The artificial pearl business on the island of Mallorca has survived the Spanish flu, two world wars, the Civil War, but has not been able to overcome the coronavirus.
Majorica, emblem of the island, and with about 300 workers, has entered into bankruptcy. The company has requested that a bankruptcy administrator take over the company, installed on the island since 1890, and that could end with its sale or disappearance.
Went to the german engineer Eduard Hugo Heusch, who had the first patent in the world for the manufacture of artificial pearls in Paris, who decided to take the business to Manacor. Although when it really began to emerge was in 1952, when the Hungarian chemist, Géza Zsolt Mulacs, discovered how to make an artificial organic pearl that was impossible to differentiate from the original, and whose formula remains a mystery. Its imminent end confirms that its history has been linked to chemistry rather than jewelery.
Since March, when the pandemic started, the company has stopped producing. 70% of the workforce is in a total ERTE and the rest in a partial one.
In Manacor, where more than a third of the workforce works, the news has coincided with the perimeter closure of the town, after coronavirus cases skyrocketing to a rate of 458 infected per 100,000 inhabitants. Initially it was thought that the closure would only affect the Porto Cristo store, but Majarica’s general manager, Didier Grupposo, confirms that the imminent closure of all the island’s stores is being studied. Miquel oliver, the eco-sovereign mayor of the town, has shown his “disappointment” and “sadness” at the situation that many families are now going to have to face.
The truth is that Majarica was already going through difficulties since the nineties, when it began to undergo changes in the shareholding. The company It had more than 700 employees, of which only 300 remain. In 2002 it was acquired by the Catalan company, Inversiones en Perlas de Mallorca SA- Line Invest XXI, but two years later it sold half to a Chinese group. In recent years the actress Monica Cruz She had become an image and also a jewelry designer for a firm that, she claimed, she had known “since she was little”.
The Majorica pearl, they report on their website, is composed of an opaline crystal core, which has the same density and weight characteristics as the best cultured pearls, covered with multiple layers of “pearl essence”, an extract obtained from of organic elements from the Mediterranean Sea thanks to the famous secretly kept technique.
The favorite Mallorcan designer of the Reina SofÃa, Isabel Guarch, also makes use of pearls in its artisan jewelry collections. In fact, at the 2008 Fitur tourism fair, the Queen received a Majorica necklace as a gift.
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