Mallorca has spent decades shaking off its reputation as a package-holiday island, and it has largely succeeded — though you have to know where to look. The south coast still belongs to the resorts and the all-inclusive crowds, and Magaluf remains Magaluf, a cautionary tale in neon and sunburn. But drive twenty minutes inland or head northwest along the coast and the island transforms into something that made Chopin stay through a winter, that made Robert Graves build a house and never leave, that makes everyone who discovers the real Mallorca wonder how a place this beautiful has been hiding behind a reputation this mediocre.
The Serra de Tramuntana
The Serra de Tramuntana — a UNESCO-listed mountain range running along the northwest coast — is one of the most dramatic landscapes in the Mediterranean. The road from Sóller to Sa Calobra is a series of hairpin turns carved into limestone cliffs that drop vertically to a sea so blue it registers as an emotion rather than a colour. I drove it with the windows down and the scent of wild rosemary coming through in waves, and at every turn the view changed — terraced olive groves below, a monastery perched on a ridge above, a flash of turquoise in a cove far below that looked like someone had poured paint into a stone bowl.
Deià is the village that Graves made famous — a cluster of honey-coloured stone houses tumbling down a hillside to a rocky cove, the whole scene so paintable that every house seems to come with an easel. Valldemossa, where Chopin spent a miserable winter with George Sand and wrote some of his finest preludes, has a Carthusian monastery with cells you can visit and a pharmacy garden that smells of lavender and lemon verbena. Fornalutx, regularly called the most beautiful village in Spain, sits in an orange-grove valley above Sóller and earns the title without apparent effort.
The Coves and the East Coast
Away from the south coast resorts, Mallorca’s eastern coves offer water so transparent you can count pebbles on the seabed from ten metres away. Caló des Moro is a tiny inlet between limestone cliffs that looks like a natural swimming pool — arrive early, because by midday the path down is a queue. Cala Mondragó, inside a natural park, is wider and backed by pine forest that provides shade and the resinous scent that is the smell of Mediterranean summer. Cala Varques requires a twenty-minute walk through scrubland, which filters out the casual visitors and leaves a beach that feels private even in August.
Palma and the Interior
The capital, Palma, is a genuine surprise. The Gothic cathedral — La Seu — rises above the harbour with a scale and ambition that rivals any on the mainland, its interior refitted by Gaudí in the early twentieth century with a ceramic canopy above the altar that catches the light through the rose window in a way that seems calculated to induce reverence. The old town behind is a warren of narrow streets hiding excellent restaurants, courtyard mansions with doors left open so you glimpse the fountain and the ficus inside, and the emerging gallery scene along Carrer de Sant Feliu.
The interior is almond orchards and windmills and weekly markets — Sineu on Wednesdays, Inca on Thursdays — selling sobrassada (the spreadable paprika sausage that is Mallorca’s most addictive contribution to charcuterie), local wine from the Binissalem DO, and ensaimadas, the coiled pastry dusted with powdered sugar that you eat for breakfast and think about for the rest of the day. The cycling is world-class — professional teams train here in spring for good reason — and the network of small roads through the interior, lined with stone walls and fig trees, is some of the best riding in Europe.
When to go: April through June for wildflowers, warm seas, and manageable crowds. September and October are equally golden, with the vendimia and the fig harvest. February brings the almond blossom — the entire island covered in pale pink — which is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in the Mediterranean.