Mallorca Walker by Anthony Sattin

August in Mallorca, immigration officials in Palma were turning away foreigners arriving without hotel bookings. The island was full and in the coastal resorts there was talk of water shortages and tourist surcharges. But not for me the crowded beaches, the mobbed markets and sweaty disco bars of the package-holiday. Instead, in darkness, at six thirty in the morning I was walking through Soller with Roger. There was a slight drizzle as we crossed the main square, passed the town’s heavy old church and joined bleary-eyed deliverymen, train drivers and road sweepers for a kick-start coffee in the Café Central. The sky had brightened by the time we left and the first of the women out sweeping their doorsteps watched us surreptitiously as we headed for the mountains.

We were going to walk the pilgrims’ path over the mountains to Lluc (pronounced Looch), Mallorca’s sacred heart, the place of last resort for its people for more than five hundred years and home to the island’s patron saint. Not that Roger and I were going for religious reasons. We were stressed-out Londoners in need of a break. And yet the trip did become something of a pilgrimage. Not a sacred one, but a search for solitude, for space to think and breathe and for a glimpse of old Mallorca.

The previous evening in Soller I had visited an elderly English lady. A long-time resident of the island, she had first arrived after the war, on a whim, having seen an advertisement for a house to rent.

“They assured me that the sun shone in December. I said ‘marvellous’, and came for the winter. And I have been here ever since.” When she first crossed the mountains to Lluc, there was no road, just a track that wound through the valleys. “We went by motorcar, but I think it would have been more comfortable by donkey or even on foot.” When I told her that we were going to walk, she went all dreamy on me. “Yes, and so you should. Only way to see the place.”

On the outskirts of Soller, houses were tucked back among orchards of oranges and lemons, figs and nuts. A valley road led to Biniaraix, shut up and empty, a postcard-perfect Mediterranean village where every wooden door was surrounded by vines, each window tightly shuttered. We stopped briefly for water beneath the shade tree in the square and then went looking for a path into the mountains. We found it marked by a small, worn signpost on which was written, ‘Lluc a pie’, Lluc by foot, its narrow finger pointing towards the now-blue sky.

Everyone has a different idea of beauty. Some of us have several. One of mine is this: a stream running through a grove of ancient olive trees, on the side of a steep hill carpeted with grasses and wildflowers. We followed the path than ran beside the stream, wide enough for the two of us and neatly laid with stones by villagers who go up in numbers each winter to harvest olives. Some eleven hundred metres above us towered the Ofre, one of the peaks of the Serra de Tramuntana, a line of hills and mountains that runs up Mallorca’s west coast from Andratx to Pollensa. We stared up towards the summit. That was where we intended to stop for lunch.

Good intentions we had, good preparation we had not, but although neither of us were in shape, our first steps were made easier by excitement, expectation and novelty. And then we found our rhythm, a common, brisk pace metered out by the crunch of stones underfoot and the creak of the old leather straps on Roger’s pack. Above the tree line the sun smacked and we sweated freely, pleased with this evidence of our exertions. They took their toll, though; the pace slowed, the jokes ran out and we stopped more often on the pretext of needing to drink water and marvel at the view of Soller, shrinking behind us like something out of Wonderland. During one of these rest breaks, a young Frenchman walked at great speed up the path, slowed for long enough to tell us he was going to the top and left with a “See you there.” I think I caught a smirk on his face as his disappeared beyond the rocks.

Suitably humbled, we hurried on until stopped by iron gates and a sign warning us that this was ‘private property’ and to ‘beware bulls’. As we were swapping cock and bull stories in front of the gates, the man came running back down. This time he stopped for long enough to tell us that he was on holiday, that he liked to run to the top of the mountain each morning and that when he got to the bottom he was going to have his breakfast. He had never faced the bulls and he advised us not to try it. Instead, he directed us around the finca of L’Ofre, a large stone farmhouse where an elderly man was tilling his soil with an old gnarled rake, a sight that would have been familiar to the elderly lady in Soller.

At the pass beneath L’Ofre, the country opened out. Behind us was the rock-strewn ridge, up above the old man’s finca. Ahead was the valley that led down to Lake Cuber. Think of distant landscapes of the Lake District, the lake down below, jagged peaks all around lit by shifting light. Without anything human to give a sense of proportion, there seemed something prehistoric about the view. At a copse of fir trees, we dropped our packs, hung our T-shirts to dry in the sun and ate a lunch of bread, cheese, ham and peaches.

Roger, constantly active, was dismayed to hear we would be staying for three or four hours to avoid the midday heat, but I settled down to sleep beneath oozing pines, on a bed of wild sage and rosemary. The birds that had sung so sweetly all morning fell silent in the heat, only the cicadas continued their persistent trills. First Roger pulled a book out of his bag. A little later, turning over, I noticed he was rebuilding a cairn to mark the path. Later still, he had whittled down a couple of sticks and bound them together.

“I’ve made a crucifix for the top of the cairn,” he explained, calmer than I had ever seen him, adding a sprig of rosemary to his work, “so other people will be reminded they’re on the pilgrims’ trail.”

We walked all afternoon, around the lake and then in the shade of holm oaks, their canopy of branches hanging low and thick, the leaves of years past turned to gentle mulch beneath our boots. We didn’t see another person, nor any reminders of the other Mallorca down below. Instead we shed more of London with each step, with every clean, dry breath, and revelled in the fact that a place of such beauty and solitude could exist so close to the resorts.

The first house we saw that afternoon was Tossals Verds, a large, high-level farmhouse renovated by the government to provide accommodation for hikers. I don’t know whether it was because he hadn’t seen any visitors for a while - we had the place to ourselves that night - or whether there was something desperate about the way we scurried down the hill, but the keeper of the hostel looked wary. Our enthusiasm for the place and for the garden he was cultivating helped calm him down and while we drank cold beers and took colder showers, he prepared a dinner of grilled meat, rough bread and homegrown vegetables. We ate on the terrace, the hostel keeper bringing another jug of wine and then leaving for the night. Before the effects of seven and a half hours of walking caught up with us, we did what people from cities tend to do when they find themselves in such a place: we tested out the idea of living up there, away from the crowds and pollution and noise and hassle. We fantasised about ways of spending our time, until the last of the sun caught the summit of a flat-topped hill and the fertile plain below it. Birds of prey hovered over the valleys, searching for hares and small foxes. A stroke of mist covered the land as darkness fell.

We were hoping to wake soon after daybreak, but what with the tiredness, the wine and the absolute silence of the place, it was 7.15am before I was shaken by a jolly Roger. “Morning, Pilgrim.” The guardian who had cooked our dinner was nowhere to be found, so for breakfast we picked over the remains of dinner, left some money under the empty wine jug and climbed away from the house into the cool, damp blanket of oak forest.

The jutting peak of Massanella, 1349m high, the second highest on the island, stood between us and the monastery at Lluc. We were walking over loose stones, the day not too hot, our thoughts clear and easy, and making good time until we were stopped by a glade that was too idyllic to pass. At the heart of the clearing, beneath a massive oak, shaggy with lichen, there was a water source covered by an arched stone roof. Inside the font there was an inscription, 1748, which suggested that for at least two and a half centuries, pilgrims heading for Lluc had stopped to refresh themselves here.

We had planned on doing the same, but the source was dry, which reminded me of the warnings given to visitors about the possibility of drought. Valerie Crespi-Green, one of the most experienced guides on the island, had explained that the real challenge to walking in Mallorca in August was making water supplies last. Unable to refill our bottles at the Font and coming now out of the tree shade and onto the exposed slopes of Massanella, I understood her concern. We had a long scramble ahead of us up over scree and rocks and around patchy clumps of maquis and pampas grasses, under a sun that had dried all but the hardiest of vegetation to dust and soon reduced us to a sweaty mess. In winter it’s a different story, for the top is often covered with snow. It was a point brought home to us by the ruins of a case de neu, a snow house, where ice was stored in the days before fridges. Several more ruined cases lined the exposed northern side of the pass beneath Massanella.

We stopped to eat beside one of them. From that mountain-top lookout we could see the succession of valleys that ran down to our journey’s end at Pollensa and the long plain that extended from there to the sea and the shimmering blue Bay of Alcudia on the horizon. After lunch, we hid from the sun beneath a protruding rock and slept for a couple of hours, surrounded by alpine plants and watched over by a circling black vulture. Lluc was still several hours walk down a rocky path through the Comafreda valley, with nothing but birdsong and the tinkling of sheep-bells to disturb our thoughts. As we got closer, the pilgrim feeling came over us again, although on the road into the monastery Roger burst into an old James Taylor song about women and beer. At Lluc we passed the bar and instead hurried into church to give thanks to the island’s guardian saint. The atmosphere inside stopped us in our tracks. The air was rich with incense, the walls glowing with marble and gilt, the altar was backed with saints and angels while the dome was covered with portraits of the apostles. Impressed, we tried to imagine how it must have been for pilgrims coming over the mountains a couple of hundred years ago. Beneath the soaring roof stood a group of women in headscarves whispering their Ave Marias. Othes knelt in the side chapel where the miracle-working image of the black Madonna and child held sway, wrapped in legend and devotionary prayers. Lluc has probably been a religious site since before the Romans, with the current complex begun by crusading Knights Templars in the 13th century.

Since then it has become the island’s main place of pilgrimage and over the past few years, has also developed into one of Mallorca’s main tourist attractions. We had arrived after the visitors had left, when a reflective peace was settling like the evening mist over the valley, the growing dusk and the deepening silence, broken only by tolling bells and hushed voices. That evening, in the monastery dining room, we had another reason to give thanks as we were served a feast that included the local speciality of roast kid and a thick red wine.

There is a prayer inscribed in the hallway at Lluc and on our way out, early the following morning, the cocks crowing, prayers already being said at the Virgin’s shrine, Roger and I stopped to read it again:

‘Set out! You were born for the road. Set out! You have a meeting to keep. Where?
With whom? You don’t yet know.
Perhaps with yourself.’

“Or perhaps,” Roger added, a hand on my back, “with you, a hot beach and a cold beer.”

The trail from Lluc to Pollensa is one of the oldest on the island, known to have been in use since the Crusaders established themselves in the hills. It provides a long, beautiful, downhill walk, first through pine woods and olive groves and then across richer farmland, the ground beneath our feet changing over the hours from rock and mud to tarmac and paving, the bare rock and trees gradually replaced by fields and then by houses, shops and people. Pollensa, real life, package tourism, crept up slowly on us and the shadow of London crowded behind. There was a moment, as we reached the centre of town, when we might have said what a good time we had had and how fortunate we had been to have found that place of peace and beauty and to have tested ourselves in it. But there was no need. Instead we settled into a back-street bar with some men of the town. When they heard where we had been, they made us welcome, in honour of Our Lady of Lluc.

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