Mohamed the Dromedary: A Small Story of Big Images on the Playa de Palma

Mohamed the Dromedary: A Small Story of Big Images on the Playa de Palma

What a single animal can tell us about tourism, memory and self-image on the island

Key question: What remains of a memory when it is sold as a souvenir – and who is missing from the story? This question hangs like salt in the air when you walk along the Passeig Marítim in the morning today, as described in Mallorca Firsthand: Voices from Playa de Palma: seagulls screech, a delivery truck beeps, an older man feeds pigeons in front of a café. Where, in the 1960s, tourists in swimwear waved at the sea, an unusual companion sometimes appeared: a dromedary named Mohamed, who wandered between Sant Jordi and the bay of Palma and appears on postcards.

The author and philosopher Patricia Almarcegui takes up this motif in her essay "30,000 Dromedaries" and presented the piece on a Saturday in Palma. The starting point was a photograph she saw at a tourism conference that stuck with her. Her trail led to the figure of the Mallorcan Mateu Campet: in 1962 he is said to have brought three dromedaries from Morocco to Mallorca and temporarily kept them in Sant Jordi. From these basic facts grows a multifaceted story – about an animal, about spectacle values and about the way a place wanted to market itself.

Critical analysis: The episode is worthwhile because it connects two things often treated separately. First: the commercialization of clichés. A dromedary on Europe's beaches fit an image meant to give the Balearics a distant, fairy-tale aura – a kind of playful "Oriental decoration" that linked seaside holidays and fantasy. Similar re-imaginings of Mallorca's visual history appear in Palma, silently beautiful: A walk into the city a hundred years ago. Second: the relationship to animals and their role as attractions. Today we speak differently about animal welfare; back then the demand for exoticism outweighed interest in the animals' needs.

What is often missing in public discourse is proper contextualization: who really profited from such images, and which voices were not considered? The voices of stable hands, of people who worked directly with the animals, and the perspectives of Mallorcans who used the city spaces every day are missing, as are accounts of other overlooked beach figures documented in 30 Years Ago on the Playa: How Senegalese Street Vendors Changed Mallorca's Beach Scene. Nor is there enough discussion of the legal and ethical consequences of past tourism practices. The image of the dromedary as a postcard motif remained – the background often disappeared.

A small everyday scene: At Plaça de Sant Jordi, near the quiet backyard where Campet is said to have kept the animals, a woman sits with a shopping bag. A tourist asks for directions to the cathedral and points to an old postcard in the window of an antiquarian shop. The saleswoman shrugs and names the year 1964; she inherited the card from her father. Such encounters are mini-archives: private mementos that tell more than any official chronicle, a perspective also emphasized in Mallorca Seen Anew: A Photobook That Slows You Down.

Concrete proposals for a more responsible handling of this past: 1) Local museums and city archives should systematically catalogue historical postcards and photographs and provide contextualized panels that show both the fascination and the problematic sides. 2) The municipality could install short information panels at relevant sites – for example in Sant Jordi or on the Playa de Palma – explaining history, animal keeping and tourism mechanisms. 3) Schools and cultural centers can address the topic in projects: oral-history work with older residents would preserve life stories before they are lost. 4) When presenting historical exotica, the animals' situation should always be considered; documentaries about past husbandry conditions would be a first step toward coming to terms with it.

What Almarcegui accomplishes in her essay is exactly this double vision: the smile the postcard evokes, and the unease about how such images came about. She also reminds us that Mohamed was not only a victim of staging, but in the memories of some people appears as a bridge to other possibilities – the child who saw snow for the first time, a trip to Sóller, a view beyond the edge of one's own world. This ambivalence must be endured.

Pointed conclusion: A dromedary on the Playa de Palma is not just a curious find in a photo album; it is a stepping stone to a more serious debate about memory, responsibility and the stories we want to tell as an island. Whoever turns the postcard over should also be able to read the other side.