LIFE WAS DIFFERENT THEN THE GOLDENEYE WATER-SKI CLUB

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We first came here in July 1965 on an Autair charter flight. This was a turbo-prop and took nearly 3 hours. If the headwinds were against it, they had to refuel in Perpignan to get here! We landed at the Sant Luis airport as it was then, which is the Flying Club today. As a pilot, I recall helping out in the Control Tower once for a British Caledonian flight to land. The pilot said, ‘How nice to hear an English voice here’.

I first came to Menorca in 1965, and life here was really different then. This was only a few years after Franco, and as Menorca had been the last of the Balearic Islands to surrender at the end of the Civil War, it got very little of the subsequent Franco era funding in the late 1950s, early 1960s. This worked out quite well in the long run as Menorca suffered none of the high rise building and lager louts of Majorca, the Costa Brava and Costa del Sol in the 1960/70s. It made the conscious decision in the 1980s to become a family island which it is today.

When we came in 1966 our vehicle had to be craned aboard the ferry at Barcelona and craned off in Mahon. There were no drive-on/off ferries in those days! The harbour edge in Mahon was half the width it is today and only partly made up, and there were still many bodegas and warehouses on the harbour edge. One sold blocks of ice in sawdust which you carried away on a sack on your shoulder to break up to pack into your non-electric ice chest at home or in your bar/café. Life was very different then! There were not many bars and restaurants along the port in Mahon. The Club Maritimo was there but not for foreigners like us, and the best harbourside restaurant then was the Rocamar on the point in Fonduco – it is still there but a wreck of its former self. The American Bar was the popular meeting place along with the Andalucia Bar, both of which are still there. The market in the Cloisters of Carmen was mostly stalls selling vegetables from many of the small farms around San Luis, Villacarlos (Es Castell) etc, each promoting their own fresh produce individually which was delightful. In the entrance was the butcher’s shop of Gomilia Llambias, with his one gold tooth, chopping up and selling fresh meat to all and sundry.

We had heard about Menorca, and Cala en Porter in particular, in an advert for ‘Villas in the sun for £500’ by a company called Gale Developments who operated from above a shop in Green Lane, Ilford, Essex. We came out on one of their inspection flights for £30, with the promise of waterfront property if we would open a Water Sports Club to help promote their development. In July 1965, standing at the top of the steps looking down at the azure blue bay of Cala en Porter as a first impression was ‘magic’. We had seen nothing like it before on the South Coast of England where we had learned to Water Ski!

We walked down the steps to the beach with Simon Vidal the developer. We waded out into the warm, crystal-clear sea, and when the depth reached our chests, we said that we would like to build our Water Sports Club on that piece of cliff. Simon looked up and said that it would cost us £800. Peter and I, two 25-year-olds from Surrey, had a quick conference up to our chests in the warm sea, and decided that it was too expensive for us. A salary in England was then £5/600 pa or £10/12 per week. We asked if we could buy the bottom half only. ‘That is simple. That will be £400’ said Simon. So, we bought it. ‘Come back next May and we will blast out the cliff for £200, we will build a 2-bedroom Gale Developments villa on the platform, and steps to it, and you can start your Water Sports Club’ said Simon Vidal. It cost us, in-all about £1800.

Next year, 1966 we came out with our van loaded with 6 beds and mattresses, tables and chairs, bottles of English Orangeade and Lemonade, towing our speed boat with Ski Club painted on the side by Barbara, and with Ian Warren to help.

The road to Cala en Porter was unmade after San Clemente, and the taxi drivers of the day were reluctant to take you there. The Playa Azul Hotel was only 2 storeys high and it was the only hotel with additional villas in its grounds. The cliff path down to the beach was 192 steps, and the Rustic Bar and Los Barriles were beside the lovely sandy beach. There was also a beach bar run by Pepe from Madrid who carried a large container of water across the beach each day which sufficed to wash the glasses all day! Club Menorca had just been built on the headland and was called Barbarella, after the 1960s Jane Fonda film.

We parked our van on the unmade road on the top of the cliff and walked down the cliff path – once called Nelson Escalera, but certainly Nelson never visited there! Sure enough, there was our Gale Villa, all built ready to become Goldeneye Villa Club (named after Ian Fleming’s house in Jamaica and a subsequent James Bond film). We unloaded all the beds, etc down 91 steps from the top. We moved in and put our pictures, etc on the walls. We towed the speedboat down to the beach and launched it from the beach into the crystal-clear water. We were in heaven.

Cala en Porter was not really a town as it is today, just a collection of shops/ bars and restaurants. Behind the Playa Azul, there was a restaurant called La Salamandra which ran for years. Sa Paissa was on the corner, but it was open fields with stone walls right back to Bar Pon’s. The 007 bar (James Bond was the thing then!) had just been built and was the highlight for quizzes, if you could get there and back at night as there were no streetlights. Curbs and pavements did not arrive until the 1990s. On the way into Cala en Porter was the Gale Developments sales office on the right - still there as a villa, and a little further on was Molly’s Bar, run by a lady from Dagenham and her husband along the lines of an Essex Transport Café – now a boarded up exChinese restaurant. A little further on at the bottom of the dip in the road on the right there was a laundromat and mini supermarket. On the top of the rise was S’Galera, run by an early resident Larry Smith with open land all around. A bit further on, beach bar owner Pepe eventually built ‘Pepe’s Castle’ on the left with accumulated profits from years of the beach bar, and this still stands today. In those days not many villas had swimming pools. Bar Pon’s and Molly’s Bar both had swimming pools behind with a garden open area for sitting/sunbathing. Tourists living in the Gale Villas congregated there to swim, sunbathe and drink all afternoon – that was tourism then!

We had been impressed with the Menorcan stone walls, so we excavated out the cliff below the villa and built a stone wall of our own watched daily by Orfila, a local who always carried a bottle of local gin and glasses which we all helped him drink. Many of the stones were excavated from the sea and thrown up the cliff in relays. When the stone wall was built, we got a local builder to construct arches on top (still there) and by Midsummer the Goldeneye Bar was completed – no permissions, no planning, nothing that I recall. Amazingly, it is still standing! We then started water-skiing with the boat in the daytime and running the bar at night. Pete had brought out from England the latest 35 amp stereo amplifier. We could bounce sound off the opposite cliff. The Goldeneye Bar was very popular that year, and for the next few years as well. My mother came down and made us a Goldeneye Flag which flew from a slightly bent flagpole to show where we were. We also painted a Goldeneye on the villa terrace facing into the bay. This was still there until a few years ago when the current owners painted over it (sad – a landmark destroyed!).

Shopping was very different then. Alaior was the nearest big town, but the road from the present Alaior roundabout on the Cala en Porter road all the way to Alaior was unmade and very bumpy. There was only one furniture shop and that was Triay. Their stock comprised rush seat and back spindle Spanish chairs which were most uncomfortable. The choice of settees which converted into beds was very limited, and so hard that you rolled off when trying to sleep. Local delivery transport was by donkey cart, so we used to tie any furniture on the roof of our hired Fiat or wedge soft furnishings on the ‘deck chair’ canvas rear seat. I remember the Cala en Porter rubbish collection service. This was in iron dustbins which were collected weekly by a donkey cart which could only hold 6 bins. The Donkey, who wore a hat with cut outs for his ears, was called ‘Brilliante’ which was the last thing that he was, poor thing.

We had a lot of fun with guests coming out from England, and Pete, Ian and I teaching water-skiing. In 1967 we added 6 rooms on the roof using a local builder with the 3 of us carrying all the materials to the site from where they had been delivered at either the top of the cliff path, or the car park by the beach. We were very fit that year! In 1968 we put on the first Cala en Porter water fiesta. We had Orfila with a huge searchlight on the cliff on the far side of the bay, and we had another by Goldeneye. We night skied, firing rockets from the bow of the boat circling the bay with 2 skiers towed behind, and the Goldeneye music blaring out. The whole of Cala en Porter - probably only about 300 people at most watched from the beach or the cliffs. The finale was Orfila jumping the 40/50 feet from the cliff into the bay with all the searchlights illuminating him. Orfila died several years later winning a ‘holding your breath underwater’ contest with a German tourist. He had wedged himself under the Playa Azul swimming pool bridge and did not come up!

We left Goldeneye in 1971 when we both got proper jobs in England and elsewhere, but we left Ian Warren behind, and he is still here. So is Goldeneye, now ‘Ocho de Oro’, no longer a Club and Bar, but a very up-market waterfront house which featured on the front cover of the Engels & Volker property brochure a couple of years ago at €1 million. I am still amazed that it did not slide off the cliff into the sea!

Everything has changed over nearly 60 years to the present convenient modern lifestyle in Menorca and I am still here enjoying Menorca today. I am glad that I saw some of the earlier ways of life to make me appreciate the present.

The caption on the front cover reads Pia Van Eck from Holland who is here for the summer. Can you tell me more?

I was working at the Hilton Hotel in Rotterdam and my youngest brother was at boarding school when I decided that I missed my mother so much that I would follow her to Menorca. To be honest, I cannot remember the photo being taken, I was 24 at the time and there was a lot of partying!

My father had retired from his wholesale business selling 2nd hand tyres and they had first bought a house on the Costa Brava. Then, my father’s friend was developing property in S’Algar and so he decided to swap the house in mainland Spain as he thought it was becoming too crowded. My mother was furious!

My mother was very creative, and she opened a fashion boutique in Mahon in 1969/70 called PIAN which was on C/ Orfila 59. It was a combination of her names Pia Anne Meike. She sold Haute Couture, exclusive costume jewellery, leather belts and handmade shoes. It became quite a famous shop as it was the only one in Menorca which was selling custom-fitting clothes as found in Paris and other capital cities. She bought the material from Barcelona and employed several local ladies to do the sewing.

I remember there were very few shops in Mahon at all at the time and people used to pay a weekly amount to individual shops. Local people would also open their doors onto the street and sell the fruit and vegetables grown on their allotments from their hallways.

When did you eventually settle in Menorca?

After a couple of years of partying, my father put his foot down and demanded that I get a job. Through a contact on the island, I got a job in Barcelona at a Private Detective Agency. In those days divorces had to be proved and so I was paid to spy on people. After 18 months I came back for a summer before going to live with friends of my parents in Madrid where I paid for my room by sewing and making curtains.

I came back to Menorca to live when I met my first husband, a local lawyer, and we had a daughter. The marriage didn’t last, and I was alone for a while before I met my current husband, John Ellison. We met when John had been on his own for 10 years. He had four children, two girls, and two boys who were born here. Many people will know his daughter Victoria Ellison who runs the private care home Casa Remei.