Mallorca: history and heritage

About Mallorca: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Mallorca Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Mallorca has been a crossroads of the western Mediterranean for three thousand years. Bronze Age islanders built stone towers; Romans, Vandals, Byzantines and Moors came and went; and a medieval king made it the centre of his own kingdom. Palma’s cathedral, rising above the sea, is the island’s signature.

At a glance

Population: 957,726 (INE, 1 January 2024), of the Balearic Islands’ 1,231,768.

Names through history: Maiorica (Roman, “the larger island”), Mayurqa (Arabic), Mallorca.

A Bronze Age island of stone towers, a Moorish city and a medieval kingdom, all in sight of the sea.

Languages: Catalan, in its Mallorquí form, and Spanish are both official.

UNESCO World Heritage: the Cultural Landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana (2011).

The Talayotic island

From around 1000 BC the islanders built talayots, stone towers that still stand across the island, at Capocorb Vell and Ses Païsses. Balearic slingers were famed across the ancient world, and served as mercenaries in Carthage’s armies.

Romans and Moors

Rome conquered the islands in 123 BC and founded Palma and Pollentia, near Alcúdia, whose theatre and streets can be visited. From 902 the island was Mayurqa, part of the Islamic world for more than three centuries: the Arab Baths in Palma and the terraced, irrigated valleys of the Tramuntana are its legacy.

The Kingdom of Majorca

On 31 December 1229 James I of Aragon took Madina Mayurqa. From 1276 to 1349 Mallorca was the heart of an independent Kingdom of Majorca, which built the cathedral, La Seu, Bellver Castle, round and unique in Spain, and the Almudaina palace. Mallorcan cartographers, many of them Jewish, drew some of the finest maps of the Middle Ages, among them the Catalan Atlas of 1375; the philosopher Ramon Llull was born in Palma.

Artists and travellers

In the winter of 1838–1839 Frédéric Chopin and George Sand stayed at the Carthusian monastery of Valldemossa. Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria explored and described the island in the late nineteenth century; Antoni Gaudí worked on the cathedral’s interior; the poet Robert Graves settled in Deià; and Joan Miró spent his last decades in Palma, where his studios are now a foundation. The Sóller railway has run through the mountains since 1912.

The Tramuntana

The Serra de Tramuntana, with its dry-stone terraces, olive groves and mountain villages, was inscribed as World Heritage in 2011. Mass tourism arrived from the 1950s and today brings millions of visitors each year, and Mallorca works to balance it with the island’s life.

Our advice: see the cathedral in the morning light from the Parc de la Mar, take the vintage train to Sóller, and drive the Tramuntana road to Deià and Valldemossa out of season.

Sources

Population: Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), population at 1 January 2024. History: Consell de Mallorca; Catedral de Mallorca; UNESCO World Heritage Centre (Serra de Tramuntana); Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Majorca”.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Mallorca: history and heritage before you go.