Monday morning came a little too early on the overnight ferry to Palma de Mallorca, like, 5:30 AM too early. We were fully disembarked by 6:15 and on our way to wait for the first bus of the morning.
Palma is the capital city on Mallorca, which is itself the largest of the Balearic Islands. Our extremely early start gave us a very different experience in Palma than most of the island's 13 million annual visitors. We had tasty early morning breakfast at Panaderia S'Estacio, it was very quiet and nearly empty.
We wandered empty streets. Here's the Parlament buildings:
Here's a completely empty Placa de Major:
Here's the gorgeous modernisme masterpiece Can Forteza Ray:
We saw shop owners and clerks arriving at work, window washers, street cleaners, and trash collectors going about their work. What we didn't see was the seething hoard of tourists. I don't know about healthy, wealthy, and wise, but being early to rise certainly let us experience a different version of Palma!
The Almudaina is closed on Mondays, but we could still appreciate the impressive fortifications! We were, unsurprisingly, pretty sleepy still. We found some nice, shady gardens to park ourselves in and get some rest.
being up this early has it's drawbacks: absolutely nothing in Palma is open before 10 AM. We enjoyed the beauty of the city, but we couldn't visit any sites or anything. We planted ourselves under a palm tree to admire the view of the great cathedral and potentially take a nap.
We booked in advance for our timed entry to the cathedral and once our wait was over we were able to hop in the line and head on inside! The crowds were amassing around the cathedral, our solitary time in Palma was definitely over.
I realize that I am a weirdo in how much I love old churches, but this one is exceptional. When we walked in the door another visitor entering with us said, "WOW. Wow, wow, wow."
Photos won't quite capture it, but the morning sun was shining directly through the large rose window and the colors washed the cathedral in spectacular light.
The cathedral is old, the alter piece slightly less so: It was designed by my Catalan favorite, Antonin Gaudi!
Gaudi also designed this beautiful chapel. It's made to look like a natural grotto covered in sea creatures. I became a fan of modernisme and Gaudi in particular after our trip to Barcelona, I loved seeing more of his work here in Palma.
I'm so glad we didn't wait till later in the day to visit the cathedral because it was already pretty warm inside! I can only imagine it would have just gotten hotter as the day went on.
I know it's too many photos, but I couldn't get over trying to capture the light and color from the windows. It looked absolutely heavenly.
It looked like the walls had been tie-dyed.
We paid for a visit to the terraces of the cathedral, totally worth it!
The terrace is actually the roof of the side chapels and serve as flying buttresses to support the higher roof over the nave.
Getting up close and personal with the architecture was fun and the views of Palma were excellent. It was, unsurprisingly, very hot up there!
The hottest spot (in the literal, temperature sense) also was kind of the most interesting to me, though the walkway was narrow so we couldn't linger. It was where we passed right next to the giant rose window.
The ticket that covers the cathedral and the terraces also includes the diocese art museum. We were already tired, it was approaching lunch time, but the museum has air-conditioning so we decided it was the best place for us. These were among my favorite exhibits:
we made our way to the Mercat de L'Olivar to pick out some lunch, including my favorite Fanta knock-off:
The tourist crush was in full force by this point. Every charming little street was packed with visitors, every shop and cafe fille to bursting. I even made two new friends in city hall:
We found ourselves another air-conditioned and FREE art museum (5 star rating by default) The Fundacio Joan March Palma.
Honestly, the collection there is quite good. They had some pieces by artists that we'd seen earlier on this trip, like Antonio Taura and Fernando Zobel. They even had a Miro and a Dali.
Eventually, one gets exhausted by art museums, even if they have air-con, nice toilets, and the occasional bench. The crowds were getting a bit overwhelming in Palma, so we hopped on the bus and headed out to the 'burbs!
In the little town (neighborhood?) of Genova there is a restaurant with a cave underneath it, and they'll just let you walk around it unsupervised.
We found ourselves totally alone in the cave, which was a lovely break from the midday crowds in Palma. And though the cave wasn't air-conditioned, it was naturally colder than any A/C.
The caves weren't super big, but quite beautiful and easy to photograph (excellent lighting goes a long way.)
It's a bit of a bus ride to get to Genova for just this one stop, so I might recommend doing some other things in the area in addition to the cave, but by this point we were pretty darn done for the day.
We took a bus back to Palma and then another bus took us to Sa Torre down the coast where we would be staying while in Mallorca. We spent our evening lounging around the B&B's pool and visiting the Migros for dinner ingredients.
We meant for Tuesday to be a rest day, but I don't know how restful it turned out to be. We got our laundry all washed and drying and walked to the Mirador del Pas des Verro. The ocean views are beautiful!
We followed a rough trail down to the beach and were rewarded for our efforts with pristine, warm water and a pretty decent number of fish! This is kind of the extent of the beach available, but it was enough for us!
We set up a little shade and had ourselves a picnic and swam in the sheltered cove. We didn't pack snorkel gear, but I did bring a pair of goggles so we took turns with those. We also didn't bring our under water friendly camera, so I guess what I saw will stay between me and the fish.
I will say, the pale blue water that looks like it should be very shallow is actually more like 10 feet deep. There isn't much wading to be done on this part of the island, so it's a good thing the water was calm enough for swimming.
We decided to undertake a little adventure of scrambling along the coast to reach a different overlook, the Mirador des Balconet. As far as I can tell it's about a half mile as the crow flies, but there isn't any kind of path, it's just rocks, boulders, and brambles.
There were a couple of spots where Lee opted to climb over some obstacles and I avoided them all together by going down and swimming around them. That's partly how we discovered this pretty neat little pseudo-cave.
We weren't actually sure we could make it all the way to the Mirador de Balconet, it wasn't clear there was a path that would get us there. In fact, right at the end the only way through was by swimming. But we packed a dry bag for our food and phones, and I ferried all our various gear without getting them particularly wet. We made it! This overlook has stairs and a ramp instead of a rough trail, but goodness did climbing up that ramp feel like the longest walk of my life! We caught a bus back to our little room away from home and had to hop in the pool to cool off from the hike back.
We rested through our late afternoon and got all our clean laundry put away and went to a relaxing dinner at the Shiva Beach Club. This place definitely had a night life, party kind of vibe. We just got to enjoy the sunset, the food, and German TV crew setting up for their shoot tomorrow.
The crew was setting up because this excellent sunset view here would likely be a perfect place to view the total solar eclipse on August 12, 2026. Oh, hey! That's tomorrow!
Was that burying the lead? The eclipse is what brought us to Mallorca. Lee's sister celebrated her wedding in Mallorca during the eclipse. So we made our way to the little town of Banyalbufar the next day to meet up with the family. We spent 3 hours on the bus, in part due to traffic and road closures for the big event. It's estimated that there were possibly more than 400k foreign visitors in Mallorca for the eclipse.
Natalie and JT requested everyone dress in a fantasy theme, so we all came in our elfish best. Banyalbufar is a very cute town, very small, and I don't think they've ever seen crowds like this before and maybe never will again. I think several of the restaurants just ran out of food. Here is a pretty good collection of Phillipses: Dave, Jordan, Megan, Aubrie, Lee, Claire, and Brittany.
There is a lot of old world, Mediterranean charm in Banyalbufar; one half expects to hear a mandolin playing in the streets.
It was, unsurprisingly, extremely hot. We were pretty well drenched in sweat and I thank my past self for choosing a light weight, loose and flowy kind of dress. It helped a lot with the heat. We hiked our way down to the beach, but the water was pretty much the same temperature as the air.
We rather unintentionally found ourselves in an excellent location for eclipse viewing, this big rocky cliff juts out into the ocean and the view of the sunset is completely unobstructed. The bride and groom exchanged vows privately at their hotel.
A little bit of thin cloud cover rolled in right as the eclipse hit totality, which made it near impossible to photograph. It was incredible regardless.
Right as totality ended, I managed to capture these shots:
Now for the fun part, trying to catch a bus. Us and 500 of our closest friends. We just paused long enough to buy a little homemade bracelet from a local kid who brilliantly set up a stand in his yard. I do love to support a young entrepreneur.
We did spend several hours waiting to get on a bus, but being unwilling to shove a bunch of rowdy lads out of our way to get to the front of the mob meant that we didn't really have a shot. Lee's parents had a rental van and a bit of room, so as they were leaving they offered to drop us off on their way back to S'Arenal, so we happily accepted.
Our time in Mallorca was over! Far too early the next morning we were in a taxi and on our way to another adventure.
