The whole roster
Nineteen pieces, six sections, one hill
Everything on the site, laid out to be read down rather than browsed.
Building with what is underfoot
| No | Piece | What it covers | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | A Bronze Age settlement inside the town's walking distance | Ses Païsses is a talayotic settlement with a cyclopean wall and a central tower, and it sits a short walk from a working town rather than in isolation. | long read |
| 1.2 | A sanctuary on ground that was always fortified | The walled enclosure above Artà has been defensive ground since long before the sanctuary, which is why the approach is a stair rather than a road. | long read |
| 1.3 | Terraces Held Up by Walls Nobody Signed | Mallorca's dry-stone terracing is a technique with a UNESCO listing and a maintenance problem — the walls need hands that are no longer there. | medium read |
| No | Piece | What it covers | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | A cavern surveyed in the nineteenth century | The Coves d'Artà were mapped by early surveyors and became a set-piece of the Romantic tour, which is how they entered European writing. | long read |
| 2.2 | Stalagmites Measured Because They Grow Slowly | Growth rates in these caves are slow enough to be dated, which turns a tourist attraction into a climate record. | medium read |
| 2.3 | Water Cut Most of It, and Is Still Cutting | The Llevant coast's caves are dissolution features in limestone, and the sea-level record is written into where they sit. | short read |
A shoreline that stayed awkward
| No | Piece | What it covers | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | A protected coast that was awkward first | The Llevant natural park covers ground that was hard to reach and therefore hard to develop; protection followed the geography rather than preceding it. | long read |
| 3.2 | A beach with no road worth the name | Cala Torta and its neighbours stayed undeveloped because the access track is bad, which is now the reason people go. | medium read |
| 3.3 | A tower built against raiding | The coastal towers are a defensive system against corsair raids, and their spacing is a line of sight rather than a design choice. | medium read |
| No | Piece | What it covers | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Palm leaf worked into everything | Artà's llata basketry uses dwarf-palm leaf and is the town's oldest documented trade, worked at home rather than in workshops. | long read |
| 4.2 | A cured sausage with a protected name | Sobrassada de Mallorca carries a protected geographical indication, which fixes what may be in it and where it may be made. | medium read |
| 4.3 | A crop that flowers in February | Mallorca's almond groves flower in midwinter, and the crop's decline and partial recovery track a plant disease rather than a market. | short read |
| 4.4 | A whistle in white and green | The siurell is a whitewashed clay figure with a whistle, made in a handful of workshops and older than the tourist trade it now serves. | short read |
| No | Piece | What it covers | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5.1 | An island that drinks from underneath | Mallorca depends on groundwater, and over-extraction near the coast draws seawater into the aquifer — a process that is measured and slow to reverse. | long read |
| 5.2 | Riverbeds that are dry until they are not | The torrents run only after heavy rain, which is why they are built over and why flooding here arrives all at once. | medium read |
| 5.3 | Four months carrying twelve | Water and waste load concentrate into the summer, so infrastructure is sized for a third of the year and idle for the rest. | medium read |
| No | Piece | What it covers | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6.1 | A mountain range listed for its terraces | The Serra de Tramuntana was listed by UNESCO in 2011 as a cultural landscape — the listing is about the human works on it, not the rock. | long read |
| 6.2 | The City the Island Is Administered From | Palma holds the cathedral, the port and the administration, and the rest of the island's road network is drawn towards it. | medium read |
| 6.3 | A wooden tram that survived by being useless | The Sóller line survived because it was too slow to be worth replacing, and is now the reason people ride it. | short read |