Sóller

I took the wooden train from Palma simply because it was there and it cost almost nothing and the guidebook made it sound like a tourist gimmick, which made me suspicious in the right direction. The train has been running the same thirty-kilometer route through the Tramuntana since 1912, and it looks like it: wooden carriages, brass fittings, windows that open all the way, a driver who operates the thing with the nonchalance of a man who has made this journey ten thousand times. Which he probably has. The route goes through thirteen tunnels and climbs through mountain passes and then drops into the Sóller valley like falling through a green curtain. When you arrive, you arrive somewhere that feels genuinely earned.

The valley is agricultural in the way that the Balearics are only agricultural in the Tramuntana — terraced hillsides of orange and lemon trees, rows of ancient olive trees whose trunks have the gnarled baroque quality of something that has been slowly becoming itself for eight hundred years, and at the center the town of Sóller arranged around a main square with a Modernista church facade and a concentration of coffee bars that seems proportionally large for the population. I found a table outside at eight in the morning with a café amb llet and watched the market stalls set up in real time and thought: this is the kind of place where you could accidentally spend three days without making a decision.

The port — Port de Sóller — is three kilometers from the town and connected by another vintage tramway that trundles through orange orchards and deposits you at a horseshoe bay enclosed by mountains. It is not a secret; the restaurants around the port road are perfectly aware of how many visitors come through in summer. But the shape of the bay is so particular — almost closed, the arms of the mountains holding the water in — that even in the busy season it retains a quality of shelter, of containment, that feels less like a resort and more like a village that has decided to be visited without being changed. In October the cafes on the port road were half-occupied and the water was warm enough for a long swim without steeling yourself first.

Back in town, the orange theme asserts itself everywhere, as it should — locally produced orange oil, orange liqueur called Turmeric de Sóller, orange jam sold in glass jars at the market that is thicker and more intensely flavored than anything that could survive shipping. I bought a bag of oranges from a stall outside the station and ate them on the train back to Palma, the juice running down my hands and the car filling with the smell of them, and the man across the aisle who had watched me buy them nodded once in the way that means: yes, you have done the correct thing.

When to go: October through May for the valley at its most productive and the crowds at their thinnest. The orange blossom in March and April fills the entire valley with a perfume that is somewhat absurd in its intensity. The train runs year-round; book seats in advance during summer months when it fills with day-trippers from Palma.