Palma & Porto Christo

Because we’d worked some extra hours last week we were given a long weekend. We made quick plans to leave the house for Palma and Porto Christo. And guess what? We traveled to opposing sides of the island with very little transportation trouble. Thank you, Mallorca, for being much easier to access than Barcelona!

On Friday we went to Palma, the largest city on the island. Our first stop was the Cathedral, where we had been told Gaudi had been involved in the architecture. As it turns out, Gaudi only contributed to the renovations of the nave of the Cathedral, which now has the expected Gaudian underwater look. It was a pretty Cathedral, though, with almost-neon stained glass windows. We spent the rest of the day wandering through the districts suggested by our host family. Palma has a pretty happening tourist district that didn’t offend me at all, a pretty-enough sandy beach, and lots of shops. I can see why it’s a popular city to visit.

Palma Cathedral

We caught the first bus from Algaida to Porto Christo on Saturday morning. After charging our camera battery at a little café, we headed to Las Cuevas del Drac (The Caves of the Dragon). The beginning of the cave tour was a little disappointing. We were herded through the cool tunnels with a large group of tourists. Alan was sore about not being allowed to take pictures of all the super-cool stalactites reflected in the pools of the cave, and I was annoyed that we weren’t learning anything. For some reason I have it in my head that when I pay an entrance fee somewhere I need plaques or guides to dump information into me, and all we were hearing were one-line useless explanations like “This is the hall of columns” in Spanish, German, English, and French. Eventually, though, we were seated in a little amphitheater and told a bit about the Frenchman who discovered the place and the temperature of the water in the caves (which, curiously, was a different number in all of the languages…), etc. And THEN! they put on a little show with lighted row boats, one of which had an organist and violinist playing Mozart pieces. So there we sat in a big, damp cave at the easternmost point of the biggest of the little Balearic Islands watching choreographed rowboats to classical music. It immediately received the stamp of Sierra-Approved-Mallorquean-Tourist-Activities. We all lined up to be row-boated out of the caves just in time for the next wave of tourists to take our places.


Alan had brought along his climbing shoes to do some deep-water soloing, because the internet had talked up Porto Christo as being a good place to do it. Since the tourist information shop was closed and no one downtown seemed to be helpful about rock climbing, we walked along the edge of the beach hoping to find other climbers or at least a nice-looking wall. We cut through some brush on the edge of a residential area and miraculously found exactly what we were looking for: An absolutely BEAUTIFUL area and a Spaniard with a book of climbing routes. I sat at the top and took pictures while Alan climbed down part of the way, jumped into the water, and climbed back up. Port Christo is probably the prettiest place we’ve been yet. So we sat up there for a while before doing the tourist shop thing and returning home.

Alan climbing