Say farewell to winter from Mallorca
Escape the cold with a getaway to Mallorca in the Balearic Islands where the seafood is fresh and the sun is plentiful, says Merryn Somerset Webb
It’s time. It’s been cold for a while. You’ve had enough. Booking a break somewhere warm will make you feel a lot better – or at the very least allow you to look forward to a time when you will feel a lot better. Maybe April, or the beginning of May. With that in mind, how about a quick trip to Mallorca?
Three hours will get you to Palma, where the average temperature in May is around 20°C. Perfect – for me at least (I live in Scotland, for context…). Once in Palma, make it easy. Head around the Bay of Palma and – stopping some way short of Magaluf – stay at Hotel Bendinat. It’s 25 minutes in a taxi.
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Beyond that you can choose from little bungalows dotted around its gardens and pool, or a more classic hotel room with a terrace. Sea views are standard. It’s not particularly expensive (all these things are relative these days).
If you’d prefer a real sandy beach, you can walk over the cliff to get to one – or just swim around a rocky outcrop to it – and its rather delightful beach bar, Freddy’s.
Enjoy a seafood lunch with a glass of rosé
Then, there is the restaurant, Las Terrazas de Bendinat. It’s gorgeous at breakfast (get up earlyish for a first-row table) and so popular locally that even hotel residents would be wise to book for dinner. The restaurant terrace practically hangs over the water and its awnings are in large part supported by the branches of the trees set into it.
In the daytime, you will be dazzled by the blue of the sky against the whiteness of your pristine tablecloth. You will sit on properly cushioned chairs and agree with your waiter that you must try the Mallorcan rosé, all with the sea shifting just beneath you.
The menu is a treat. It’s fish heavy: sea bass ceviche, tuna tartar, shrimp carpaccio with salmon roe, fried squid, prawns with garlic, four different kinds of paella and sea bass baked in a salt crust. You can imagine the kind of thing.
What you might not be able to imagine is our teenage son loving it so much that he wanted to eat there every night (mostly the lemon sole – one of the most expensive things on the menu, I noticed a tad too late).
And on our last night there, when a pile of our aunts and cousins turned up unexpectedly for dinner – just as the evening was winding down – the staff did not turn even the smallest of hairs. A new, bigger table appeared, menus were passed around and more wine opened. The closing time of the kitchen wasn’t mentioned.
Beware the goings-on further down the beach
However, quite possibly the best thing we ate – and I feel a little disloyal about writing this – was on another terrace. Walk over the cliffs, past Freddy’s, past a five-minute-view church and on to the next beach.
Do not walk down the beach (you aren’t that far from Magaluf and you don’t want to know anything about the kind of place your daughter went to on her post-A-levels girls’ trip). Do do anything to get a table at the near end of the beach on the edge of the terrace at Xio by S’Esponja.
We sat by the sea under yellow umbrellas, ordered wine and various fish things. Then the waiter returned. The paella had just arrived. Would we like to rethink? We would. Everyone has eaten a bad paella. This was a very, very good one.
After that lunch, it was back to the Bendinat, where my mother (this was a multi-generational trip) had what she swears was the best massage ever in the hotel’s small, but, she says, utterly glorious spa.
That her therapist spoke six languages hung over the rest of us (conversational French, max) for some days. It was hard to get her out of there. She had to be promised another trip this spring (see you there…).
But when her hands were eventually prised away from the cocktails list (yes, they do make a good French 75), we headed north to somewhere that won’t be on your weekend-away list, but should be on your take-the-whole-family-away list.
A palatial villa and glorious gardens
We met all the aunts, uncles and cousins an hour’s drive north at Son Doblons, a giant villa (it sleeps 18) situated away from the sea, but set in 130 hectares of glorious gardens. There are pomegranate and orange orchards, endless fountains and ponds and a blissful (if unheated) swimming pool that kept our teenagers (a lot of them…) happy for hours.
It came with an excellent cook (who fully grasped how much we wanted to celebrate the brilliance of the 80th birthday of one of our number) and a house manager who produced a fine flamenco dancer to add to the celebrations with 24 hours’ notice.
It’s ten minutes from a charming hill town, Arta, where you can drink coffee (the Cafè Parisien is the top choice) and buy cowboy boots and pottery to your heart’s content.
Twenty minutes in the other direction takes you to a perfectly good set of caves and a delicious little beach with a tat shop that sold the girls, who had forgotten their bikinis, new ones for €10 each. Mostly, however, we didn’t leave the house much. It was too lovely.
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