The treasures of Mallorca’s Tramuntana mountains

Twelve million visitors a year, yet it never quite loses its capacity to surprise. From the summit of Puig d’en Galileu, the whole island of Mallorca was laid out below me in a glittering panorama of rock, woods and water. Close by loomed the peak of Puig Mayor at 1,436 metres, its grey pate still covered with a skullcap of recent snow. Far away towards the south were the resorts of Magaluf and S’Arenal — hidden under a pall of sea mist and so far removed from these rugged mountains that they might as well have belonged to another country.

The Serra de Tramuntana, a mountain range named after the fierce north wind, runs the length of Mallorca’s north-west coast. As spring sunshine cleared away the remains of a stormy cold front in the Balearics, my plan was to drive 110km along the spine of the range, taking the slow Ma-10 road linking Andratx in the south-west with Pollença in the far north. I’d stay at four hotels along the way; there would be visits culinary, cultural and agricultural, and more wild untamed scenery than seems plausible on a Mediterranean holiday island.

I set out from Palma, then turned north on the first of the Ma-10’s seemingly endless switchbacks. Here I had a pungent first taste of the Tramuntana’s dark forests: the gloomy gorges with streams trickling in their boulder-strewn depths; the sudden, blazing presence of the sea.

The fame of the Tramuntana rises and falls like its undulating peaks. Historically, the Serra was divided into great estates called possessions where the island’s aristocracy took refuge from the sweltering summer heat of Palma. Following the Catalan conquest in 1229 this was a powerhouse of olive oil production, a medieval Abu Dhabi, until competition from other Spanish regions led to a slow decline. Never a player in Mallorca’s mass tourist industry, the region’s lack of development was finally rewarded in 2011 when it was listed under Unesco’s World Heritage scheme.

And now it is once more in the ascendant. A new constituency of international travellers, notably from the US, has begun discovering the Tramuntana even as a new crop of mountain hotels is poised to welcome them. Examples include Ca’n Beneït in the hamlet of Binibona, Toni Durán’s exquisitely authentic country house retreat with its orchards and flower-filled gardens; and Hotel Corazón, where British photographer Kate Bellm and her Mexican artist husband Edgar López Arellano have applied a breezy, fashion-forward cool to the old Son Bleda on the road between Deià and Sóller. With 15 individually designed bedrooms, Hotel Corazón opens its doors in June — but the most keenly anticipated opening in this neck of the woods is the new hotel at Son Bunyola, Sir Richard Branson’s property on the coast near Banyalbufar, also due to open next month.

I found the entrance off to the left of the Ma-10, a country lane winding down through groves of ancient olives to a grand old Mallorcan mansion sitting prettily above its own gently curving bay. Workmen in hard hats were laying pipes and pruning trees.

Branson has had a long association with the island. He claims it was the memory of childhood holidays here that inspired his purchase in 1987 of La Residencia in Deià, among the first of Mallorca’s country house hotels (and now part of LVMH’s Belmond group). Casting about for a new project in the 1990s, he came on the enormous possessió of Son Bunyola, which sprawls over 500ha of forest and farmland and five kilometres of coastline. He bought the property in 1998, sold it four years later after planning permission was denied by the local authorities, only to rebuy it in 2015. There followed six years of legal wrangling before Branson finally got the green light to begin restoring the estate’s abandoned land and transforming its dilapidated finca into a 26-room hotel. (Three villas that were already available to rent on the estate have also had an upgrade.)

The Serra de Tramuntana reminds me of California — but without the pollution, traffic jams or politics

You might say the last thing Mallorca needs right now is yet another five-star hotel but there are reasons for thinking this one will stand out from the crowd. A condition of the building licence was that the possessió should recover its original character as a working farm, and this has meant large-scale plantings of olives and almonds, 2ha of new vineyard, sheep and hens, not to mention a gang of 40 donkeys charged with clearing the swaths of overgrown woodland.

The estate is practically a palimpsest of Mallorcan history with its two neolithic sites and medieval Arab waterworks, the 15th-century watchtower at the heart of the house and its neo-Gothic chapel. During a site inspection with general manager Vincent Padioleau, I found the hotel’s interiors, by Palma-based Swedish design firm Rialto Living, pleasant if underwhelming in their discreet Mediterranean tones of blue, red, yellow and green. Not so the exteriors: from the rear of the house the landscape rolled away towards a view so mesmerising, with the Serra’s cliffs and promontories jutting out one behind the other like some gigantic stage set, that I could imagine staring at it for hours on end. “It was the setting, above all, that made Branson fall in love with this place 25 years ago,” said Padioleau.

Son Bunyola being some weeks away from its inauguration, I backtracked for my first night to the village of Banyalbufar, made famous by the malvasía vines planted on stonewalled terraces racked up steeply from the ocean. Ca Madó Paula was a six-room hotelito with beamed ceilings, crisp white sheets and the charm of an old-fashioned Spanish pensión. It was one of the few places to stay in this village of 500 souls where children played in the street and barely a car passed in the evening calm. I wondered aloud whether Banyalbufar’s rustic sleepiness — and its house prices — might be disturbed by the supercharged luxe of the new hotel just around the corner. “Ah, yes, we’ve heard about that place,” answered the receptionist, Soledad. “We just hope our village won’t change, because we like it the way it is.”

As seen from my window in the morning light, the sea was as shiny like a pool of olive oil, becalmed, as if barely awake. On a terrace far below a man was assembling bamboo canes for his tomato plants. A moped puttered past a barking dog.

Now I headed into the heart of the Serra, an area whose high glamour quotient and death-defying coastal roads certainly give Amalfi and the Cinqueterre a run for their money. I stopped at Son Moragues, one of the portfolio of houses once belonging to the Mallorca-loving Archduke Luis Salvador of Austria (1847-1915). (Another being S’Estaca, now the holiday home of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.) Under the aegis of businessman Bruno Entrecanales, this immense possessió is run as an organic farm which supports itself with the sale of olive oil, vegetables and meat, and with guided visits. I spent a morning touring the estate’s rolling countryside, winding up at a great water tank high in the hills, fed by freshwater springs and shaded by the trees of a magical walled garden.

In Valldemossa, I picked up lingering echoes of Chopin at the monastery where he and George Sand spent a holiday from hell over the damp winter of 1838-39. (The 16th-century possessió of Mirabó, now a fine agroturismo run by owner Ignacio Ozonas, was my lodging here.) And, in Deià, I walked to a churchyard on a hilltop to find the simple stone slab marking the tomb of the poet and novelist Robert Graves (1895-1985), who lived in the village on and off from 1929 until his death.

I had been this way before. As a backpacking student roaming Europe in the summer of 1984, I took the rickety bus that clattered out of Sóller towards the coast. I remembered Deià’s picturesque straggle of sandy-coloured stone houses with green shutters and terracotta-tiled roofs, the tall palms and cedars lending verticality, the great grey hulk of Puig del Teix rearing up behind it and the sea below. But Deià had changed. It was now a busy tourist town with more estate agents and arty boutiques than actual village shops. The general store Forn Deiá still sold locally grown oranges and oven-baked vegetable cocas — but its shelves also held matcha tea, coconut milk, and cuttlefish-ink linguine.

In the hotel La Residencia, ground zero of high-end tourism in these mountains, I stood with Chilean sculptor Juan Waelder under an orange tree outside his studio. Waelder arrived in Deià during its 1970s glory days, one of a long line of adventurous spirits and bohemian mavericks drawn here as if by a magnet.

When the Tramuntana was accorded World Heritage status in 2011, the sculptor made a large-scale work in homage. It stood on the lawn beside the hotel entrance — a personification of the mountains as a woman with her hair blown back by the wind in skeins of twisted steel. “I hold up my hands towards the Teix every morning to feel the energy it gives off,” he told me. “The Serra de Tramuntana reminds me of California — but without the pollution, traffic jams or politics.”

North out of Deià the Ma-10 hugged the heights above the sea. I passed solidly built stone farmhouses and palatial possessions with pergolas and balconies. Umbrella pines leaned in over the road. Under a carob tree, sheltering from the midday sun, stood a donkey and its newborn, both heads down and motionless. Scraggy sheep had found places to lie among the rocks and roots of an olive grove, so well camouflaged they seemed to blend seamlessly into the landscape.

For some reason, the Tramuntana has largely missed out on Mallorca’s recent culinary boom but still I found good things to eat and drink. There was the superb organic goat’s cheese made by neophyte dairymen Josep Sánchez and Nicolau Cerdà at their farm outside Pollença, which turned out to pair well with the dry malvasía wines from Banyalbufar. Memorable dinners were had at El Olivo in Deià, where young chef Pablo Aranda puts a shine on classics such as lamb with a black-olive crust and Sóller prawns baked in salt, and at Ca Na Toneta in the village of Caimari.

Served in a chic dining room, Maria Solivellas’ fresh-faced cooking at Ca Na Toneta has been based on seasonal and island-grown produce since before such things were fashionable. The rice dish of spinach and langoustines and the strawberry, cucumber and kefir dessert with black pepper were for me the standouts of her springtime repertoire.

Beyond Fornalutx, on precipitous terraces held up by dry stone walls, stood olive trees of unimaginable antiquity, their huge trunks twisted into fantastical forms as grey and pitted as the sheer rock face above them. The road took me up and up, through forests of holm oak, to the sanctuary of Lluc, a monastery founded in the 13th century. Above the tree line, shadows cast by the afternoon sun on the Serra’s barren peaks gave them a strangely violet hue.

The few locals to be seen in the sparsely populated countryside around Escorca were indomitable outdoor types like Martí Mascaró, who runs organic honey company Mel Caramel and took me to see his hives in the remote fastness of Son Alzines. “To me this is the most authentic side of Mallorca,” he said as we walked through a field full of wildflowers. “I go around the tourist zones and I ask myself: what am I doing here? It’s up in the mountains that I really feel happy.”

The final ascent was near. Looking to finish the trip with a proper mountain hike, I called Eduard Casajuana of active tourism specialists Mallorcalpina. Together we climbed through the forest on a path (the GR221) that stretches 140km through the Mallorcan highlands, while Casajuana told me tales of the Tramuntana: about the tiny ferreret toad, among the world’s most threatened amphibians, which lurks in the mountain torrents, and the terrifying Sa Fosca, a karstic canyon so deep that much of its length lies in total darkness. We saw ice houses — deep pits in the mountain once used for storing snow — and woodland clearings where charcoal burners plied their trade right up until the 1950s. At the top of Puig d’en Galileu (1,181 metres) a black vulture swooped past below us.

Between Mortitx and Pollença the Ma-10 turned swiftly downwards. I had the sense of an ending. After the thrills of the high Serra this felt a little like a comedown. Though even on the plain there would be compensations: I found Pollença a delightful, buttoned-up little town, and just outside it my hotel, the Son Grua, a dream of country living at its most congenial.

I drove back to Palma along the motorway, dodging the tourist hire cars, depressed by the prosaic surroundings. Up on my right in a long dark huddle was the mountain range I had just traversed practically from end to end. Somewhere in the middle was the peak I’d conquered the previous afternoon. My Tramuntana journey had confirmed a truth I’d long suspected: while the tourist makes a beeline for the beaches, the true Mallorca-lover heads for the hills.

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