Palma: The oscillating core of a suspended periphery. An imagologic approach to an island city and its discourse of pleasure

In the first decades of the twentieth century Palma emerged as a city worth visiting with a promising network of hotels and organised tours. Palma became an urban playground for British bohemians, artists, expatriates, and socialites. Their notion of leisure and pleasure (on a faraway island) provided the leitmotiv for the years to come. The purpose of this paper is to inspect the extent of which the different discourses adopted by British travel writers in the beginning of the twentieth century (coinciding with the birth of modern tourism on the island) worked to conform a contemporary vision of Palma and its coastal suburban areas (such as Magaluf or El Arenal) as opposed to the (rural and allegedly ‘authentic’) island. Firstly, the paper examines the different stages through which both Palma and the island are discursively constructed as opposed entities in the travel accounts in Mallorca’s first stages of tourism. A special focus is given to the discursive and ideological tools deployed to embellish upon or belittle the city and the island. Finally, I suggest that the images proposed by travellers in their accounts a hundred years ago evolve in today’s imagotypes of the island and its city.