Josep Planas i Montoya produced all the classic images that featured on postcards – brand new hotels with exotic names, turquoise pools, dreamy beaches and coves, wooden boats, girls in bikinis, payesas or local couples in folk costumes. In these images, the sky is always blue, the women wear bikinis, and the sea and pool are never far away: Sol y Playa or the dream holiday for thousands of northern Europeans.

A forerunner, Josep Planas introduced colour and bought a helicopter, the first on the island, before the fire brigade, giving himself exclusive access to aerial views of the island. The company's photographers were everywhere: immortalising celebrities, birthdays, inaugurations, creating images for tourist promotion campaigns, reporting on behalf of hoteliers - in fact, at the time, every hotel provided its guests with postcards of the rooms, the lobby, the swimming pool, etc.

“Photography and tourism always go hand in hand” explains Marina Planas. Travellers, painters and the first photographers in the 19th century pointed out things to see. “George Sand went to Valldemossa and said that you had to visit Valldemossa, and Archiduke Louis Salvador told us what the typical plants of Mallorca were,” she explains. Postcards generated stereotypes: they reduced a territory to a few specific features so that it could be recognised and identified by everyone. “The postcard”, continues Marina, “has now been replaced by mobile phones and Instagram, but it's all the same. Tourists come to see that it all exists and they take the same photos. At the end of the day, nothing is authentic any more; we travel in search of these stereotypes”.

“In the 50s and 60s, until the first oil crisis, says Marina, tourism was seen as something positive, and only positive. There's something ingenuous and innocent about these postcards”. During their archi-tours, Casa Planas opens up their archives to the public, allowing people to be touched by these historic images. If you look closely at the photos of Platja de Palma, Magaluf or Cala Ratjada taken in the 1950s or 60s, with just one or two hotels, you can see a kind of lost paradise that will never be known again.