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We are lucky to live in one of the greatest places on earth. Here are a few links to help you learn more about the area:
City of Carmel-by-the-Sea
Monterey Peninsula Yacht Club
City of Monterey
Monterey Peninsula Visitors & Convention Bureau
Carmel Chamber of Commerce
Homes Magazine
An edited version of this piece was published in the Carmel Pine Cone on August 10, 2001. The complete text follows.
(Carmel residents Paul & Nellie Brocchini have been co-skippering a chartered sailboat around Mallorca and Menorca for the last few weeks and have taken the opportunity to visit Carmel's sister city, Petra. When Paul worked for the United States Information Agency, he and Nellie lived for three years in Bogotá and Cartagena, Colombia, where they learned to speak Spanish. Here is their account of their visit.)At 9:30 AM this morning we left the stunning Hotel Encinar, perched high above he Mediterranean in the ancient Mallorcan village of Deia, to head for Petra, birthplace of Padre Junipero Serra in 1713. Petra is Carmel's Sister City.
Deia is on the rugged west coast of Mallorca. Here the mountains rise straight up from the sea, similar to the Big Sur coast. There are only a few "calas" or coves on this coast and only one safe over-night anchorage, Porto Soller, for mariners. One might call it the Big West, forbidding and beautiful.
Petra is in the mid-eastern part of Mallorca on a lowland plain that rolls out to the flat, sailor-friendly East Coast. We exited Deia on a narrow, well maintained and marked two-lane road lined on both sides with the typical Mallorcan dry-stone walls. These walls are beautifully constructed. In the rugged mountain areas they are used as retaining walls for terracing up and down the steep mountain sides. They pitch slightly into the hillside. The stones fit tightly and a straight tier of capstones locks the structure together from the top. There is no cement, hence the term "dry wall" (muro seco), which allows water to pass through the wall during heavy rains, reducing the accumulated weight of the water that might bring down a solid wall.
We descended toward the lowlands passing through the romantic, hillside village of Valldemossa whose classic stone houses and buildings elegantly spill down the steep mountain. Once on the plain below we stayed on the back roads driving through large almond orchards, scattered olive trees, grapes, and tomato truck farms. The countryside was neat, clean and well organized. Neither trash nor signs marred the bucolic ambiance. In two hours we reached Petra. We quickly found the church where Padre Serra was baptized and signs pointing to the Junipero Serra Museum and "Birth House." Not sure of the distance to go, we approached a gentleman on the street who offered to show us the way. He introduced himself as Bartolome, retired carpenter, hopped into our car with us and directed us to the museum.
Petra was founded in 1300. The streets are extremely narrow. All are one-way. Our small Renault squeezed in nicely, but we were a bit uneasy about the blind intersections. We had one near miss as one of the locals barreled through an intersection appearing instantly from the totally occluded left. We hit the breaks and slid to a stop on the slippery cobblestones.
The houses presented a stonewall façade in the front. All of the windows were shuttered and painted either green or brown. One would swear that the town was totally abandoned, but behind the closed doors, shuttered windows and stone walls life was going on. All of the houses have interior patios and gardens.
Bartolome guided us to a place to park and walked us to the museum. He explained that the museum was not always open, and that the duty person could always be found at a house around the corner marked Number 2. When we arrived, Dona Isabel was on duty. She turned the lights on for us and explained that the museum and next-door house were maintained and staffed by a "Friends" group that depends on donations for survival. We made a contribution and took a tour.
There is a room dedicated to the California Missions, many paintings, sculptures, artifacts and an historical outline of the principal achievements of Padre Serra. There are also many plaques from groups all over the world who are interested in preserving the legacy of Father Serra, including one from the Carmel-by-the-Sea Rotary Club.
Dona Isabel explained that the historic house next to the museum was not really the birthplace of Padre Serra. He apparently was born in the house of his grandparents, a structure that has not survived. Padre Serra's father built the house next door in 1718 and Serra spent his childhood there.
We had to cut our visit short and get across town to meet Mayor Joan Font Massot for lunch. On our way we got stuck behind an elderly German cyclist, all dandied up in fancy riding togs, yellow shirt, blue plants, black helmet and red face. We were trying to find the temporary headquarters of the Ayuntamiento, the town government. The cyclist kept going slower, and slower and finally stopped, forcing us to stop behind him. He signaled that he wanted to talk to us. We lowered the window and he asked Paul in heavily accented Spanish, "Where is the sanctuary?"
"Nellie," said Paul, "would you believe that he is asking us for directions, and we are lost ourselves?"
Funny thing is we knew where the sanctuary was and sent him happily on his way. Meanwhile, we were still looking for the Ayuntamiento and asked a lady who had stopped her car at a recycle can if she could direct us there. She could and did and within a few minutes we were parking the car outside of a school. The Ayuntamiento is functioning there for a few months while its offices are being remodeled.
We found the office easily. All of the staff, including the mayor, was working in one large room. Mayor Font, a burly bearded man, about 5 foot ten, probably in his early forties, greeted us warmly. We left the offices and walked a few blocks to have lunch in a hotel, Sa Placa Petra, located on the main square. They had a reasonably priced three-course "menu " for lunch. Lunch conversation covered a broad range of topics about Petra, Mallorca and the flowering of local languages in Spain. Petra is even smaller than Carmel with only about 2,700 residents. The Ayuntamiento has eleven council members. The council elects the mayor. Terms are four years.
Mayor Font has been mayor for four years and a council member for 11 years. We teased him about "owning" the town as the Ayuntamiento is on Font St. "No, no," he protested. "All of us have names that are used locally. After all, our families have been here for hundreds of years."
Spain uses proportional representation in voting, a practice common in Europe. In the last election, five parties presented lists for the Ayuntamiento, three of which garnered enough votes to secure seats. We assumed, although we did not ask, that Mayor Font's party acquired the majority.
Petra and Carmel have only three obvious things in common: 1) the link with Junipero Serra and the other Mallorcan priests, Crespi, Lasuen and Palou; 2) size and 3) the importance of the tourist trade.
Other than those three, the towns could not be more dissimilar. Carmel is a fashionable, dream town by the sea. Petra is a largely forgotten backwater, off the coast and far from the foreign watering holes and mega tourism sites. Carmel is Deia; Petra is Gonzales.
Yet from a public-administration point of view, there are two interesting parallels. Petra, like Carmel, has experienced a boom in real estate values. The prices of homes have become so expensive that it is nearly impossible to keep the youth from leaving. Mallorca is incredibly popular with northern Europeans. Package tourism, especially from Britain and Germany, is huge. The Germans, in particular, have been avid buyers of real estate, especially small country farms. Mayor Font told us that approximately 30 percent of the "fincas rusticas" (rustic farms) are owned by German nationals. Germans also own a growing number of houses all over the island. Even out-of-the-way places like Petra feel these impacts.
This foreign demand has made it increasingly difficult for locals to purchase real estate. The Ayuntamiento of Petra has attacked this problem by creating a program of subsidized housing. So far they have built 12 low-income houses and have 18 more in the works. Some of the land was government owned and other parcels have been acquired through quid-pro-quo agreements (convenios) with landowners. We did not get into the details of any of these deals, but there are apparently some goodies that the Ayuntamiento can offer to landowners which are attractive enough to motivate them to deed parcels to the town to get them.
The second element is that tourism drives the economy. Even though Petra is not a tourist town, it is the tourism industry that creates the demand for goods and services on the entire island. Mayor Font has a contracting business. His firm specializes in building the dry walls that we mentioned before. Whether his clients are native or foreign, it is still the off island money that is driving the demand for his services. We know all about this in Carmel.
A short-term effort shared by both towns is the construction of a new theater. Although Petra is not doing anything close to the scale of the rebuilding of Sunset Center, the town has acquired the former headquarters of the Guardia Civil which the Ayuntamiento is fixing up to the tune of 120 million pesetas, about $620,000. The restored building will become the town's cultural center. It will have a theater, youth center, and meeting rooms. Unlike Carmel, there is no mechanism or tradition for seeking private funds for this endeavor. The Ayuntamiento has to use its own resources and to apply for those of applicable government agencies.
Two interesting side issues came up in our conversations with Mayor Font. One was garbage. Mallorca has millions of tourists every year. What do they do with the garbage? Before tourism, the mayor pointed out, there wasn't any garbage. Mallorcans were farmers and their refuse was used on the farm. And, of course, they did not have plastics, a modern refuse scourge.
To date Mallorca has been burning its garbage. It is also a leader in Spain, along with the other Balearic Islands, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera, in recycling. The environmentalists have mounted a campaign against the incineration of garbage based on health and air quality considerations. The problem is not solved. Water is another major issue. The Mallorcans have to be really careful. They do not even have the possibility of a dam, as we do, to bail them out. During the long dry season people simply run out of water. We met people in Deia who told us they have to buy water from tanker trucks in the summer. The wells and springs dry up.
Finally, we talked to the mayor about linguistic freedom. This has nothing to do with the Carmel/Petra link, but it is an interesting aspect of contemporary Spanish life. Spain, like most European countries, is an amalgam of different peoples, languages and cultures. The small state within the larger state is known in Spain as the "Patria Chica," the Small Fatherland.
There are three large historic non Spanish-speaking regions in Spain: Galicia, the Basque Country (Los Paises Vascos) and Catalonia. These three today enjoy a special status as Autonomous Regions. They are part of Spain, but they can use their native languages to conduct official business and to teach in their schools. The literature in these languages is flourishing. Sub areas of limited independence are the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Valencia, Murcia, Extremadura, Castilla La Mancha and Madrid.
In Mallorca and Menorca over the past few weeks we experienced the linguistic flowering of the Catalan language. The working languages of both islands are the Mallorqui and Menorqui dialects of Catalan. We did not hear anyone speaking Castilian-Spanish on the street. We attended two Roman Catholic masses conducted one hundred percent in Catalan. Although Catalan sounds a lot like Portuguese, which we learned during our many years living in Brazil, we hardly understood a word.
At the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco banned the use of the other Iberian languages and the Basque languages. Castilian-Spanish was the one and only official language. Schools were not permitted to teach the local languages. This repression seems to have increased the desire of these various peoples to retain and foster the use of their native languages.
Time ran out for us at lunch, and we had to release Mayor Font from our relentless barrage of questions. When we drove out of town we reflected on how that now remote Catalan-speaking friar, Junipero Sera, half a world away from his beautiful island home, had pioneered the missions of California, from San Diego to San Francisco, and had put Carmel on the map.
On a warm, shirtsleeve Tuesday afternoon in December, we gathered at a wreck of a house fronting the sea. The smell of mold permeated the structure. Only the dimmest light made it into the dwelling through the filthy windows. Yellow construction tape with large, black “caution” warnings closed off holes that offered immediate vertical trips to the lower level. The interior ambience contrasted sharply with the pristine freshness outside.
It was a beautiful afternoon. Monterey Bay was showing off her best togs with clear views to Moss Landing and Santa Cruz. Terns, pelicans, cormorants and other sea birds were gaily diving for their catch into the bluest of waters. The air was soft and warm, unusual any time of the year on the Monterey Peninsula.
There were 18 of us assembled in the gloom of the house: seven real estate agents, two bankruptcy trustees, four potential buyers and five friends or family members of the buyers. I knew all of the agents, was accompanying one of the buyers and his son and introduced myself to one other person, not knowing at the time that she was a competitor.
We were there for an auction. The house was on the market for $950,000. The next-door neighbor had submitted a full price offer. The offer was subject to overbid. Bidding in such instances usually takes place in court. The trustees had gone to the judge in Fresno suggesting that the sellers and creditors would be best served by doing the auction at the house. The judge agreed.
The four buyers established their bonafides by handing over certified checks for $32,000 made out to a trustee. The checks were noted and returned to the bidders.
The bidding was supposed to start at 3 PM. A few minutes past the indicated start time one of the trustees took the floor and explained the rules:
“We have a full price offer in hand. The minimum overbid is $10,000, and we already have one at $960,000. Today’s bidding will be in $10,000 increments. The lowest acceptable offer at this point, therefore, will be $970,000. Would anyone like to open the bidding?”
A wave of noise, similar to the din of conversation in an animated restaurant, engulfed the room. The bidders were chatting with their confidants while eyeing the competition. Who would go first? My client, anxious to get the process underway, bid $970,000. The hubbub died down. Who would go next?
Everyone, I think, was uncomfortable. Bidders did not want to appear too eager. At the same time none wanted the auction to drag on forever. A minute or two passed before someone stepped in with $980,000. In the beginning my client and the two women did most of the bidding. After the $980,000 bid, the pace picked up: $990,000; one million dollars; a million ten; a million twenty. Up the bidding soared.
Somewhere in the low million-dollar range the neighbor’s representative chimed in. The bids reached one million one hundred thousand rapidly. By then the room had become quiet. Pauses between bidding varied: some long with interjections from the trustees asking if anyone wanted to continue; others brief. As the auction continued, the tension began to build.
One of the onlookers blurted out: “In Fresno you could buy a whole block for this!” That remark cracked up the room, draining the tension out of the bidding struggle. After the laughter subsided, the auction moved on. My client dropped out at the one million two hundred thousand mark. One of the women fell to the wayside shortly thereafter.
There were two bidders left, the neighbor’s representative and the remaining woman. The pace slowed. There were several “going once, going twice” moves by the trustee before the other bidder increased the ante another ten thousand dollars.
At the woman’s one million two hundred ninety thousand dollar bid, I felt she had reached her top. Her bid sounded weak. Her voice had become less audible, and she appeared to be struggling with the decision making process going on in her head. It seemed to me that the neighbor had instructed his agent to bid whatever it might take. I felt sure that with another bid or two, the property would be his.
I looked out the window to a sepia version of the gorgeous scene through the dirty windows. I was living in two worlds at once. “Was this how the prisoners in Alcatraz felt?” I wondered.
The neighbor’s agent didn’t hesitate: “One million three hundred thousand,” he stated firmly. To my surprise the competition did not flinch: “One million three-ten,” she said. And just like that, it was over. The neighbor’s agent said he was out. She had found his top, but he hadn’t found hers.
The trustee stated that all the legal matters could probably be settled by mid-January when the buyer could expect to close the escrow. We shook hands, exchanged pleasantries with some of the folks, congratulated the successful bidder and headed out to the beauty of the bay.
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