Mallorca 🇪🇸 The Island That Lent Its Name to a Kingdom and Is Now Limiting Its Visitors

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 42: Mallorca

Mallorca is the largest Balearic Island, the medieval kingdom that gave its name to a thirteenth-century Mediterranean state, the cultural landscape UNESCO inscribed for its Tramuntana mountain terraces, and the European leader in twenty-first-century tourism regulation.

Mallorca deeper history starts with the Romans

Mallorca has, for the last sixty years, been one of the most internationally famous Mediterranean islands in the world, and almost none of that fame is for the right reasons. The package-tourism Mallorca — the Magaluf strip on the southwestern coast, the S’Arenal beachfront east of Palma, the high-rise hotels of the 1970s and 1980s, the British and German charter flights, the all-inclusive resorts, the cheap sangría in plastic cups, the inflatable dolphins in the swimming pools — is real. It is also small. The combined area of the package-tourism strip on the southern and southwestern coast is approximately one hundred square kilometres on an island of three thousand six hundred and forty square kilometres. The package-tourism Mallorca occupies, in physical extent, about three per cent of the island. The other ninety-seven per cent contains a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, the remains of a thirteenth-century kingdom that ruled a scattered Mediterranean empire, a Carthusian monastery where Frédéric Chopin spent the winter of 1838–39 and wrote some of his most consequential preludes, a village called Deià where the English poet Robert Graves lived for fifty years and is buried, a 200-hectare foundation housing six thousand works by Joan Miró, mountain villages reached by a narrow-gauge railway that was built in 1912 to carry oranges, and an estimated twenty thousand kilometres of hand-built dry-stone walls holding up agricultural terraces that have been cultivated continuously since the early Middle Ages. This is the foundational fact about Mallorca, and the one most casually-informed visitors do not carry. The article’s task is to walk past the three per cent and show the reader the other ninety-seven.

The island is the largest of the Balearic Islands — the archipelago in the western Mediterranean that includes Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, and Formentera, lying roughly 170 kilometres east of the Iberian peninsula. Mallorca itself is approximately a hundred kilometres east to west and seventy kilometres north to south at its broadest, with a coastline of 555 kilometres. The interior is divided between three landscapes: the Serra de Tramuntana, the dramatic limestone mountain range running along the entire northwest coast for ninety kilometres, with peaks rising to 1,445 metres at Puig Major (the highest point on the island); the central agricultural plain (the Pla de Mallorca), a broad gentle landscape of wheat fields, olive groves, almond orchards, and the small inland towns of Inca, Sineu, Petra, and Algaida; and the smaller Serra de Llevant, the modest hill range along the eastern coast. The capital, Palma de Mallorca, sits on the southern coast in a wide protected bay, with the airport that handles the bulk of the island’s international traffic — and which is, by passenger volume, the third busiest airport in Spain after Madrid-Barajas and Barcelona-El Prat.

The island’s deeper history starts with the Romans. The Greeks knew the Balearics as Gymnasiae (after the supposedly nude athletic combat of their inhabitants); the Phoenicians had trading posts; the Carthaginians had control by the third century BC. The Romans took the islands in 123 BC under Quintus Caecilius Metellus, who founded the colonies of Palma and Pollentia (the latter at modern Alcúdia on the northern coast, where the Roman amphitheatre and town ruins are still partially visible). For the next five centuries, Mallorca was Roman Balearis Maior — “Greater Balearic” — and the Roman period left the road network, the agricultural pattern, the original urban grid of Palma, and a substrate in the Mallorcan language that is still detectable. The Vandals took the island in 426. The Byzantines retook it in 534. The Moors took it permanently in 902, after a Muslim merchant fleet wrecked off the Mallorcan coast and the survivors decided not to leave. For the next 327 years, Mallorca was Moorish Mayurqa — a province first of the Caliphate of Córdoba, then of the taifa states that succeeded it. The Moorish period left the agricultural irrigation system (the network of qanats and the underground water channels that still carry water to the central plain), the terraced cultivation of olives and almonds in the Tramuntana foothills, much of the vocabulary of contemporary Mallorcan Catalan, the orange and lemon trees, and the Almudaina — the royal palace at Palma whose substructure is Moorish, whose Gothic walls are Christian-medieval, and which is still used as a royal residence by the Spanish crown when the king visits the island.

In December 1229, after a five-month siege, King James I of Aragon — Jaume el Conqueridor, the same king whose later death in 1276 produced the medieval Kingdom of Mallorca — captured Palma. The conquest of the rest of the island took another two years. James I established a new Christian kingdom of Mallorca within the Crown of Aragon, replaced the Moorish population with Christian settlers from Catalonia (particularly from the Empordà and Roussillon regions, which is why the Mallorcan Catalan dialect retains affinities with northern Catalan), and granted the island its own legal code (the Furs de Mallorca) and parliamentary institutions. On James I’s death in 1276, Mallorca passed — as Episode 39 (Perpignan) recounted — to his younger son James, becoming for seventy-three years the capital of an independent Kingdom of Mallorca, with the Palau de l’Almudaina in Palma and the Palau dels Reis de Mallorca in Perpignan as its two royal seats. The kingdom ended at the Battle of Llucmajor in October 1349, when James III of Mallorca was killed by his cousin Peter IV of Aragon, and the kingdom was reabsorbed into the Aragonese crown. The medieval Christian inheritance survives across the island: the Cathedral of Palma (Sa Seu) — begun in 1230, substantially completed in 1601, one of the great Gothic cathedrals of Mediterranean Europe, with the world’s third-largest stained-glass rose window (over thirteen metres in diameter) — sits directly above the medieval Moorish palace foundations. The cathedral was modified by Antoni Gaudí between 1904 and 1914 (one of the few Gaudí commissions outside Barcelona, which connects this article quietly back to Episode 40). The Lonja of Palma — the merchant exchange, built between 1420 and 1452 — is the Mallorcan parallel to the Valencian Llotja covered in the previous episode, with the same late Gothic civil architecture marking the merchant wealth of the medieval Catalan-speaking Mediterranean. The Castell de Bellver — the fourteenth-century circular royal castle on a hill above Palma, built between 1300 and 1311 for King James II of Mallorca — is one of the few completely circular castles in Europe and offers what is still the best aerial view of the city of Palma and its bay.

Then the centuries of relative obscurity. After 1349, Mallorca was a provincial outpost of the Crown of Aragon, then of unified Spain, then of the Spanish empire. The island’s location made it an exposed target for Ottoman Turkish and North African Barbary pirate raids — the watchtowers (talaies) that still mark the coastline every few kilometres were built between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries specifically to give warning of approaching raiders. The economy was agricultural: olive oil, almonds, wine, and increasingly, beginning in the eighteenth century, the citrus exports that would later require the railway to Sóller. The population remained small — perhaps 150,000 in 1800. The island was politically a backwater of Madrid. Then, in November 1838, two foreigners arrived at the port of Palma who would change the literary geography of the island.

Frédéric Chopin, twenty-eight years old, was a Polish composer in increasingly fragile health (early-stage tuberculosis, though it would not be definitively diagnosed for some years). George Sand — the pen name of the French novelist Aurore Dupin, thirty-four years old, divorced, dressed in male clothing, smoking cigars, the most controversial woman of letters in France — was his partner. They had decided that a winter on Mallorca, in the warm Mediterranean climate, would be good for Chopin’s lungs. They were wrong. The winter of 1838–39 turned out to be unusually cold and wet. The local Mallorcan population — devoutly Catholic, conservative, suspicious of foreigners and especially of unmarried couples with female partners in men’s clothing — was hostile. The house they had rented in Establiments fell through. After several weeks of difficulty, they rented three cells in the disused Carthusian charterhouse at Valldemossa, a small mountain village twenty kilometres north of Palma, where they spent the rest of the winter. Chopin’s health deteriorated badly. He wrote, in the famous letter, that the local doctors were uniformly hostile and that he was being treated “like a leper.” But he also wrote some of the most consequential music of his career. The Twenty-Four Preludes Op. 28 — including the famous Prelude in D-flat major, the “Raindrop Prelude” — were composed in the Charterhouse during that winter. Sand wrote Un Hiver à Majorque (A Winter in Majorca) — a memoir that is half travel writing and half furious denunciation of the local population, and which remains the single most influential foreign book about the island. The Charterhouse at Valldemossa is now a museum and one of the most-visited cultural sites on the island. The piano they used is still there. The cells they rented are preserved. The literary genealogy of Mallorca — that this remote Mediterranean island became, after 1838, a place where foreign writers came specifically to work in solitude — begins with their unhappy winter.

The pattern continued. Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria — a Habsburg with no political responsibilities and an obsessive interest in Mediterranean culture — arrived in 1867, fell in love with the island, bought several estates in the Tramuntana between Deià and Valldemossa, and spent the following four decades documenting Mallorca and the other Balearic Islands in his seven-volume work Die Balearen in Wort und Bild geschildert (The Balearic Islands Described in Word and Image), published between 1869 and 1891. The seven volumes total over 3,500 pages and are the most comprehensive pre-modern ethnographic and natural-historical study of any Mediterranean island — covering every village, every plant species, every social custom, every folk song, every traditional building type, every economic practice. The Archduke also established what was effectively the first European nature conservation policy by protecting the natural landscape of his Mallorcan estates from agricultural exploitation. The land he protected is now substantially the core of the Serra de Tramuntana UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape. Robert Graves arrived in 1929 with his second partner, the American writer Laura Riding. He moved to the small mountain village of Deià, in the Tramuntana foothills above the sea, and lived there — with a wartime interruption from 1936 to 1946 — until his death in 1985. He wrote, in Deià, more than thirty books — including I, Claudius (1934), Claudius the God (1935), and The White Goddess (1948), the three works he is best remembered for. He is buried in the small cemetery of Sant Joan Baptista de Deià, in a grave overlooking the Mediterranean. The Graves house at Ca N’Alluny is now a museum maintained by the Robert Graves Foundation. The Deià literary connection has persisted: the village has hosted at various times Anaïs Nin, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Mick Jagger, and a steady stream of contemporary writers drawn by the literary genealogy. Joan Miró, the Catalan painter, moved permanently to Palma de Mallorca in 1956 (his mother and grandmother had been Mallorcan), and the studio he worked in until his death in 1983 has been preserved exactly as he left it, as part of the Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca, with six thousand of his works in the collection. The cultural-literary Mallorca is denser than the package-tourism Mallorca but coexists with it on the same island, in many cases ten kilometres apart.

The Serra de Tramuntana is the most distinctive single landscape on the island and the reason UNESCO inscribed Mallorca on the World Heritage List in 2011 — not as a natural site, but as a cultural landscape, recognising the human work that has shaped the mountain range over a millennium. The mountains run for ninety kilometres along the entire northwest coast of the island, rising sharply from the Mediterranean to peaks above 1,400 metres. The seaward slopes have been terraced by hand for at least a thousand years — substantially since the Moorish period and continuously developed in the Christian medieval and early modern centuries — with dry-stone walls (marges) supporting narrow terraces planted with olives, almonds, citrus, and vines. The dry-stone walls are constructed without mortar, by stacking limestone blocks in patterns that distribute load and survive earthquakes and centuries of weather. The total length of dry-stone wall in the Tramuntana is estimated at twenty thousand kilometres — half the circumference of the Earth — built by hand, over generations, by Mallorcan farmers whose names are mostly not recorded. The walls are still maintained by a small specialised guild of marjers (dry-stone wallers) who are paid by the regional government to repair sections damaged by storms or neglect. The terraced agriculture is still partly active: the olive oil produced in the Tramuntana (under the DO Oli de Mallorca designation) is some of the finest in Spain, and the Sóller orange — one of the few citrus varieties to retain a protected geographic indication — is still cultivated commercially. The narrow-gauge railway from Palma to Sóller, completed in 1912 to carry these oranges to the port, still runs daily, now as a tourist line as much as a working freight service, in original 1912 wooden carriages restored and maintained as historical infrastructure. The journey takes one hour, passes through thirteen tunnels and over numerous viaducts, and emerges at Sóller in a valley filled with orange groves at the foot of the Tramuntana. From Sóller, a 1913 tram continues to the small coastal harbour at Port de Sóller. Both railway and tram are entries on the UNESCO listing as examples of the engineered cultural landscape.

The contemporary regulatory experiment is the article’s most underappreciated single story. Beginning around 2017, the Balearic regional government — in successive administrations of various political affiliations, including socialist (PSOE) and centre-right (Partido Popular) — has implemented an increasingly aggressive series of tourism-containment policies. The principal measures include: a cap on new hotel construction across the entire island (in place since 2017, renewed multiple times); restrictions on cruise-ship arrivals at the port of Palma (since 2022, a maximum of three cruise ships per day in the harbour, with a maximum of one mega-ship — over 4,000 passengers — per day); strict regulation of short-term rentals through the platforms Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo (since 2018, with significant fines for unregistered properties); the tasa turística (tourist tax, in place since 2016, ranging from €1 to €4 per night per visitor depending on accommodation category, used to fund environmental and cultural projects); and most recently a 2024 regulation limiting the maximum number of visitors at certain peak natural sites (Sa Calobra, Cap de Formentor, the Cala Mondragó) to prevent over-use. The combined effect of these regulations is that Mallorca, while still receiving approximately 12 million tourists per year (similar to Barcelona), has begun to slowly bend the curve of growth and to redirect tourism toward higher-spending, lower-volume visitors. The model is being studied closely by the regional governments of the Canary Islands, the Costa del Sol, Catalonia, the Greek islands, and the French Mediterranean coast as the possible future of Mediterranean tourism policy. Mallorca is, in 2026, the European leader in tourism containment — not by accident, but by sustained municipal policy of varying political affiliations over a decade. The article does not propose that the experiment has resolved the problem (housing prices in Palma remain among the highest in Spain, the island continues to experience significant resident displacement to the mainland), but it does propose that Mallorca is doing the difficult policy work that Barcelona and Venice are at earlier stages of trying. The island is the policy laboratory. The rest of the Mediterranean is watching.

The cuisine, the wine, and the language complete the layered Mallorca. The food is Mediterranean with strong Catalan and North African influences — pa amb oli (bread with oil, a simple dish of toasted Mallorcan country bread rubbed with garlic, ripe tomato, and olive oil), sobrassada (the cured paprika-spiced pork sausage that is the island’s signature charcuterie, with a documented continuous tradition since the late medieval period), ensaïmada (the spiral-shaped sweet pastry made with lard, flour, eggs, and sugar — sometimes filled with cream or pumpkin jam — that is the breakfast pastry of the island and a regulated Protected Geographical Indication since 1996), frit mallorquí (the traditional dish of fried lamb offal with potatoes, peppers, and fennel), tumbet (the layered Mallorcan vegetable casserole of potato, aubergine, courgette, and red pepper that is the island’s ratatouille), and the local fish dishes (caldereta de llagosta, the slow-cooked lobster stew traditional to the small port of Fornells on Menorca but also Mallorcan, escabetxat de peix, marinated fish). The wines are recovering from the phylloxera devastation of the 1890s, with the local indigenous grape varieties (Manto Negro for reds, Callet for reds, Prensal Blanc for whites) now being commercially revived under two DO designations (DO Binissalem and DO Pla i Llevant). The language is mallorquí — a Balearic dialect of Catalan, with significant distinctive features (the use of the salat article es, sa instead of el, la; the strong pronunciation of vowels; the retention of some archaic Catalan forms) — spoken by roughly half of the resident population as a first language, and used in regional administration, schools, and the regional broadcasting service. The Catalan-Mallorquí language is the deepest single connection between Mallorca and the broader Catalan cultural world — Barcelona, Valencia, Perpignan, the Pyrenees, the dispersed Mediterranean Catalan diaspora — and is the most durable inheritance of the medieval kingdom that gave the island its name.

This is the deeper character of Mallorca. The island is twice the size of the package-tourism cliché allows, with a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape covering its mountainous northwest, the remains of a medieval kingdom that ruled a Mediterranean empire from the Almudaina palace and the Castell de Bellver, a Carthusian charterhouse where Chopin composed his Preludes, a village where Robert Graves wrote I, Claudius and is buried, a museum where six thousand works by Joan Miró are preserved exactly as he left them, twenty thousand kilometres of hand-built dry-stone walls maintained by a specialised guild, a narrow-gauge railway from 1912 that still carries oranges and tourists to the same valley, a Catalan-family language that is the inheritance of the thirteenth-century Christian conquest, a cuisine that has continued substantially unchanged since the medieval period, and a contemporary regulatory experiment that is rewriting the rules of European Mediterranean tourism policy in slow, contested, sustained municipal politics. The package-tourism Mallorca is real. It is also small. The Mallorca that occupies the other ninety-seven per cent of the island has been doing something deeper than holiday-making for the past thousand years and is now, quietly, doing the most consequential policy work in European tourism. The reader who comes to Mallorca expecting only the cliché will find the cliché, on a stretch of southern beach. The reader who looks up will find a mountain range, a kingdom, a museum, a railway, a winter Chopin spent in pain, and a regulatory experiment that may decide the future of Mediterranean travel.

Some islands are remembered for what they look like. This one was a kingdom, became a literary residency, is now a mountain range with a museum, and is currently rewriting the rules everyone else will eventually have to follow.

Nine regions. One hundred and twenty destinations. Three hundred and nineteen weeks remaining.

The journey continues. The next stop is the city where flamenco was actually invented, oranges flower in February, and an entire civilisation departed in the seventeenth century leaving a single river name behind.

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