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Long before PR and ’spin’, what is now among the world’s most popular holiday islands already had a kind of marketing machine. He was Archduke Ludwig Salvador, his father the King of Tuscany and his mother a Bourbon. With money to burn and freedom to roam, from the 1860s he cruised up and down the Mediterranean aboard his beloved yacht Nixe. He journeyed widely and thoroughly but it was to Mallorca that he gave his heart.

So Ludwig, a Habsburg with wanderlust, became Luis, man of the people, hosting open house parties for Mallorca’s great, good and poor. Yet he was clearly industrious rather than idle. So great was his enthusiasm for the place that he managed to have two local plants named after him. Botany, zoology, geography, languages – Luis, it seemed, mastered all and churned out encyclopaedic tomes on the island. It is hard not to warm to his passion and now here I was, standing at the place where he fell in love.

Around 5km south of Deià, Miramar lies just off the dramatic C710 road that twists and turns across the shoulders of the Serra de Tramuntana. This was Luis’ first Mallorcan estate and, as if to prove his earnestness for things Balearic, he immediately restored its dinky 13th-century monastery established by Ramon Llull, the nearest thing Mallorca has to a saint. Only recently opened to the public, the lozenge-embossed villa exhibits Salvador relics, pictures and sea charts along with facets of old island life.

It was the view more than anything that seduced him. In his What I Know About Miramar, Luis proclaimed it incomparably beautiful. Terraces of carob and olive trees fall away to cliffs; a 16th-century watchtower (built to warn of approaching pirates) perches implausibly amidst a tangle of pines and just up the coast Sa Foradada – a slender hook-like peninsula with an eyehole – pokes into the lapis sea. It was from here that Salvador could see the small Son Marroig estate, one of whose damsels had reputedly been kidnapped from its own tower by crack pirates. The swashbuckling romance was so utterly beguiling, if not rose-tinted, that he went ahead and bought it, too.

The Archduke’s houseguests included artists, intellectuals and royalty. Empress Sissi of Austria was moved to name her yacht Mira-mar while Luis had acquired his second, Nixe II. So began a trend – the wealthy multiple-home owner – that endures. Just in case one doubts the area’s near-glitterati credentials, Miramar’s ticket office displays the pages of a well-known celebrity magazine featuring the hideaway of one Mr M. Douglas and his former wife. Nightmarish paparazzi aside, their ‘dream home’ boasts virtually the same view from its terrace.

I peered down over the edge at faint trails – now roamed by goats or the odd hiker by special arrangement – and you can still discern their cobbles. Having acquired several houses and estates, Salvador built bridle paths up and down the mountains. The best known, still called the Cami de S’Arxiduc (or Archduke’s Path) in Mallorquin, broadly follows the ridgeline of the high hills behind Miramar. It remains one of the island’s finest walks, with marvellous views up and down the coast and of the Serra de Tramuntana.

Luis’ greatest affection was for Son Marroig, a few kilometres down the road. Today it is among the best known and accessible of what one might loosely term Mallorca’s venerable homes. Externally it resembles a cross between an Italian palazzo and a baronial hunting lodge tacked on to a far older watchtower. Owned by the family of Luis’ loyal secretary since his death in 1915, much of the mansion and its gardens are open to the public. The contents are relatively modest – displays of Roman and Phoenician ceramics, old Mallorcan furniture, fading prints, paintings and books. Yet the ballroom’s lofty wood-panelled ceiling and tall seaward windows, along with an adjoining dining hall and arcaded veranda, do evoke another more gracious age.

Outside amidst the olive terraces stands a pavilion of dazzling Carrara marble. Though it hardly matches the rest of the house (he was erratic in striving for the eclectic) you can – just – see Sa Foradada far below. That was probably the point. Once a frequent anchorage for his beloved Nixe, this striking peninsula is a sublime spot on an already impressive coast. Its name approximates to ‘the rock pierced by a hole’ (it’s quite a rock and a substantial hole) and when not sailing in, Luis was conveyed to the rugged shore by horse and carriage. With prior permission, most of us are going to have to make do with a wholesome thirty-minute walk on the stony track, the effort offset perhaps by a cool swim in its turquoise shallows.

Nearer Palma, the capital, stands La Granja, a far older estate with roots dating back to the 10th-century Moorish conquest. Its copious springs and thriving wool mills meant that by the 15th century it was a sought after property, within reach only of religious orders or noble families. Still in private hands today, it is probably the island’s most visited mansion. Aside from ye olde traditional-women-with-headscarves, folk dancing and handicraft demonstrations – which to varying degrees just about avoid being cheesy – it’s a fascinating place and well worth seeing.

Restored and expanded over many years, La Granja is as much a museum as a grandee home. There are dyers’ vats and olive presses, perfume stills and a rope-making workshop. A well-equipped ironing room serviced bedrooms baroque and renaissance. The family installed a Florentine-influenced gallery. The joy is in the detail: wood-and-brass braziers to warm one’s feet, an eight-seat dining table that ingeniously doubles as a snooker table, the array of entertainments in a ‘games room’, even a sinister hair-dryer resembling a zany contraption from a ‘50s sci-fi movie.

Rather less appealing are the cells and torture chamber, with chilling displays of racks, a spiked interrogation chair, and despicable implements called ‘scold’s bridles’ and ‘shrews fiddles’. Yet even here there’s a kind of grotesque, if unintentional, humour. In the time it takes to read about institutionalised torture (administered by lords and nobles) across medieval Mallorca, you’ll hear a continuous recording of a hooting owl and a creaking door followed by the shrieks of some hapless victim – perhaps a bit too authentic for youngsters.

Almost in the island’s heart, amidst the rolling farmland near Villafranca de Bonany, Els Calderers represents the apogee of its landed gentry. Dating from around 1750, the manor exudes patriarchal authority and calm. It also seems a touch more lived in (which it is, the owners discreetly maintaining quarters in the upper floors). When uniformed maids check the dining hall’s monogrammed crockery and napkins, you anticipate an imminent banquet for eighteen rather than mere pilfering.

Salvador himself knew this house and perhaps he aspired to its taste. Families like this were avid worshippers so they had their own chapel whose priest had an office. They hunted and so needed a ‘hunting room’; evenings were spent in a music room. All this luxurious yet dignified space orbits a shady courtyard with a well and fishpond. But I was tickled most by the rooms of its farmhands and their own kitchen and dining room – all beautifully, designedly rustic – that suggested ‘downstairs’ is the new ‘upstairs’.

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