The Teatre Principal. Palma has had a theatre standing on this spot since sixteen sixty-two — which makes this patch of ground one of the longest continuously entertaining places in Spain.
It has also, once, burned completely to the ground.
On a June night in eighteen fifty-eight, the audience filed out after a performance, the staff put out the lamps, and at some point in the dark the building caught. By morning there was nothing left but the shell. Total loss.
Which was the standard outcome. A nineteenth-century theatre was the most flammable structure a city could build: a timber frame, painted canvas scenery, rope, and an open flame every few feet to light it, with several hundred people packed into the dark. Theatres across Europe burned down with grim regularity, and the wonder is that any of them survived at all.
The opera they had just performed was Macbeth.
Now, theatre people have been superstitious about that play for centuries — you're not supposed to say the name insi
de a theatre, you call it the Scottish play, and the whole tradition exists because productions of it have a documented habit of going catastrophically wrong. And in Palma the building itself burned to the ground on the night they staged it. If you were designing a piece of evidence for a superstition, you could not do better.
What the city did next tells you everything about this island's relati
