The School Built Like A Palace

In Sa Pobla there is a primary school named Sa Graduada. Eight years ago the education ministry was being put under pressure by the school's parents association to create more classroom space; a familiar enough story because of a growing population caused, in the main, by immigration.

This shortage of space aside, here was a school that any parents would surely wish their children to go to. The school building is an architectural treat. It isn't how one tends to think that schools should look. If one weren't aware that it was a school, one might presume that it was a mansion, fashioned according to a Mediterranean style with high arched windows, a balcony, an imposing gate of an entrance door, and with palm trees in a front garden. Going inside the school, one would find an inner courtyard with cloisters, but not of an austere religious character. The white finish of the exterior is reflected inside, and the combination of external and internal design leaves one with the impression of a minor architectural classic. And this is a primary school?

Originally it was known as Escola Graduada. Over the years, the name was amended to Sa Graduada. As such, the original school was far from unique, except perhaps in its architectural design. There were other examples of the Escola Graduada, and they remain. The name can arouse some confusion. This isn't and never was a graduate school, as in a place of higher education, it was a grade (graduated) school, representative of educational change and reform in Majorca and Spain, which owed a great deal to a movement in Murcia at the very start of the twentieth century.

In 1900, work started on the building of the first Escola (Escuela) Graduada in Spain; it was in Cartagena, Murcia. The significance of this school was great. Children were to be given classes according to age and their ability. They were graded or, if you prefer, they were graduated, as in their teaching was organised according to a scale.

The timing itself was significant. Two years earlier, Spain had suffered the 1898 Disaster. Defeats by the Americans meant the end of Spanish colonial rule in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The disaster was economic as well. Calls for better education were among the reactions, and the Escuelas Graduadas were a response, with teachers themselves advocating a more progressive education which in Majorca was already being championed by Guillem Cifre de Colonya and Clara Hammerl in Pollensa.

Palma was to have the first of this new type of school in Majorca; the Escola Graduada opened in 1912. Seventeen years later, the Sa Pobla Escola Graduada was inaugurated. On the tenth of September 1929, Sa Pobla was graced by the presence of the first dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera, and of Jaime Leopoldo Isabelino Enrique Alejandro Alberto Alfonso Víctor Acacio Pedro Pablo María de Borbón y Battenberg, the Duke of Segovia and the second son of King Alfonso XIII. For the new pupils entering Sa Graduada for the first time this week, it is reasonable to assume that there wouldn't have been dignitaries of similar calibre to greet them.

The architect was Guillem Forteza. Sa Graduada was perhaps his final example of design predominantly influenced by Italianism and Catalan modernism, a movement which affected the arts as well as architecture in the late nineteenth century. Forteza was responsible for some other schools. Those which came after Sa Graduada were more functional in style.

The legacy he granted to Sa Pobla, in the form of this rather beautiful school, was one that Forteza had created for other parts of the island and for buildings with different purposes. In Felanitx, the Celler Cooperatiu, commonly referred to as Es Sindicat, is being restored. It was one of Majorca's finest buildings for wine production, and if one looks at the facade of this building, one will see some similarities with Sa Graduada. But there was a grander building that followed Es Sindicat, and it genuinely was a mansion.

The school in Sa Pobla was the culmination of a style that Forteza had been working on and which was to mean that Sa Graduada really did look like a mansion. And that is because of what Forteza created in Palma. Between 1923 and 1925, the Marivent Palace was built. It is now of course the holiday residence for the Spanish Royal Family, and if one contemplates the front of the Marivent, one will discern the similarity to Sa Graduada. There aren't, for instance, the columns of the Marivent, but the central part of the school building is an echo of the palace's entrance. It was a school that was in fact built more like a palace than a mansion.

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