Which came first, the city of Palma or the port?
Which came first, the city of Palma or the port?
The shipyards and Palma, a history that goes back 2,144 years
Which came first, the city of Palma or the port?
The economic activity of a city shapes everything. Its streets or squares, walls, size, population, buildings, port and even the design of its ships depend on the needs of its inhabitants at each historical moment. The inhabitants and their vital needs therefore shape every corner of the landscape. In short, cities, their ports, and their ships are consequences of activity. (See the gallery here).
In the case of Palma, the questions that define it are: What led to its foundation? What main activity has shaped its streets since then? What importance did and does its geostrategic position in the Mediterranean have?
The city, its origins
Founded in 123 BC after the victory of Quintus Caecilius Metellus, honorary consul of Tarraco, over the Mallorcan slingers, Palma was possibly first a small beaching site to repair ships before it was a city.
The Romans conquered Mallorca and Menorca because of their vital strategic location at the commercial and military crossroads of the western Mare Nostrum. For the Roman Empire, controlling Mallorca was essential in this naval space of trade and war.
The city was named Palmaria Palmensis because it was where the final Roman victory over the natives was achieved. Apparently, the last warlike slingers received their Roman enemies with palm branches in their hands as a sign of surrender, just as the invading fleet entered sailing into that small natural shelter where it was possible to beach the ships on the sand and repair them after two campaigns of hard fighting. That was the last unpacified place on the island. That point, probably a river beach, approximately where today stand the Teatre Principal and the Provincial Court, between La Rambla and El Born, became the site of the first beaching camp.
For years this beaching site for ships served to repair and perhaps even build some vessels, generating an initial naval industry that already required carpenters, blacksmiths and sailmakers. From that rambla, from that calm spot, this first Roman shipyard naturally spread a whole society of sailors and workers, creating a new city. Those first Romans immediately fortified themselves, defending their ships and keeping them always ready to withdraw in case of counterattack or new conquests. In this way Palma developed, becoming fully Roman in a short time as it received almost four thousand settlers from the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. Everything indicates that the first inhabitants came from one of the 23 ancient Roman tribes with the right to vote, the Velina tribe, which also colonized Pollentia (“power”). According to the Department of Ancient Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, this hypothesis is confirmed by the typology of the funerary steles found in both cities. The Velina tribe came from the Italian region of Picenum, on the Adriatic coast, where they had been experts in shipbuilding and navigation for centuries.
That first small beaching site on the stream soon became an important port in the Mediterranean, probably occupying the whole area of the riverbank of the Rambla. Settlers, soldiers, merchants and sailors settled in the place where the ships were beached, repaired or built. The port-city of Palma had been born.
In the medieval era
Centuries later, in medieval times, piracy and general naval conflict made it necessary to fortify the city and build warships and heavily armed merchant vessels. This was precisely the main industry for centuries in the port of Palma: the manufacture of warships, weapons and troop transports. During those years, Palma’s fortified seafront was constantly filled with sizable ships that repaired and resupplied in the city on their Mediterranean routes of trade and war against pirates and Turks. In the old Llotja building, naval cannons were even manufactured—cutting-edge technology at that time—which would later travel the world’s seas on large sailing ships during Spain’s colonial era.
Ship repair site
In short, the city was founded by the Romans for its good shelter for ships, its easy supply of fresh water, and possibly for the favorable regime of regular breezes in the bay.
Undoubtedly, the geostrategic location of the islands has also always been vital, located right between Rome and Hispania, between Africa and Europe, between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, right in the middle of the main routes of those times and these times. In addition, the islands, being geographically and culturally equidistant from their neighboring civilizations, were able to maintain a kind of political, economic and religious neutrality. In Palma, for centuries, Jewish merchants could do business with Christians, Muslims with Catalans, or French with Andalusians. This insular character, inclined to trade as a consequence of its geographical crossroads, combined with the good conditions for navigation that these islands had and still have. All this has been maintained over time, and Palma is still today a key place in the Mediterranean. The island, the city of Palma, remains a natural meeting point of trade and tolerance.
The shipyards were transformed
The first shipyards on record are located in Palma in the year 1230. They were located near the Moll Vell, outside the city walls. Inside the walls were the city’s and royal shipyards. In the cove of Porto Pi, especially in Muslim times, there were other shipyards, mainly dedicated to the repair and construction of small vessels.
The growth of the city and the port always went in parallel, at least until the arrival of airports and airplanes many centuries later.
The revolution in the form of a ship
It was at the end of the 19th century that shipbuilding and repair activity reached its peak in Palma. The Industrial Revolution in Europe spread across the continent, causing a true boom in the islands in the construction of transport ships for people and goods. This marked the beginning—through the steel ship and the steam or combustion engine—of the massive movement of people and goods around the world. From every port, across every sea.
Between 1863 and 1872 alone, 267 ships were built in Mallorca, totaling 5,729 tons. Palma had ten shipyards at that time, plus two in Alcudia and another in Felanitx, employing probably thousands of specialized workers and countless suppliers.
The Mallorcan shipyards of the 19th century specialized in what the industry of the time demanded: medium-sized cargo ships mainly for coastal navigation. They mostly built what were and are known as schooners (from the English “pilot boats”). The construction of these vessels and their importance in the export of island products—especially salt and citrus—generated wealth and work for many Mallorcans, who were thus able to sell their products at good prices in southern France or in Barcelona, where the main regular routes were established.
Palma and its shipyards in the 20th century
The millennia-old tradition of shipbuilding and repair in the city went from being basically artisanal and family-based to “industrial” when Astilleros de Palma was founded in 1942. This was the first company with a “modern” structure. The workers were hired and already had working conditions very similar to today’s. Its business and organizational structure allowed Mallorca’s first large steel ships to be built.
Astilleros de Palma was initially located in sa Pedrera, next to the Quarantena gardens, in the Paseo Marítimo area, where today there are several well-known nightclubs and hotels.
The area was known as sa Pedrera because material had been extracted from there for years for the expansion of the port and the Paseo de la Riba. There, in that abandoned quarry, Astilleros de Palma was set up in 1942 to take the definitive step in shipbuilding. For twenty-five years, the company built wooden and steel ships in sa Pedrera. It produced hundreds of vessels that required the coordination of a large number of specialized workers. Mallorcan naval engineers developed increasingly large, powerful and high-capacity ships. Steel ships built in Palma were in demand in many neighboring countries’ fleets. The shipyard became one of the most important in the western Mediterranean.
However, in 1957 the current Paseo Marítimo was practically completed, which forced the local authorities to install a rotating metal bridge that allowed the few cars that circulated then to give way to the ships entering or leaving Astilleros de Palma. During the 1960s that rotating bridge delighted many Mallorcans, especially the youngest, who waited nervously and excitedly for the bridge to turn.
The first relocation
However, the city’s economic growth and the industrial arrival of tourism generated more and more vehicle traffic along the Paseo Marítimo. Finally, the municipal authorities and the Port Works authority, the predecessor of the Port Authority, chose to remove the bridge to promote tourism growth in that area, ordering Astilleros de Palma to move to another location, specifically to the Mollet area.
At the end of the 1960s Astilleros de Palma was displaced by the growth of the city, the development of tourism and vehicle traffic on the Paseo Marítimo. It merged with other small shipyards and with Naviera Mallorquina. The change of location and shareholders resulted in the current company, Astilleros de Mallorca.
Astilleros de Mallorca built fishing vessels, container ships, refrigerated ships, tugboats, liquefied gas carriers, etc. for decades. What the industry demanded, what society needed in those early years between the 1960s and 1980s, were “professional” vessels, for transport, fishing or work.
However, just as tourism changed the seafront and the entire economy of the islands, another form of tourism—yachting—gradually began to also transform shipbuilding and the city’s shipyards.
From merchant ships to yachts
The first yacht built at Astilleros de Mallorca was the Cleopatra, 42 meters long, in 1977. It was followed in 1984 by the three-masted, 60-meter schooner Jessica.
In 1992, after the launching of a 32-meter motor yacht, the Aldonza, Astilleros de Mallorca decided to specialize in the repair and refit of large vessels of this kind.
Currently, awaiting another relocation proposed again by the Port Authority and Palma City Council, even further away from the Paseo Marítimo seafront, Astilleros de Mallorca repairs and maintains large yachts, generating hundreds of direct jobs in collaboration with nearly half a thousand companies in an increasingly specialized and technological sector.
The heritage of more than two thousand years of shipbuilding and repair is still alive today, shaping a city that was first just a simple Roman beaching site at a key crossroads of the Mare Nostrum.
Source:
https://www.diariodemallorca.es/fotos/diario-de-palma/2021/09/04/ciudad-palma-o-puerto-56957831.html