More will you understand as words bring you closer to the bank of the river of yourself, and without fear you face with your fluent reality (…)
Drown, then, everything that moves you away from the project of you, and accept all the lonesomeness and shortage without concerns.
Take love as a norm that frees you from fears and anxieties and clears you the horizons of the dream.
Miquel Martí i Pol, catalan poet and writer.
The lines above were written in a simple yet beautiful tile hanging up in the wall of Joan and Pepita’s kitchen. They hosted me and Dani (his grandson) in Palma de Mallorca for a few days. Queralt, Dani’s girlfriend, also joined us for the trip.
My thoughts about Mallorca were defective. I found out just one day after landing in Palma. For us –catalans, I’m from Barcelona– the Balearic Islands are a place of mass tourism which we see more as a southern extension of Germany, Russia and England. The archetypical idea is that whatever beauty left in the island has been devoured by the claws of tourism.
This trip was a bit different, luckily. I was visiting Mallorca with a local, who happens to be one of my best friends at home. His family came from this island and so, the legacy of unspoiled places and secret spots has permeated through the years. I was the family’s lucky guest of honour.
So first things first. Common sense will prevent you from going to Magaluf, Palmanova and other massified towns. The cool spots are tiny in the maps but giant in real life.
A great filter for tourists are the long walks to the beach. The longer the walk, the lesser the guiris. It makes sense. Go to small coves, rocky beaches and steep mountains to forget that, yeah sure, the tourists are all around, but not precisely there. You won’t see them off the beaten track.
Although Dani had a few ideas, we carried on by pointing the map with our finger and driving to whatever place we thought would be beautiful. We did fuck up a couple of times, but those days in Mallorca were just a feast of sun, relax and brilliant gastronomy.
Lucky me, Dani’s granparents event treated me with the best fresh products of the land: sobrassada, ensaimadas and black bread. Just be sure to try them out. But let me finish here, because words can’t describe better than pictures, at least in this case.
