By Andrew Ede

In 2014, archaeologists rummaging around in a cave on the Costa Blanca made a discovery that was to turn the worlds of both anthropology and malacology on their heads. Dr. Javier Fernández-López de Pablo and fellow researchers came across stone tools and animal remains in pits used for cooking. These pits dated from the Gravettian era, approximately 30,000 years ago, this name coming from a European tool culture at that time. The most startling discovery was what they found among the remains - snail shells. The secret of the cave was evidence of there having been snaileating in the Mediterranean 10,000 years before what had previously been reckoned. It was one up on the French. The Spanish had been eating snails well before their neighbours.

The cave in question was Cova de la Barriada, which is just some three kilometres from Benidorm, where Spanish visitors - of which there are a great number - will be queuing for a snail supper, while their British counterparts will probably be turning up their noses. The snail season is getting under way, and the Spanish know a thing or two about snails, which is why they’ve been eating them for 30,000 years. Snails are very good for you; good for the heart, good for the bones, high iron content, the snail is a small health-giving bundle.

In Mallorca there is a saying: “Whoever eats snails for Saint Mark enjoys good health for free.” Not entirely free perhaps if one pays for a dish of snails prepared over a five-hour period along with lean meat, chicken, herbs, fennel, onion, garlic and sausage. These ingredients are some that typically make up the Saint Mark snail specials at Restaurante Es Cruce in Vilafranca, the restaurant for snails in Mallorca par excellence, as even the French may grudgingly agree.

Why do snails feature so heavily in the island’s springtime cuisine? And what do they have to do with Saint Mark the Evangelist, Sant Marc in Catalan? Was he the protector of snails and other molluscs? Not as far as his patronage CV is concerned, no. The Gospel of Mark makes no specific reference to snails, so his association owes no more than the fact that his feast day happens to be April 25, bang on the start of the snail season, which lasts until some time in June. A day for mass and thanks, April 25 also starts days of feasting heartily on the snails of the evangelist.

A natural cycle and folklore therefore provide the reasons for the popularity of snails in Mallorca, plus all those health-giving properties and a legacy going back 30,000 years that was transferred from the Iberian Peninsula. And on the peninsula, snails are no more popular than in lands that speak Catalan or a variant; hence Beni

dorm, but it is Catalonia where there is a snail festival.

However, it wasn’t necessarily the Catalans who popularised the snail in Mallorca after the 1229 conquest. Almost certainly not, as the Romans had been keen snail eaters, as had been the Muslims. Ibn Razin was a scholar in 13th century Murcia before vassalage to the crown of Castile eventually led him to leave. He wrote a cookbook in Tunis around 1260. This had a recipe for snails, one of the first ever documented, if not the first.

Despite Saint Mark’s standing in biblical terms, Mallorca doesn’t go that big on him. Only Sineu has fiestas, and that’s because Sant Marc is Sineu’s patron. He has been since 1645. It is perhaps curious, given the snail connection, that Vilafranca has claimed Mallorca’s snail culinary crown, but Sineu certainly doesn’t overlook the humble snail. For instance, traditional Sant Marc paellas on offer this coming Sunday will feature the odd snail or two. But for Sineu, there is the more solemn business to do with the saint, so when Joan Maimó Vadell created a monument in 1945 (the 300th anniversary of the patronage), his statue wasn’t that of a giant snail but a winged lion, the symbol of the evangelist.

In the same year, 1945, the ‘goigs’ of Sant Marc were sung for the first time. One line goes: “Saint Mark, be the hope of this village of Sineu.” These songs of joy (or praise, if one prefers) nowadays form part of the ceremony along with a procession featuring a sort of tabernacle with another winged lion containing the ‘ex ossibus’ relic of the evangelist - from the bone rather than off the bone. This tabernacle was blessed by the Palma Cathedral archdeacon in 1943.

The parish church, Santa Maria, supposedly has a Saint Mark relic as it also has a bit of Saint Sebastian bone. But Mark definitely beat Sebastian to the patronage, as the latter only really started to enjoy veneration when Sineu was hit by the plague in 1652. Well before the local council, the ‘universitat’, opted for Saint Mark’s patronage in 1645, it is believed that King Jaume II, whose countryside palace in Sineu was commissioned in 1309, had encouraged the villagers to pray to Saint Mark for rain in the spring. And this rain, in turn, would no doubt have encouraged the snails of spring.