Landmarks in Mallorca
18 landmarks to discover with Bad Historian in Mallorca.
Banys Àrabs
Behind that gateway, at the end of a garden of palms and lemon trees, there's a small square room with a dome on it. That's the Banys Àrabs. The Arab baths. It's about a thousand years old, and it is very nearly the last thing standing.
Basílica de Sant Francesc
Big square, big Baroque front, one friar standing on a plinth out here in the middle.
Ca'n Joan de s'Aigo
Down this lane there's a café called Ca'n Joan de s'Aigo, which translates as the house of John of the Water. It has been open since about seventeen hundred, and the remarkable thing about it is how little anybody has done to it since.
Can Casasayas & Pensió Menorquina
Two buildings here, one on each side of the little street, and they are the same building twice. Same rippling stonework, same curved windows, same wave running along the top as if the whole façade is slowly melting.
Casal Solleric
The pale stone palace on the corner of the Born, with the deep first-floor gallery and the iron railing running across it, is the Casal Solleric — and it was paid for entirely in olive oil. That gallery is the thing to look at.
Catedral de Mallorca — La Seu
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.
Catedral de Mallorca — the interventions
Inside this cathedral there are two objects that Mallorca has been arguing about for a hundred years, and neither of them was supposed to be permanent. Start with the ceiling above the high altar.
Es Baluard — the sea wall
That enormous sloping stone flank, with the sea on the other side of it, is the Baluard de Sant Pere. Saint Peter's bastion.
Església de Santa Eulàlia
Stand where you can see the main door of Santa Eulàlia. It's one of the first churches the new rulers put up after they took this city, and one of the oldest parishes in Palma — and I want you looking at that door, because of what walked…
Gran Hotel
The building with the flowers crawling all over it is the Gran Hotel, and when it opened it was the most modern object on this island by a distance nobody could quite believe. Look at the front of it. There's almost no flat surface.
Palau March
This is the Palau March, and the first thing worth noticing is the address. It's built directly against the royal palace, a few steps from the cathedral, on the highest and most conspicuous ground in the city.
Palau Reial de l’Almudaina
The long fortified building beside the cathedral is the Almudaina — the royal palace. Find the tallest tower and look at the very top. There's an angel up there, in bronze, turning with the wind.
Parc de la Mar
That's the water at Parc de la Mar, with the cathedral standing over it. This is the view. It's on the postcards, the fridge magnets, the front of every guidebook to this island. It's also a lake. Not the Mediterranean.
Passeig des Born
The wide shaded promenade running down toward the harbour is the Passeig des Born. Plane trees, stone benches, and the most expensive shop rents on the island. The shape is the giveaway.
Plaça de Cort
Plaça de Cort. Town hall square. And the thing in the middle of it, with the trunk that looks like it's been melted and then thought better of it, is an olive tree about six hundred years old.
Plaça Marquès del Palmer
Find the face. It's high up on the building with the broken tiles all over it — a big hairy grotesque head with a winged dragon on either side of it, staring down into this square like it has opinions about everyone in it.
Sa Llotja
Sa Llotja — you say it Yot-ja. Battlements along the top, an octagonal tower at each corner, enormous windows full of stone tracery, and a row of gargoyles leaning out over your head with their mouths open. Everybody assumes it's a church.
Teatre Principal
The Teatre Principal. Palma has had a theatre standing on this spot since sixteen sixty-two — which makes this patch of ground one of the longest continuously entertaining places in Spain.
Mallorca Audio Experiences
Visit these landmarks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Everyone Wanted This Island
Eight hundred years of people arriving in Palma uninvited and immediately starting construction — and almost none of them knocked the last lot's buildings down first. A Moorish fortress the King of Spain still entertains in, a cathedral promised to God during a storm, a reasoning machine built out of spinning paper discs, a shopping street that used to be a river, and a postcard view that was dug in the nineteen eighties.
The Architects Who Wouldn't Leave It Alone
Gaudí was hired to fix the lighting in Palma's cathedral. He tore out the choir, hung an enormous crown of thorns over the altar as a temporary model, then quit in a temper before building the real one — and it has hung there ever since. A walk through a city that cannot leave a finished building alone: a jeweller who designed his own house, a confectioner refused a private bridge over a public street, a theatre that burned down on the night of Macbeth, and a smuggler's palace full of Rodins.
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