La Seu. The cathedral. Get close to the stone, because it's the colour of sand and full of shell fragments — it was quarried out of this island's own seabed, and in low sun the whole building goes gold.
This thing exists because a young man got scared on a boat.
In the autumn of twelve twenty-nine a fleet was crossing from the mainland to take Mallorca, and it ran into a storm bad enough that the twenty-one-year-old king in charge of it started negotiating with God. If he made it to shore, he'd build the Virgin a church. A great one. He landed, he won, and the day after the city fell he had a foundation stone laid — on the site of the main mosque, which is the piece of the story nobody puts on the ticket. The mosque was where the city already gathered, so that's where the cathedral went.
Then they started building, and they did not stop for three hundred and seventy years.
Nobody who laid that first stone saw a roof. Nobody who saw a roof knew the first builders. The thing was fina
lly called finished in sixteen oh-one, by which point the kingdom that commissioned it had been absorbed, the language had shifted, and the boats in the harbour had a completely different shape.
And the SIZE of it. The nave inside is forty-four metres high — one of the tallest Gothic naves anywhere in Europe — on an island that at the time had a population you could fit in a modern football stadi
