Mallorca: Sóller, Sa Calobra and the North Coast

Sóller sits in a bowl of mountains on the far side of a pass from Palma, and at the start of the last century it got tired of the pass. The valley paid for its own railway with orange and lemon money, opened it in 1912, and you ride it today in wooden carriages, through the mountain and down above the orange groves. The road tunnel came in 1997. Until then, every car went over the top.

When the orange trade hit a crisis at the end of the 1800s, a lot of Sóller left for France. The ones who came home with money built the Modernista houses in the middle of town, and the bank and the church front on the square are by Joan Rubió, who had worked inside Palma's cathedral with Gaudí. Day 1, following you around.

Dinner in Sóller tonight.

Until 1933 there was no road to Sa Calobra. So you arrive the old way. The boat runs an hour east from Port de Sóller under the north coast's cliffs and puts you ashore in a cove with eighteen registered residents and a great deal of mountain behind it.

Then the good bit. A path cut through the cliff in 1950 takes you through two tunnels and out onto a wide bank of pale stones, where the Torrent de Pareis comes out of the mountain at the end of three kilometers of gorge and simply stops at the sea. Walking the whole gorge from the top is a scramble of four or five hours that people bring rope for. You are doing the last ten minutes, which is the part on every postcard anyway.

Then you leave by road, and what a road. Antonio Parietti laid it out to be driven for the view, and near the top it turns 270 degrees and passes under itself. Locals call that bit the knot of the tie. Pollença tonight, by way of the monastery at Lluc, where a children's choir in blue has sung since the 1500s and, if the timing is kind, still does.

This is the early one, and we are sorry, and we would do it again. At first light the road out along the Formentor peninsula is empty, and when the sun comes up out of the sea you are at the lighthouse on the very end of it, about two hundred meters above the water, with Menorca on the horizon if the air is clear.

When the lighthouse went up in the early 1860s there was no road at all. The stone came in by sea and went up the cliff on a winch that took forty men to turn. The road you drove out on came sixty years later, and it is Antonio Parietti's work again, the man behind yesterday's knot.

Breakfast back in Pollença, then nothing much, on purpose. Day 4 is the slow one. Toward evening there are 365 steps up to the chapel on the Calvari, one for every day of the year, for anybody who wants them. Dinner in Pollença.

Robert Graves came to Deià in 1929 and built a house among the olive trees. The Civil War sent him away in 1936, he came back ten years later, and he stayed until he died in 1985. I, Claudius came out of the first of those stretches. His house is kept the way he lived in it, kitchen, printing press and study, and he is buried in the churchyard on the hill above the village.

Valldemossa is the most visited stop of the day and the least surprising, which is fine, because you are here for a review. Chopin and George Sand spent the winter of 1838 in the old monastery. He was ill, the winter was miserable, and Sand went home and wrote a book about the island that was, by any measure, rude about the people in it.

Back in Palma for the thing day 1 promised. You climb onto the cathedral roof and walk its terraces, with the bay below you and the old town behind. Farewell dinner tonight.

Last morning in Palma. Coffee near the water, and the cathedral exactly where it was on day 1, looking a little pleased with itself.

Six days ago this was a table of strangers working on each other's names. Now there is a group chat named after a road that ties itself in a knot, a camera roll that is mostly one lighthouse at sunrise from every angle anybody could reach, and at least one person who now says "the Tramuntana" as if they grew up under it. Hug everyone. Keep the chat.