PALMA DE MALLORCA TRAVEL GUIDE: How to Feel, Eat and Live the Mediterranean's Most Complete Island Capital

Behind the package holiday statistics — thirteen million tourists a year, the third busiest airport in Spain — there is a fully functioning, fully layered Mediterranean capital of four hundred and fifty thousand people with a Gothic cathedral that is the most technically audacious religious building in the Balearic Islands, Arab baths from the eleventh century surviving in a perfectly medieval alleyway five minutes from that cathedral, a neighborhood called Santa Catalina that has become the most culinarily interesting square kilometer in the entire Balearic archipelago, a Miró foundation where the studio is preserved exactly as the painter left it on the day he died, and a food culture built on ensaïmada and sobrassada and pa amb oli and Mallorcan wine from ancient olive groves and volcanic soils that is one of the most completely underrated gastronomic traditions in all of Spain.

This guide takes you through the essential dimensions of Palma: the Gothic quarter and the Arab inheritance beneath it, the transformation of Santa Catalina from fishing neighborhood to creative capital, the cathedral and the Arab baths and Bellver Castle and the Fundació Miró, the gastronomy of the island market and the contemporary Mallorcan restaurant scene, the nightlife from vermouth hour to natural wine bar to rooftop terrace over the bay, and the excursions that reveal the island beyond the city — Valldemossa and Deià, the antique tramway to Sóller, the turquoise calas of the east coast.

Written with the voice of someone who understands that Mallorca's greatest secret is not its beaches but its capital.

Welcome to the city that invented the Mediterranean good life.