There is much to be said about off season travel. Most obvious is the lack of crowds, even with the risk of cold or inclement weather. Prices are better and upgrades more likely. We have heard locals on Mallorca and Ibiza complaining vociferously about the increasing number of tourists that descend there during the summer months. Our strategy is to go when it’s slow. When the hordes go south, we’ll go north.
Our first trip to Mallorca was a three day excursion from our new headquarters on Carrer Sueca in Valencia. We found flights for as low as 10 Euros one way but somehow weren’t able to buy them quite so cheap. The commute was short with dramatic views on the approach and our only fellow passengers were from a large soccer club sporting identical athletic suits and hard shelled silver wheelies.
Just before we left my mother told me that my grandfather, Howard Imhoff, used to visit Mallorca every winter. He was a larger than life figure in our family until his death when I was twelve who had grown up on a silver mine in Idaho and rode the rails east with the hobos to attend art school, became an illustrator by trade, and started the business our families were all involved in. Each year he and his second wife Betty would travel for at least a month and return home bearing gifts like maracas and boomerangs and shrunken heads and bedazzle us with slide shows that seemingly went on forever as the adults got plastered on vodka and gin. Howard and Betty travelled everywhere their US passports permitted and while I recall images of camel rides and African villages and other exotic locales, I don’t remember Mallorca.
From Palma we rented a car and drove immediately to the hill town of Valldemossa. I learned from a book in the hotel that the Balearic Islands got their name (in the Latin interpretation) from the islanders’ acumen with the slingshot, or ballos, a verb meaning to launch. Children on Mallorca were trained to knock food purposely hung from in the trees in order to eat. The Greek name, on the other hand, apparently derived because the inhabitants went nude.
View along the trail above Valldemossa, Mallorca.
We were hoping to hike despite the chilly winter weather. The skies were overcast and our first day’s trail led us 10 miles and a few thousand vertical feet on a large loop through oak forests and rocky ridges with dramatic views of the hills and coastal villages and the sea and back down through pines. Everywhere were intact stone walls and foundations of structures formerly used to cook charcoal and cure lime and the roads and pathways and landscapes were in spectacular condition. I believe they film scenes from Game of Thrones on the island and you can see why because there are so many impressive windswept landscapes with no signs of human habitation.
The second evening we were one of just two couples in a restaurant called Can Costa. We sat next to a wood stove and the decor was of old farm implements and amphoras and other rural accoutrements. I had a delicious whole sea bass cooked to crispy perfection in the wood oven with vegetables and they didn’t overwhelm the salad with mounds of canned tuna and yellow corn and eggs boiled to rubbery death. The wine was highly drinkable and the muscle exhaustion from the day’s hike provided a fine sauce.
Our second walk on the north end of the island started from a vineyard and wandered through a truly spectacular granite gorge and then up and over a notch that, had we the time, would have taken us all the way to the sea and back. There were lots of massively trunked ancient olive trees and everywhere we heard the sounds of bells clanging from the necks of sheep and goats, which are used for meat and rarely for milk or cheese, roaming freely among the crags looking after their kidds and lambs.
We bought sandwiches from a sausage and cheese monger at the Sunday market in Valldemossa made on dark rolls spread with pan tomat sauce. Mine had a firm salty cow cheese from Minorca and combined with a beer and the brisk uphill walk and cold weather made for a memorable picnic. At the market, where one vendor sold sweet and tangy seedless mandarins, were two white haired ladies, no more than four and a half feet tall, dressed in winter coats, wandering the stalls, sampling fruits and talking the gospel of buying and eating locally.
Picnic stop on the Mitotx trail at the north end of the island.
Later we found ourselves in the town of Esporles on the way to the Granja Museum but decided against it because of a lack of time and cost of entry. We promised to come back because it is a sprawling museum about agrarianism and right up our alley.
The capital of Palma is much larger than we imagined. In typical fashion we oriented ourselves around visiting an English language book store, seeing the cathedral which underwent an early 20th century makeover by Antoni Gaudí then headed to the Central Market to eat. We sat at the counter at Bar del Peix and ordered a racion of decadently batter fried mixto fritura with calamari, baby shrimp, bacalao and boquerones and a plate of padrone peppers. We squeezed a lot of lemon on the lovely seafood and crunched even the heads and tails and ordered a few glasses of beer, which prompted a conversation among the locals about which is the better Spanish beer on tap, Estrella Galicia, or the less prevalent, Mahou, which was what they were serving. Everyone at the bar seemed to have a preference and the consensus leaned toward Mahou so we left duly indoctrinated.
Lunch at the Bar del Peix in Palma’s central market.
Even when the sun disappears behind the clouds and January pokes out her cold face, offseason travel is not to be avoided. One could spend weeks on Mallorca in the winter time, which is apparently what my late grandfather Howard Imhoff used to do. If he were only here to tell me his whats, whens, and favorite haunts.
