The Canary Islands are our cross to bear when you go to the Peninsula and they force you to roll your eyes.
I remember formally enrolling at the Faculty and the administrative assistant telling me: “Oh, how wonderful to live with a pleasant temperature all year round. You must spend your days in the water”. Madam, I am not from the Canary Islands.
Some people – and this is true – have been surprised not to see “the square of the sea” from the plane when traveling to the Canary Islands, as if the maps reproduced a kind of natural border. We live with these ridiculous misunderstandings. And also with the fact that we have to drag to Palma an artificial and administrative addition that requires little effort to correct.
The Ministry of Transport has accepted that Son Sant Joan will cease to be the airport of Palma de Mallorca and will be called Palma-Mallorca Airport. We have made some progress. It would have been worse if they had named it after Rafa Nadal.
Now we just have to wait for the right to act sensibly and not do what the PP did in 2012, when it recovered the ‘de Mallorca’ through a decision that was much more political – and submissive – than practical.
The insistence on keeping this surname reveals a colonial complex and an obsession with the tourist brand. It seems that Palma cannot exist in its own right if it does not carry a label that reduces a city founded in 123 BC to the category of a tourist operator's brochure, as if they were afraid that the German visitor or the bureaucrat from Madrid would get lost if we did not spell out the folklore for them. Palma does not need a GPS in its name. History should be enough to locate it.
Demanding that it be called simply ‘Palma’ is not a nationalist whim or a philological delirium. It is a matter of democratic hygiene and self-respect. Removing the ‘de Mallorca’ is shaking off the old mentality that understands capital status as a concession and not as a historical reality. We must defend the dignity of a map. That of the peripheries. Although, speaking of confusions, the Canary Islanders have it worse, with those travelers who are still looking out of the airplane window for the square that, on the maps, brings them closer to Africa.
