Balearic Islands

The Balearics bring together four main islands, set in the western Mediterranean, each resting on a different foundation. Mallorca, the largest, carries the Serra de Tramuntana in its north-west, a limestone range that drops almost straight into the sea and has been shaped, slope by slope, into farming terraces held by dry-stone walls stacked without mortar for centuries. Menorca, further east, stays noticeably flatter: a low plateau, gridded with fields likewise bordered in dry stone, its relief so gentle that it is easy to forget it is, on its own scale, a mountainous island. Ibiza and Formentera, further south, share a common base of low hills covered in pine and coves cut into a softer rock. Mallorca lives on this contrast between mountain and plain. On the foothills of the Tramuntana, villages of ochre stone cling to the slopes among almond trees, whose blossom whitens the orchards before anything else comes into leaf. The central plain, Es Pla, long depended on windmills built to draw water from underground, and their frames of wood and canvas, or metal in the more recent ones, still stand among the fields. The island's large estates, the possessions, gathered house, farm buildings and sometimes a chapel under a single tiled roof, around an inner courtyard — a layout found today in many of the houses let to visitors. On the east coast, the calas cut the rock into small bays of pale sand ringed by pines, some so narrow that they are still reached only by a path along the cliff face. Menorca has chosen a different pace. The island has stayed more pastoral than its neighbours, gridded by parets seques, kilometres of dry-stone walls that divide the fields without ever quite closing them off from view: you drive or walk between two low lines of stone, and the land stays legible from one field to the next, each plot standing apart from its neighbour without a single hedge closing the horizon. It also keeps, scattered through the countryside, talaiots, dry-stone towers shaped like a truncated cone and built in the Bronze Age, and taulas, strange T-shaped monuments whose exact purpose is still not fully understood. The island's natural harbours, Maó and Ciutadella, grew up at the end of long sheltered bays, away from the open cliffs found elsewhere in the archipelago. Away from its nightlife reputation, Ibiza keeps a rural interior: white fincas of simple form, set among almond and olive trees, and villages whose fortified churches recall a time when the coast had to defend itself alone against raids coming off the sea. This whitewashed, cubic architecture in fact drew modernist architects who settled there last century, won over by its simplicity. Formentera, smaller and flatter than all the others, comes down almost entirely to its dunes and its lagoon, Ses Salines, a shallow turquoise stretch of water born of former salt pans whose rectangular basins are still visible among the dunes and pines; it is reached only by sea, from Ibiza. The Balearics are not one island but four different versions of the same archipelago: a mountain dropping into the sea, a pastoral countryside gridded with stone, pine woods pierced by coves, a flat lagoon. What people come looking for is exactly that choice — an island suited to a pace rather than a programme, whether mountainous, flat, wooded, or reduced to a beach and a dune.