Mallorca's First Luxury Yacht

Dating from the 1920s are three promotional images for hotels in Mallorca that were reproduced in the history of the Fomento del Turismo (Mallorca Tourist Board), which was published to coincide with its one-hundredth anniversary in 2005. Of the three, one is a photograph, while the other two are paintings. Though their styles and the medium differ, they share one thing in common - the images. None of the hotels exist any longer. They were the Hotel Costa Brava in Sóller and the Hotel Royal and Gran Hotel Mediterraneo in Palma, but in front of each hotel is a distinctive shape and colour: a white sail. The symbolism of the image is profound. Mallorca's tourism from the days well before the masses arrived was inextricably linked to the sea, to sail boats, to yachts and to ships.

It is a pretty obvious point to make that, once upon a time, what tourism there was in Mallorca came by sea, and even when the first planes started to bring tourists, they required the sea. Air France was something of a pioneer in this regard, its seaplanes making Mallorca a stop-off point on the route between Marseille and Algiers.

Nautical tourism, as opposed to tourism which arrived by ship, was, despite those white sails that had been witnessed in the 1920s, a minority element in the island's tourism mix in the years immediately after the Second World War. It might of course be said that all tourism was something of a minority interest in those days, but the story of Mallorca's tourism history is more complex and longer than one which takes the "boom" of the early 1960s as its starting-point. The entrepreneurs and visionaries of the tourist board were ever alert to opportunities, one of which was announced in 1947 and which was to be realised the following year. In 1948, Palma's Real Club Náutico was founded. In the same year, the Club Naútico de Sóller was also founded. It could count, it is said, on a sporting leisure "fleet" of more than 250 vessels - snipe dinghies, monotypes, felucca sailing boats.

1948 can probably, therefore, be cited as the year when nautical tourism truly started in Mallorca, and from its relatively humble beginnings it has grown to what it now is - a tourism niche capable of generating annual revenues in the order of some 500 million euros thanks to the marinas of the Balearics and of bringing over 300,000 tourists: a niche which is substantially greater than that of either cycling or golf.

Mallorca sits in the centre of an imaginary cross, its western and southern points shorter than those of the north and east. But if the distances to Sete and Sardinia are longer than those to Valencia and Algiers, they are no real distance for today's super yachts with cruising speeds of knots in the twenties or thirties and top speeds of double these. It is this advantageous location that has helped to make Mallorca the attraction it is to the nautical tourist, he or she with a super yacht or something rather more modest, but time was - long ago - when Mallorca was not looked upon so favourably by the traveller. It was an island, and for the traveller - the earliest form of "tourist" - of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, islands in the middle of the Mediterranean were felt to offer little in terms of experience by comparison with the grand cities and ports of the Med. 

This perception was to alter, however. The yachts of the nineteenth century were the preserve of Europe's rich, nobility and bourgeoisie, and it was to be one of the nobility who was to not only mark Mallorca out as a destination that others from the upper class as well as from the wealthy middle class might wish to consider but also to - arguably - invent the whole idea of the luxury yacht. He was the Archduke Louis Salvador.

The Archduke's "Nixe" might just be the most famous vessel to be associated with Mallorca, though in what follows, there are other claimants to this crown. The Archduke, renowned for his work in documenting Mallorcan culture, society and nature in his series "Die Balearen" and for his property owning in the Tramuntana mountains, was one of life's restless souls. He liked to travel, and he had the means to do so. Though he came to Mallorca in the 1860s, he wasn't a permanent resident. His journeying was such that he came to realise that rather than fork out for stays on ships, he may as well have one of his own. In August 1872, therefore, the "Nixe", built in the shipyard in Fiume (aka Rijeka) in Croatia, was launched. Its initial journey was to Alexandria, where the Archduke was awaiting its arrival. He climbed aboard, and the "Nixe" set sail, finally entering Mallorcan waters for the first time in May 1873.

Fifty-two metres long and six metres wide, the "Nixe" was a large vessel which had three masts but which was principally propelled by its steam engine rather than its sails. There is a debate as to whether it deserves the description "yacht" or not, but for the purposes of Mallorcan nautical tourism history, "yacht" it is; and luxury yacht is an even better description.

For twenty-one years, the Archduke would take himself off on his journeys around the Mediterranean on board the "Nixe". It was Mallorca to which it always returned, until disaster struck. One night during the summer of 1894, the "Nixe", close to the Algerian coast, collided with a reef. No lives were lost, but the "Nixe" was. It ended up on the seabed.

The Archduke was nothing if not considerate to his crew. They didn't have to fear for losing their jobs because the Archduke was determined to replace the "Nixe". He went to the site of the birth of the original - Croatia - and found a craft called the "Hertha", which closely resembled the "Nixe". He bought it at a cost of eighty thousand florins, it set off for Mallorca, was anchored off Sóller and was renamed. The "Nixe II" arrived in November 1894, only months after the sinking.