Catalonia & the Balearic Islands: an historical and desciptive account

by Albert Frederick Calvert

This does not sound very interesting. Mahon is not, however, wholly devoid of the picturesque element. The old gate of Barbarossa is named after that famous pirate, by whom the city was surprised and sacked in 1536, and the fortifications still bear traces of the siege of 1781. Ciudadela, the old capital, at the opposite end of the island, is more suggestive of old times and memories. The streets are quaint and arcaded, and lined with fine old mansions: and there is an old palace, and a vast dim cathedral, which no one has ever properly explored. Ten minutes will be enough in which to exhaust the sights of Ciudadela, and you may then go and look at the Buffador, a blow-hole like those to be seen at Sark.

The people of Menorca have long since abandoned their native dress—presuming that they ever had one; but M. Vuillier remarked the continuance of the old custom, observable in other countries, of strewing the path of a bridal party with obstacles and building a wall before the house of the bride and bridegroom, the morning after their marriage. We see one of the innumerable survivals here of marriage by capture. The people are strangely fond of the practice of vaccination, and will perform it on each other with the least possible excuse. In blood-letting they also entertain an ineradicable belief.

Speaking of Alazor, a large village, Ford says: “It is worth the traveller’s while to go into any of the peasants’ houses and convince himself that in no other part of the world do the lower (i.e., working) classes live in greater comfort and even luxury. A man who has only a franc and a half a day as wages, and a little bit of garden, has a large and commodious house, well furnished, exquisitely clean, and always with a spare bed for the stranger. The character of the people is in exact harmony with their surroundings. They are polite and hospitable, crime is unknown, and their hygienic condition being so favourable they are healthy and long-lived. If is difficult to write of them without exaggeration and using too many terms of admiration for the good and wholesome life they lead.”

To the economist, then, the island of Menorca must be of interest, but it is infinitely more so to the archæologist. From end to end it is strewn with the works of prehistoric man, whose record in stone is hard to read. These megalithic remains present a strong resemblance to the mirage of Sardinia and Malta, but have also local characteristics which have puzzled and delighted the learned. M. Cartailhac has traced the sites of many ancient villages. The most considerable may be seen at Torre d’ea Galines, south of Alazor. There, on the summit of a slight eminence, a vast pile of stones is all that remains of the “city” to which the naked aborigines fled wildly the instant a sail rose above the horizon. In the constant and arduous struggle waged by the present inhabitants with the stones and the rock, the limits of the stronghold have, ages ago, disappeared, and if it had an outer wall it can no longer be traced. The dwellings were grouped together so closely that no streets can be distinguished. No chariot or beast of burden could have been known to the citizens. They communicated with each other by corridors leading from cabin to cabin. Here and there the doorways remain intact and uphold a heavy lintel of stone.

In each of these villages is to be found a single huge monument, composed of two blocks of stone, arranged T-shape. It is surrounded by a semicircular wall of unhewn stones, which probably once rose higher and higher and supported a roof of flat stones. These monuments are termed altars by the people of Menorca, and such they may, in fact, have been, but nothing definite can be said on this point.

Equally uncertain are the nature and purpose of the monuments called talayots, a word allied to the Arabic term for watch-tower. These are structures of uncemented blocks of stone in the form of a tower, slightly conical or cylindrical, sometimes square at the base. None of them is wholly intact. Whether the summit was a dome or a platform we have no means of knowing. “I observed, however, at Torranba de Salort,” says M. Cartailhac, “a detail which throws some light on this point. The tower is among the highest at the summit and at two steps from the centre lies a great stone more than a metre in diameter, in the shape of a thick mushroom, almost circular, flat on one side and with a protuberance on the other. It is possible that this block once crowned the culminating-point of the edifice.”

Among the largest talayots are those of Torre Ilafuda. They measure sixteen metres across the base and fourteen at the summit. The stones are laid horizontally and are carefully adjusted. The walls are three or four metres thick, and skilfully constructed. The interior usually forms a single chamber, and where this was large the roof was supported by a column formed of huge blocks of stone. The wall itself is often threaded by a passage to the roof or upper chamber, so narrow that it could only have been ascended by crawling. The entrance to the talayot is through a square opening large enough to permit a short man to walk through upright. All sorts of theories and guesses have been made as to what these towers originally were. Near every T-shaped altar one or two are to be found; there was always one at least on every town site. Perhaps, suggests our authority, they existed before all the other structures and were used as centres by a later population. Though they are often placed on eminences, it has been established that they were not fortresses; it can be proved more or less satisfactorily that they were not dwelling-places, storehouses, or tombs.

The boat-shaped piles, called navetas or naves, on the other hand had clearly a sepulchral character. The front or prow is slightly concave. The entrance measures about half a metre across and three-quarters of a metre in height, the edges are grooved as though to admit some sort of door. Inside, the passage widens and conducts you to a second opening as narrow as the first, through which you penetrate into the mortuary chamber itself. Filled now with rubbish, filth and carrion, these are the tombs of the fathers of the Mediterranean races, whose bones are brought to light each time the Menorcan ploughs his stubborn soil.

Stones must always have been a plague to the people of the island, and this, besides accounting for their selection of the sling as their peculiar weapon, may partially explain, as Ford reasonably remarks, the abundance of these monuments. “The erection of a large tumulus was not a piece of barbaric extravagance. It provided an unperishable monument for the person it was intended to honour (?) and it got rid of an immense mass of loose stone which greatly impeded agriculture.”

“One fact,” adds this lively writer, “is very curious. The Menorcans, even now, are in the habit of constructing just such tumuli as the talayots for the use of their cattle, though of smaller stones. In the distance they present an appearance not at all unlike the older structures.”