The Castell’s cultural insights begin with its focus on Mallorcan cuisine. A waiter brought me lemonade mixed from citrus and mint grown in nearby groves. Lunch included “pink tomato tartare” from the estate’s fields along with bread and goat cheese made on site. The resort’s signature cocktail, the Tramuntana, combines herbs from its organic garden with the obscure (to outsiders) local liqueur called Palo de Mallorca—a bitter remedy beloved by Mallorcan connoisseurs that contains cinchona bark and gentian root.
Nearby Palma offers a surprisingly elegant crash course in the history of the island. There were no inebriated Britons or Germans in sight as I explored the port’s winding medieval streets and broad, leafy boulevards peppered with gorgeous Art Nouveau confections. All roads lead to the harbor, crowned by the extravagantly ornate Gothic cathedral of Santa Maria. After the crown of Aragon seized Mallorca from the Arabs in 1231, construction took 300 years to finish. Today it is second in grandeur only to its counterparts in Milan and Cologne, Germany. Inside, along with the classic grisly Catholic relics (fingers, bones, and other assorted body parts of the saints are on plentiful display), I was delighted to discover that the revered Catalan artist Antonio Gaudí, who worked in Mallorca in the early 1900s, had created a seven-sided modernist canopy hovering over the altar like a reimagined crown of thorns.
But even Gaudí’s celebrity wattage is outshone by Joan Miró’s lovely house-studio on the western edge of Palma. The illustrious Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramist arrived in 1940, fleeing Paris to escape the Nazis, in search of the calm Mallorcan shores where he had summered as a child. From the mid-1950s, Miró set up an extraordinary complex here, with different structures for each of his artistic disciplines. Today, the painting studio is a work of art in itself. Designed by the architect Josep Lluís Sert, a fellow Catalan, it has a ceiling that evokes a wave. Its sun-filled interior is still crowded with Miró’s deliriously cheerful canvases mixing abstraction and Surrealism, with animals, stars, and the moon swirling together in a hypnotic dance. But just as affecting are the tiny souvenir knickknacks, like pinned butterflies and a swordfish tusk mounted on the wall, and the eccentrically personal photographs Miró gathered over his life, including images of Easter processions. The walls of other rooms are still covered with his charcoal sketches, making it feel as if the artist left only yesterday.
The rugged northern coastline of Mallorca, where the Tramuntana meets the Mediterranean in mile after mile of dramatic cliffs, is the island’s most isolated and spectacular region. But its narrow, winding roads are notoriously taxing to drive. The most central location for exploring, Mallorcan friends said, was the Jumeirah Port Sóller Hotel, which is perched on a precipice roughly in the middle of the coast, with panoramic sea views from every balcony. It was tempting to squander days in the rooftop infinity pool, gazing at the horizon and dining on chilled gazpacho with cherries. But the mountainous UNESCO World Heritage–listed coast is riddled with hiking trails with evocative names like the Trail of Dry Stones and the Trail of the Painters that lead to empty valleys and abandoned churches. The coast first appeared on Europe’s artistic travel map when Chopin and his lover George Sand scandalously spent the winter of 1838 and 1839 in the village of Valldemossa. Today, Sand’s memoir of their visit, A Winter in Mallorca, is sold in 10 languages on the island, despite the fact that she detested the weather, the local peasantry, and the cuisine. The somber monastery where the pair stayed is now a charming museum, with their room, “cell number 4,” preserved as a shrine.
