The glorious days of open road in Mallorca

Ah, the joys of motoring. But how much more joyful they used to be in Mallorca. Like one hundred years ago, or even 101 years ago, when you could take your Hispano-Suiza out onto the mountain road from Inca to Lluc and not expect to encounter any other vehicle and certainly not a damn great excursions coach or a long line of zealous cyclists two abreast hurtling around a bend. And when you could drive said Hispano-Suiza on the left.

On the left? Oh yes. There's an old photo from 1923 of what looks as if it was an Hispano-Suiza. It was on the Inca-Lluc road and it most definitely wasn't on the right. And no, there were no other vehicles in view. Which was probably just as well, especially on a mountain road. There could have been another Hispano-Suiza on the right in the opposite direction. They were pretty solid cars. There would have been more than a slight prang; they could apparently do up to 130 kilometres per hour.

Had this been the following year, it is just possible that the car in the photo would have been on the right. Possible but no means certain. The Mallorca motorists of 1924 were not, after all, governed by rules of the road as were decreed by Juan O'Donnell y Vargas, the civil and military governor of Madrid. On the tenth of April that year, O'Donnell, aka the Duke of Tetuán, issued his order: “From April 10, all vehicles will go on the right side of the road, both on streets and in squares.”

Prior to this order, they drove on the left in Madrid. In Barcelona, they drove on the right. Six years previously, a traffic regulation had been introduced in Spain. This established that driving should be on the right, except in municipal areas where town halls had adopted “special dispositions”. These meant that cars could be driven on the left. And so in Madrid they continued to. This led to numerous accidents, not least because as soon as drivers crossed the municipal boundary, they were in the wrong lane.

Faced with the sheer chaos caused by the increase in the number of cars in Madrid, the duke sought to bring harmony to the roads. Oh, and his order also applied to carriages, which vied for road space and had simply been adding to the chaos, as had bicycles.

But regardless of the 1918 regulation, the choice of lane was somewhat fluid. Was our Hispano-Suiza in a municipality with a special disposition for driving on the left? Doubtful. The municipality was probably Escorca, where the population was admittedly higher (around 330) than today but probably didn't over concern the town hall with a vast fleet of motor cars. There's certainly no reference to any traffic decrees from those years. There wasn't in fact to be a hardand-fast national rule about driving on the right until the 1930s.

One might say that the situation on the roads was somewhat anarchic. And one would be right, as abiding by rules and regulations certainly took its time to catch on. Extraordinarily enough, given an impression of Mallorca as a place where the payment of taxes has perhaps appeared to be optional, the first ever road tax was paid in Mallorca. This was because the first motor car to ever be registered in Spain was registered in Mallorca. PM-1 was that registration; Palma de Mallorca-1. And a retired naval officer by the name of José Sureda y Fuentes was clearly flush enough not only to possess a car but also pay the tax.

In fact, José Sureda etched Mallorca forever into the history of motoring on the planet. PM-1 was the first car to be registered anywhere. His was a Clément-Panhard. And just as remarkably, the second car to be registered in Spain was also in Mallorca - PM-2. On September 18, 1900, regulations for the use of motor cars were published by the Spanish authorities. But as registration came with a fiscal obligation, this was ignored for some years, by which time the cars themselves were becoming rather more substantial and powerful than José Sureda's French-built threewheeler Clément that was registered on October 11, 1900.

The enhanced structure of cars and the increase in their number in Mallorca (those which were registered, that is) take us to November 1921. A landmark date, this was when PM-507 was sold. It was the first Loryc and so therefore the first car manufactured in Mallorca. The company took its name from the first letter of the surnames of three of the four founders plus ‘y compañia' - Rafael de Lacy, Albert Ouvrard and Antonio Ribas.

Modelled on a Hispano-Suiza, Loryc enjoyed commercial success, but it was shortlived. The factory closed in 1923, a Spanish decree of the previous year which facilitated imports but also increased the cost of components having caused its demise.

Glorious days of motoring they were, but rules - those of the road and of competition - were catching up.