How strange. Consider for a moment the overwhelming importance we claim to attach to history when it comes to marketing our local tourism product. We talk endlessly about culture and tradition. We boast about the fact that we have the “oldest free-standing structures in the world”. We refer to the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Knights of St John as though we knew them all personally. We make a great fuss about the Great Siege. We wax lyrical about our role in World War II (unconsciously mimicking Spike Milligan, who entitled his autobiography: Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall). Recently, we even went and slapped up posters of Napoleon Bonaparte all over the London Underground... which, when you stop to think about it, is more than just strange: it’s positively bizarre. But then, in all this grand talk of historical superlatives – in which everything we possess always seems to be the “oldest” of its kind – we somehow omit utterly to mention that Malta also has the oldest golf course in the entire region of the Mediterranean.
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OK, I admit I might be wrong on this one. And yes, I am aware that the original Marsa golf course was not the same one you see there today (having been moved to its present location in 1903.) But the fact remains that the Marsa Golf Club itself was founded in 1888. And for the better part of the last week, I looked, I searched, I hunted and I googled, but I was not able to locate a single golf course in the Med which can claim to be older than that.
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Not, that is, unless you count the one in Pau, France... which, founded in 1856, markets itself as “the oldest golf course on the Continent”. Please note: on the Continent. For, tucked away in a corner of the French Pyrrenees, Pau Billeres overlooks the Bay of Biscay (and consequently the Atlantic Ocean). In other words, it is about as Mediterranean a destination as the British Isles.
Much the same could be said for the similarly-marketed “oldest golf course in Spain”, the Real Club de Golf (1891). Not only is Real three years younger than our own (unmarketed) specimen... it is also sited in the Atlantic Ocean: to be precise, near Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria, around 60 miles off the west coast of Morocco.
As for the rest, the only Mediterranean golf course to even come close to ours in terms of age is to be found in Egypt – the Gezira Sheraton in Cairo (1894). And do you know how this particular golf course markets itself? “Come and play golf on the oldest golf course in Egypt, overlooking the Great Pyramids of Giza!” Rather tame, I must say, when you consider that: a) our only existing golf course is older than that, and b) the earliest of our temples actually predate the Great Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure by nearly 1,000 years.
But anyhow: after Egypt comes Italy: the Acquasanta Golf club, founded in 1903. After that? Nothing. All the rest – I refer to the several hundred golf courses scattered all over Greece, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, Portugal, the Balkans, Israel, etc. – were built after the 1960s. Comparatively speaking, that makes them all newborn babies.
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Hence the strangeness of it all. As I have already pointed out, both Pau and the Gezira Sheraton place considerable emphasis on the historical value of their respective golf courses when it comes to marketing. The same is certainly true of other famous golf destinations, including the significantly named “Old Course” in St Andrews... which dates back to the 17th century, and naturally doesn’t miss an opportunity to point this fact out to everyone.
But here in Malta – the island of history and tradition, if the Malta Tourism Authority’s marketing strategy is anything to go by – it seems to be the other way round. The fact that our only golf course dates back to the year 1888 does not add anything to its perceived value. On the contrary: it detracts from it. Today, as wheels are being set in motion to justify the fast-tracking of that hideous project, a golf course at Xaghra il-Hamra, the MTA would have us believe that the Marsa golf course doesn’t even exist. Elsewhere, you get people telling you that it is (delete where appropriate) “obsolete”... “substandard”... “too small”... “overbooked”... (I mean, make up your minds: if it’s “substandard” and “obsolete”, does it make sense that it would also be “overbooked”?) and therefore, the “obvious solution” is simply to build a new, bigger and better golf course which (unlike the existing one) we will then go on to market as a tourist attraction.
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Excuse me, but there is another, much simpler, more cost-effective and – above all – less controversial solution staring us right in the face. If the old Marsa golf course is too small, it can very easily be expanded to accommodate at least one, but quite possibly two additional 18-hole golf courses alongside the original, which can also be modernised to boot.
More to the point, we could then go on to do what we have so far unaccountably not done, and market the resulting golf complex as part of our global tourism product. And who knows? What with the oldest golf course in the Med, in an area which also features the oldest polo club in existence, and which is literally two minutes’ drive from the oldest known free-standing buildings in the world... maybe we’ll get those celebrated “30,000 tourists a year” after all.
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Subject of which: this week, I contacted the St Andrews links and asked them the following question: “How many golfers does it take to change a light bulb?” No, seriously, the question was: “how many golfers can a single golf course realistically expect to attract in a one year?”
Now, this being a Scottish golf club (as opposed to a Maltese government department) I actually received a reply, which I reproduce verbatim:
“Here at St Andrews Links, more than 42,000 rounds are played over the Old Course a year. But we have six courses on the links and overall more than 200,000 rounds are played. I hope that at least gives you an indication, bearing in mind that this is the Home of Golf and one of the most popular places to come and play.”
Right: You make what you will of those statistics. You can even use them to justify the “industry sources’“ claims of 30,000 a year for the Ghajn Tuffieha course. But remember: St Andrews is to golf what Twickenham is to rugby, Wembley used to be for football, and the Radio City Hall in Hamrun was for Vince Bongailas’ boxing career. If you ask me, the fact that “industry sources” seem so convinced that an untried and untested golf course would automatically attract an annual turnover comparable to even a quarter of the world’s most famous golf course is, at best, just slightly ambitious.
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Call me a sceptic if you like, but I personally doubt these claims are in fact based on anything other than wishful thinking. I also doubt a new golf course Xaghra l-Hamra would be an improvement over its predecessor at Marsa. And these are my reasons for being so sceptical:
1) Location, location, location
It’s incredible how much more environmentally aware people were over 120 years ago.
For instance, a century before the introduction of reverse osmosis technology, the engineers responsible for the Marsa course knew that the water required for irrigation of such a large area of land would place an undue stress on the island’s limited resources. So they sited the project upon an alluvial plain, which (as many people, including Resources Minister Ninu Zammit, seem to have only just realised) annually receives most of the collected rainwater from the higher areas of Malta... resulting in a golf course which waters itself for several months of the year.
Compare this to the topography of the “chosen” site at Ghajn Tuffieha, and you will find an almost opposite scenario. For it is in the nature of garigue (supposedly protected by law, but that’s another story) to react to water much like the proverbial duck’s back. Only a tiny percentage of the annual rainwater received is actually retained: the rest is irretrievably lost, mainly to the sea. This is why the area has in the course of millions of years evolved its own natural ecosystem, which... hang on, what was I thinking? Those are just a bunch of plants and insects. Since when has anyone cared about stuff like that?
2) Social impact, social impact, social impact
One other interesting by-product of the Marsa golf course (which I suspect was largely incidental) concerned, of all things, public health.
As ancient maps will reveal, the original area was in fact a salt marsh – as tends to be the case when your alluvial plain also happens to lie few millimetres below sea-level. As such, Marsa was home to, among other insect species, the anophilis mosquito. Consequently, the draining of the Marsa marshes did more than just convert the area into one suitable for golf. It effectively rid the surrounding towns and villages of the threat of malaria... which, when you stop to think about it, is no small achievement for any project, let alone a humble 19th century golf course which we now all take turns to publicly rubbish.
Again, Xaghra il-Hamra presents an altogether different scenario. OK, a golf course will not in itself pose an instant health hazard; nor will it re-introduce a long-eradicated tropical disease. But the likelihood is that it would displace a number of resident farmers, resulting in a glaring social injustice, and much unnecessary resentment. It will also invariably attract more development, followed by more development, and then even more development to what is today a largely unspoiled part of the island. The ones who will suffer as a result include the aforementioned farmers, but also the residents of Manikata. Ironically, in the long run the tourism industry is likely to suffer, too.
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However, none of this is really relevant. What is relevant at this stage is that our Prime Minister (very intelligently, I might add) has made the golf course proposal the mainstay of his otherwise unmemorable administration of this country. Which, in a country where Prime Ministers have always really been plenipotentiary, also means that this project will go ahead... that’s right, come hell or high water.
Therefore, I humbly suggest we abandon my earlier recommendation of a marketing campaign for Marsa, and instead start marketing the Xaghra il-Hamra golf course from now. I can already see the MTA posters all over the London underground: Napoleon Bonaparte, putting on the green, while a Manikata farmer is guillotined in the background... If that doesn’t bring the tourists rolling in, I don’t know what will.