🇪🇸 Spain · The Islands
Mallorca is much more than the sun-and-sand island the popular imagination promises. The largest of the Balearics is a world in miniature: an elegant capital with one of the most impressive Gothic cathedrals in the Mediterranean, a mountain range listed as World Heritage dropping sheer into the sea, stone villages perched on the slopes, monasteries where Chopin spent a winter, hundreds of turquoise coves and a seafaring and farming tradition still alive beneath the tourist bustle.
The island offers very different experiences depending on what you are after. Palma, with its cathedral of La Seu leaning over the water, its Arab old town and its circular castle, is a city to enjoy slowly. The Serra de Tramuntana gives you vertiginous roads, footpaths, thousand-year-old olive groves and villages such as Valldemossa, Deià and Sóller, the last linked to Palma by a century-old wooden train. And the coast unfolds everything from kilometre-long white sand beaches to coves hidden among pines and cliffs.
This guide covers Mallorca with a practical and honest eye: what to see in Palma and in the mountains, how to reach the loveliest coves (and why some have restricted access), how the Sóller train and the Formentor bus work, where to eat a good ensaimada or a frito mallorquín, and also how to travel responsibly on an island with serious problems of tourist saturation. With a little planning, Mallorca makes for an unforgettable holiday, far from the clichés.
Mallorca's history begins in prehistory with the Talayotic culture (around 1300 BC), which scattered the island with talayots, great stone towers. Phoenicians and Carthaginians frequented it — the Balearic slingers, fearsome warriors with the sling, were famous throughout antiquity — until Rome conquered it around 123 BC under Quintus Caecilius Metellus 'Balearicus', who founded Palma and Pollentia. After the Vandals and the Byzantines, the island was absorbed into the Muslim world at the start of the tenth century (from 902-903), and Madina Mayurqa flourished as a cultural centre for more than three centuries. In 1229, King James I of Aragón conquered the island and began the Christian and Catalan era. In 1276 the short-lived independent Kingdom of Mallorca was born, under James II, until its reincorporation into the Crown of Aragón in 1343-1349 after the battle of Llucmajor. The following centuries brought the scourge of Barbary piracy and privateering. And from the 1950s and 1960s, mass tourism completely transformed the island, making it one of the great destinations in Europe. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Balearics at the heart of the Mediterranean: the talayots of prehistory, Phoenician and Punic Ibiza, the conquest of Mallorca by James I in 1229, centuries of corsairs, and the tourism that transformed them in the twentieth century.
Read the history of The Islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the parasols and the hotels, Mallorca was a land of stone builders and of warriors feared across the Mediterranean. The first settlers reached the island around 3500 BC, in the Neolithic, but the great cultural leap came around 1300 BC with the appearance of the Talayotic culture, shared by Mallorca and Menorca. Its name comes from the talayots, great truncated conical stone towers that still dot the island landscape, alongside other megalithic monuments. These were organised societies with a strong warrior element, which left fortified settlements and impressive cyclopean architecture.
The strategic position of the Balearics, in the middle of the western Mediterranean sea routes, soon attracted the great trading peoples of antiquity. Phoenicians and, above all, Carthaginians frequented their coasts and set up trading posts. From that period comes one of the most famous traits of the ancient Mallorcans: the Balearic slingers, warriors expert in the use of the sling, capable of hurling stone or lead projectiles with devastating precision and force. They were highly prized mercenaries and fought in the Carthaginian armies — including Hannibal's — and later in the Roman legions. Legend says they learned to use the sling as children, made to hit their food in order to eat.
The name of the islands themselves has traditionally been linked to these warriors: 'Baleares' has been connected to the Greek 'ballein' (to throw, to hurl), although the exact origin is disputed. Either way, Mallorca entered written history as a land of skilled slingers on the chessboard of the great Mediterranean powers.
Mallorca's absorption into the classical world came at the hands of Rome. Around 123 BC, the consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus conquered the Balearics in a campaign whose pretext, according to the sources, was to end the piracy threatening Roman trade in the area. The victory earned him the honorary surname 'Balearicus'. Rome organised the territory and founded two cities that would prove key: Palma (today's capital) and Pollentia (beside present-day Alcúdia, in the north), whose archaeological remains — forum, theatre, houses — can still be visited.
Under Roman rule, which lasted for centuries, the island was deeply Romanised: Latin arrived, along with the vine, the olive, farming techniques, roads and, in time, Christianity. Mallorca lived through a long period of stability and integration into the Roman Mediterranean world.
The fall of the Western Roman Empire dragged the Balearics into turbulent centuries too. In the fifth century, the Vandals, a Germanic people who had founded a kingdom in North Africa, occupied the islands and added them to their domains, in a phase marked by instability. In the sixth century, the Byzantine emperor Justinian recovered them for the Eastern Roman Empire as part of his ambitious reconquest of the Mediterranean, and Mallorca was tied, though ever more weakly and distantly, to Byzantium. It was a period of transition, from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, in which the island, exposed and isolated, sought its place in a world changing at speed.
At the start of the tenth century, Mallorca entered the orbit of Islam. Although there had been raids and contacts since the eighth century, the conquest and full integration into the Andalusi world took place around the years 902-903, when the islands came under the Umayyad emirate (later caliphate) of Córdoba. So began a period of more than three centuries that would leave a deep and lasting mark on the island.
The capital, renamed Madina Mayurqa (over the old Palma), flourished as an important urban and cultural centre. Mosques, palaces, baths and a system of walls were raised; advanced agriculture developed thanks to sophisticated irrigation techniques — channels, waterwheels, cisterns — that transformed the Mallorcan countryside and introduced new crops. Traces of that period survive today, such as the Arab Baths in Palma, and a significant part of the island's place names and farming vocabulary has Arabic roots.
For a time the Balearics formed an independent taifa and were a base for fleets and, at times, for the piracy that harried the Christian coasts of the Mediterranean. That was precisely one of the reasons that pushed the Christian kingdoms to turn their attention to the island. In 1114-1115, a large Pisan-Catalan expedition attacked Madina Mayurqa and sacked it, though it failed to hold it. The fate of Andalusi Mallorca would be sealed a century later, when a young and ambitious king of the Crown of Aragón set his eyes on it.
The year 1229 marks the great turning point in Mallorca's history. King James I of Aragón, called 'the Conqueror', landed on the island at the head of a large host of Catalans and Aragonese and, after besieging Madina Mayurqa, took the city on 31 December that year. The conquest meant the end of more than three centuries of Muslim rule and the beginning of Christian Mallorca, Catalan in its language, its culture and its institutions. Over the main mosque, work began shortly afterwards on the great Gothic cathedral of La Seu. The Catalan language, brought by the settlers, became the island's own language and remains so today, in its Mallorcan variety.
On his death, James I divided his domains among his sons, and so in 1276 the independent Kingdom of Mallorca was born, with James II as its first king. This kingdom, which besides the Balearics included territories in southern France (Roussillon, Cerdagne, Montpellier), enjoyed a period of splendour. James II drove the economy forward, founded villages and had emblematic buildings raised such as the Castell de Bellver, Palma's singular circular castle, and the Palau de l'Almudaina.
Independence, however, was brief and troubled. The independent kingdom of Mallorca was caught in tensions with the powerful Crown of Aragón, until King Peter IV of Aragón forcibly reincorporated it between 1343 and 1349. The last independent king, James III, died at the battle of Llucmajor in 1349 trying to recover his crown. From then on, Mallorca was part of the Crown of Aragón and, later, of the Hispanic Monarchy.
The centuries following reincorporation into the Crown of Aragón were hard ones for Mallorca. The island suffered the constant scourge of Barbary piracy: fleets of corsairs from North Africa and the Ottoman Empire ravaged the coasts, sacked villages and captured inhabitants to sell as slaves. To defend themselves, Mallorcans studded the coastline with watchtowers (the 'talaies') that communicated with fire and smoke signals, and many villages withdrew inland, away from the dangerous shore. Mallorca in turn practised privateering, with sailors attacking enemy ships under royal licence.
Internally, the late Middle Ages and the early modern period brought social and economic tensions. There were popular revolts against taxes and privileges, such as the rising of the 'forans' (the country peasants against the city) in the fifteenth century and, above all, the Mallorcan Germania of 1521-1523, a great rebellion of guilds and peasants harshly repressed. The Jewish community and the converts (the 'xuetes') suffered persecution and discrimination for centuries.
Politically, Mallorca followed the fate of the Crown of Aragón and then of the Hispanic Monarchy. During the War of the Spanish Succession, at the start of the eighteenth century, the island mostly backed the Austracist side; after the Bourbon victory, the Nueva Planta decrees (1715-1716) abolished the kingdom's own institutions and centralised power. The economy remained essentially agricultural and maritime, with olive oil, the vine, almonds and trade as its pillars, well into the twentieth century. Nothing suggested the radical transformation that was to come.
The great revolution of contemporary Mallorca was not a war or a conquest but tourism. The island had always attracted distinguished travellers — Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, who studied and loved it devotedly in the late nineteenth century; Chopin and George Sand in Valldemossa; poets and painters in Deià — but it was a select trickle. Everything changed from the 1950s and, above all, the 1960s, when air travel became widespread, living standards rose in Europe and a determined policy of promoting tourism turned Mallorca into one of the world's first mass sun-and-sand destinations.
In barely two decades the island was completely transformed. Airports, roads and thousands of hotels and apartments were built along the coast; previously empty areas filled with tourist complexes; and millions of visitors began arriving every summer, drawn by the climate, the beaches and the prices. Tourism displaced agriculture as the economic engine and gave Mallorca very rapid prosperity and modernisation, but also at times disorderly development and heavy dependence on a single sector.
Today Mallorca receives many millions of tourists a year, and tourism is at once its great wealth and its great challenge. Summer overcrowding, pressure on water and land, rising housing costs for residents and the protection of fragile natural areas have generated intense debate and public protests against 'overtourism'. The institutions have responded with measures such as the Sustainable Tourism Tax (the eco-tax), access restrictions at saturated spots such as the Cap de Formentor and limits on holiday rentals. The island is looking for a difficult balance today: to go on living from tourism without dying of success, and to preserve the authentic Mallorca — that of the Tramuntana, the stone villages and the coves — that travellers fall in love with.