RESOURCE   "Reportages - Faces of Mallorca"

Cala Figuera and the man of the first hour

Mallorca, December, 24 2023
Salvador Escalas has made tourism history on Mallorca and in Cala Figuera in particular. The 78-year-old still lives in the coastal town, which he shaped for decades as a hotel manager, entrepreneur and politician.
TEXT   isla editorial office (bk)
PHOTO  Gunnar Knechtel

TAGS   Cala Figuera History in Mallorca Society Santanyí Tourism

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Salvador Escalas

It's fun to rummage through the photo box with Salvador Escalas. How much history fits into a shoebox! Personal memories emerge with every photo that the 78-year-old takes out of the box. "Oh, I was still pretty then!" he says in perfect German, or "this old rattletrap! We used it to drive tourists around the island." He smiles, thinks, is pleased.

Many young women can also be seen, with pinned-up hairstyles and flared skirts. "They were all my girlfriends, I was the cock of the walk." It's not just 60 years of his life that can be seen in the small black and white photos. It's 60 years of tourism history on Mallorca. Escalas has helped to shape it, here in Cala Figuera, where he lives with his German wife Ulla Escalas, née Potthast.

Escalas grew up in Santanyí. "Fortunately, I had poor parents," he says today, "so I was able to appreciate what I had later." He was one of the few of his generation to graduate from high school, studied at home, and his pharmacist gave him lessons and bought him books.

He went to Palma with his mother to take the exam. The day after the exam, he was already working as a waiter in his brother-in-law's guesthouse, who was also a well-known cigarette smuggler on the island. Earning money was what he wanted and what the time offered him - it was the 1950s. Studying outside the island never even crossed his mind. He used his intelligence and thirst for knowledge in other ways: he taught himself German, asked the first guests who were on vacation in the little harbor town at the time, and soon subscribed to the magazine Der Spiegel, which arrived every week by post from Germany, but had previously been controlled by Franco's censorship authority. "Naked breasts were covered with black bars," he remembers. In the 1950s, Cala Figuera was a place where hardly anyone lived apart from a few fishermen. In June 1955, Bonn University brought the first holidaymakers, groups of students who from then on spent their vacations there every 14 days. The first of them stayed in barracks that had been converted into a hotel, enjoyed full board, partied and had Salvador and others show them around the island and the sea.
"There was nothing here," he explains in the study of his spacious house, "no running water, no electricity, no paved roads. The toilet was in the courtyard." Later development in Cala Figuera was somewhat different to most of the island's coastal resorts. The 1960s to 80s were the decades of bed castles and mass tourism. However, it was mainly guest houses and apartment complexes that were built in the bay of Cala Figuera, and to this day there are only two hotels. The clientele remained student; in general, it was mainly young people who loved this corner in the south-east of Mallorca. Cala Figuera boomed until the 1980s. Back then, there were 900 guest beds and 15 souvenir stores here, as Salvador Escalas noted. Today there are only 350 beds and 3 stores.
This trend has to do with the change in demand and the natural conditions of the narrow bay, explains Salvador's wife Ulla: "Cala Figuera doesn't have a beach, which is why the place doesn't interest conventional tourists who want to fall off their beds onto the beach." Others love the place precisely because of its fishing boat shelters and small houses by the water.
Salvador Escala's memories

How much history fits into a shoebox!

Cala Figuera is one of the few coastal towns on Mallorca that has retained some of its original charm.

Ulla Potthast also fell for it in 1972. And she was also taken with Salvador Escalas. She actually wanted to study for her second state exam and had already been teaching math, physics and chemistry for a few years when she came to Mallorca at Easter "with a suitcase full of books". She went on to pass her state exams, but her life took a turn for the worse.

Salvador Escalas 3
Salvador Escalas 4

Cala Figuera, a tranquil fishing village with an eventful history

A year after the two met, Ulla moved from the Ruhr region to Mallorca in an R 4 "filled to the brim with my movable household goods", she recalls.

Salvador was a widower with two small children, Ulla became their new mother. To this day, the couple is dynamic and well-rehearsed, the partners complement each other, which is immediately noticeable. "German thoroughness versus Mallorcan inscrutability," says Salvador Escalas with a laugh, adding: "I now feel half German, half Spanish."

Ulla then ran the business with her husband for decades, as the "girl for everything", as she says, "Salvador looked after the guests and I was responsible for the running of the business."

From April to November, this meant sleeping six hours a night and earning money for the whole year. In the 1970s, Salvador had risen to become a hotel manager and had just started his own business renting out vacation apartments. His days as a waiter were long gone. By the end of the 1950s, he was already working as a tour guide and earning five times more than before. In the 1980s, at the height of the economy, the couple ran five apartment buildings and guesthouses and a disco in the village. Today, everything has been sold.

Escalas was chairman of the hoteliers' association in Cala Figuera for many years and played a decisive role in the establishment of democracy after Franco's death in 1975. Escalas developed the program of the new centrist party UCD based on the German model.

"I knew the big popular parties and wanted a mixture of them," he says, "which I then implemented for 17 years with realpolitik and pragmatism." That's how long Escalas was mayor of the Cala Figuera district, and he also spent more than a decade in the Santanyí town hall for Tourism policy responsible.
He was already a member of the Partido Popular (PP), which won the municipal elections following the dissolution of the UCD in 1982. Since then, politicians from the conservative Popular Party have governed Santanyí without interruption. Salvador and Ulla have been enjoying life more intensively for a few years now. Every afternoon they have tea and cookies on the terrace, their cat Max also gets his snacks and they indulge in Mallorcan cuisine as often as they can. There are 135 cookbooks on the shelf.

17 years
Mayor

Per llepar'se els dits

In 2004, the Escalas' got together with 200 German and Mallorcan families to form a gourmet club. Since then, they have regularly visited restaurants serving local food, indulging themselves with what grows and thrives on Mallorca. This shows how deeply Salvador Escalas is rooted in his island, despite his curiosity, his progressive thinking and his close ties to Germany.

When asked about his favorite food, he answers without thinking and in the deepest Mallorcan: Escaldums de matances and Arros brut.
If you are not familiar with these dishes, you should go in search of them, for example at C'an March in Manacor or at Can Tronca in Sant Joan (by reservation only).
"They cook the best rice dishes on the island," says Escalas, "you lick your fingers afterwards" - per llepar'se els dits.

Salvador Escalas was mayor of Cala Figuera for 17 years

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