Olga Subirós recommends the tragic story of a dromedary, victim of tourism

BarcelonaDromedaries are not native to the Balearic Islands, but, nevertheless, they have been exploited as a tourist attraction. Architect Olga Subirós, curator of the DHub's major exhibition Matter matters, recommends an essay on one of these cases, Treinta mil dromedarios, by writer and traveler Patricia Almarcegui, published by H&O Editorial. Almarcegui recalls the story of Mohammed, one of the three dromedaries brought to Mallorca in the 1960s. "From what might seem like a simple anecdote, the author tells us about the beginning of a process of touristification that still endures, based on exoticization, over-urbanization, and resource exploitation," explains Subirós. The book's title refers to the fact that Almarcegui discovered Mohammed's story on a postcard of which around 30,000 copies were made, with an image showing Mohammed on a beach carrying three women in swimsuits. "It is a brief book with humor and irony, but also with a clear ecological and social conscience," says Subirós.

Mohammed's owner left him with two young men who wanted to make the wild adventure of going around the island with a dromedary a reality and then explain the experience in a book. But the architect explains that the animal ended up being a "tragic star": the young men set off with the dromedary from Palma on January 16, 1964, and traveled about 400 kilometers in 25 days, that is, about 16 kilometers daily. They did not ride on it because the dromedary was already very old. The procession generated excitement everywhere it went: when they arrived in Deià, Robert Graves and his family went to meet them. But everything went wrong when some rascals got Mohammed drunk, and he died shortly after resuming the journey. Almarcegui could not find out what became of the corpse.