Valldemosa

The church/monastery Is where Chopin and George Sand stayed one bleak winter. I did not go In this time, but I did visit the entrance to the old road that we had taken In our Voisin In 1956. We also visited a fancy visitor's center supported by Michael Douglas and his family; I'm not sure It's still there.

See the pictures

This was not my first time in Valdemosa. In 1956, when I was traveling around Europe with the Robertsons, daughter Anne, 16, wanted to visit the monastery there where her hero Chopin and his girlfriend George Sand had stayed one cold winter.  We flew over to Mallorca from Barcelona and took a ferry back, as I recall, and rented a room near the beach. To get to Valdemosa, about 20 km away, we rented two small Voisins. These things started like a power land mower, with you pulling a cord hard. They had no reverse, but their turning ratio was small. They were, not to put too fine a point on it, much like golf carts of today.  They held two people, so Charles Robertson drove one with his mother and I drove the other with Anne as passenger. 

We went to Valdemosa, and to the monastery. Anne was very disappointed. On this hot August day, zinnias were blooming in profusion outside the window of Chopin’s room - not snow as had been the case when they were there.  

I had had some difficulty with the choke on the Voisin I was driving. Charles wanted to circumnavigate the island but I didn’t trust my little car and he drove off without us.  Anne and I were in the parking lot in front of the church as it discharged its worshippers. I could not get the car running.  Some obliging young men gave us a push and got us going and off we went, down the road back to Palma. “Down” is the operative word here, Valdemosa is atop a hill.  

But the hill ends before the road, and after a few kilometers, the car died again. We tried to get it started.  No luck. This was in an era when families used to go out driving on Sunday afternoon, to see the sights. Many cars passed, loaded with kids and parents. Some stopped and tried to help. They couldn’t get it going. I remember noticing some teenage boys on their bikes stopped and talking to our unhelpful papas.  Eventually the papas gave up and Anne and I discovered that we could put the car in neutral and, one on each side, walk it along. It was, after all, mostly on a downhill slope.  

We hadn’t gone far when the boys came back on their bikes, with a rope.  They proceeded to put the rope through the bumper of the car, tie the ends to their bikes, and tow us!!  They insisted we ride inside, not walk, and so for 10 km or so, we were chauffeured back to Palma.  Both Anne and I had a year or two of high school Spanish, so we could sort of communicate with them. They were pignoli pickers - pine nut gatherers.  They saw a tree and plucked off a pine cone to show us. That was the first time I’d ever heard of pignoli! 

When we got back to the car rental place, I gave them each a $10 bill from my emergency stash.  The guy there was furious, said that was a week’s worth of wages for them. I demanded my rental deposit back, which he gave me begrudgingly.   And the next day we caught the ferry back to Barcelona. 

I had always hoped to see Valdemosa again - and went there from Deià in 1999. The road we had taken was still there - although the monastery was expensive to visit and the town much enlarged since we were there before.