Mallorca

We arrived on a Thursday with no plan beyond a rented house and a vague intention to swim every day, which turned out to be the only itinerary worth having. Mallorca rewards people who are willing to be slightly bored for the first forty-eight hours.

Santanyí on a Saturday is the correction to everything you have heard about the island. There are no boat parties here. There is a square, a church the colour of bread crust, and a market that treats punctuality as a moral position.

By the third day we had a routine. Market at eight, swim at eleven, lunch that ran until it was too late to do anything else, and then the long slow evening where the light goes gold and refuses to leave for another two hours.

Getting around

The coves are the thing everyone comes for and they are, annoyingly, worth it. Cala Llombards took forty minutes of switchbacks and a scramble down a path that no one had maintained since the nineties, and then opened into water so clear it looked like a rendering error.

What surprised me was how quickly the island stops feeling like a destination and starts feeling like a place where people are simply getting on with their week. The tourism is real but it sits on top of something older and considerably less interested in you.