The Magalluf AIR CRASH OF 1954

Famously or perhaps infamously, depending on your point of view, Magalluf was the last of the grand tourist developments on the Calvia coast to be given the town hall green light in the 1950s. This was at the very end of the decade, 1959, and so this quiet place where nothing of note had seemingly ever happened in its entire history was about to be transformed and, in many ways, eclipse developments already under way, e.g. Palma Nova (as it was then spelt rather than today's official Palmanova) and Santa Ponsa.

That history, in terms of the name, can be traced back to 1334 or perhaps even to one hundred years before. In the ‘Gran Enciclopedia de Mallorca', the first edition of which was published in 1988, there is reference to a Magaluf Ben Jusef in 1234; reference, but no supporting evidence. In 1334, according to a different source, the mayors of Calvia and Andratx apparently owed twenty Mallorcan pounds

to brothers - Magalluf and Jusef Fesnati - about whom nothing else is known, except for the fact that Magalluf (or Magaluf) was a relatively common name back in those days.

Either of these, it has been suggested, is the reason for the place name. There are various other hypotheses, but these names give an indication as to when Magalluf became known as Magalluf. Possibly, as it wasn't until 1531 that Platges de Magalluf was first documented in writing. The spelling, for all those who get into a lather about it, has always been variable, a fact recognised by Catalan dictionaries if not by the University of the Balearic Islands, the arbiter of Mallorca's place names, which only accepts Magaluf.

This background is intended to highlight the singular unimportance of the place over the centuries. It was as if it hadn't really existed until the 1950s, which was when Calvia town hall discovered that there was a prime coastal area ripe for development to satisfy the anticipated tourist boom of the 1960s.

At the time, Magalluf wasn't the barely inhabited place it is sometimes made out to be. There were some grand houses dotted around in addition to small cottages. Even so, it was an idyllic place, so idyllic that a taxi driver once took the Hollywood star Gary Cooper from the Hotel Formentor to Magalluf. The actor had wanted to go to one of Mallorca's finest beaches; the taxi driver chose Magalluf.

So, apart from Gary Cooper and that 1959 town hall decision which was to definitively seal Magalluf 's future fate, the 1950s were a decade in keeping with all the many decades going back to the mediaeval personages who bore the name. Nothing ever happened in this place. Except that it did, and the date was April 7, 1954.

On that day seventy years ago, a French Air Force Languedoc plane was en route from Algiers to Paris. It crashed into the sea some one hundred metres from the shore in Magalluf. There were twelve on board. Five drowned, apparently because there was a rough sea. The other seven managed to make it to dry land, the story going that they were in fact rescued by two men - Gabriel Planas and Juan Sánchez.

Gabriel and Juan were picapedrers, stonemasons or stonecutters. Given their craft, one has to assume that they were working on a building in Magalluf.

But while their names have been mentioned with regard to the rescue of the French military personnel, they otherwise seem to have been expunged from history. As indeed, almost, has the crash itself.

The history of aviation accidents in Spain does list this event, and it would seem that the pilot had requested permission to land at Son Sant Joan, then a military aerodrome and nothing more. But this is about as much as we know. The accident has been forgotten. Well, nothing ever happened in Magalluf, did it.

It is curious, to say the least, that the 1954 crash has been so neglected. Did the fact that it was a French military plane have something to do with this? Did the authorities prefer to keep it quiet for some reason? Who can say, but a particularly curious aspect of this apparent silence is provided by the one-time magazine, ‘Paris Baleares', which was first published in 1954 by Les Cadets de Majorque, the association of people from Mallorca and the Balearics who were resident in France or were descendants of people from the islands.

I had hoped that the archives might reveal something, given the obvious association between France and Mallorca. The May 1954 edition did note that the plane had crashed and highlight the “heroic” rescue by Gabriel and Juan. But note was all it was, included among various other snippets of news under the Palma section.

Or is this lack of information that curious? Air accidents weren't exactly uncommon in those days. Maybe, but this was nevertheless a rare occurrence for Mallorca and even more so for Magalluf, where on April 7, 1954 something did actually happen.