UNCOVERING MALLORCA'S UNSPOILED COASTLINES, STORIED ART ENCLAVES, AND MANY ECCENTRIC PERSONALITIES

No historical plaque marks the spot known as Platja des Franceses, or Frenchman's Beach, on the Spanish island of Mallorca. In fact, as I turned off a back road in the warm haze of a late summer's afternoon, there was little to distinguish it from other parts of Alcúdia Bay, a roughly eight-and-a-half-mile-long arc of soft sand and gently lapping crystal-clear waters. Like most corners of the Mediterranean in July, it was a genial hubbub of families playing, lovers smooching, and sun worshippers lazing. But I recognized the location, framed by a shady grove of pine trees with a headland in the distance, from murky black-and-white holiday photographs and a flickering Super 8 movie I'd watched on YouTube.

In the summer of 1950, this stretch of sand played an eccentric but pivotal role in the history of modern travel when it became the site of the world's first Club Med. The resort was run by a veteran of the French Resistance named Gérard Blitz, who said he'd come up with the idea while working in a postwar sanitarium for concentration camp survivors. In what sounds like the premise for a Wes Anderson movie, Blitz decided that the way to cure the ills of civilization that haunted postwar Europe was to take city dwellers into a pristine natural setting and remove the trappings of social status. The setup was endearingly basic: Guests wore only swimsuits and slept by the beach in US Army surplus canvas tents, sharing a single shower. All food and wine was included; any extras were paid for with beads.

The modern world's first humble “all-inclusive resort” was an instant success, and Blitz's motto still resonates in travel today: “The goal of life is to be happy. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now.” But while the first Club Med was an inspired idea, it has had a dubious legacy, particularly in Mallorca. With the arrival of the jet age in the 1960s, the island became a quagmire of sun-and-sand mass tourism, with chunks of its coast quickly barnacled with cheap all-inclusive refuges catering to hard-drinking Brits and Germans. Of late, some of the resorts favored by guiri (Spanish for “uncouth foreign visitors”) have become so debauched that the local Mallorcan government banned happy hours and the unsavory tourist practice of “balconing”—jumping from high hotel balconies into swimming pools, with predictably disastrous results.

But this was only half the Mallorcan story, I knew. Even as Blitz and his French sun worshippers frolicked at Alcúdia, the island was earning a reputation as a bohemian artists escape, luring a steady stream of writers, painters, and composers who sought inspiration along its spectacular cliff-lined shores and among the medieval cathedrals and winding streets of its ports and mountain villages. Famed artists like Frédéric Chopin, Robert Graves, and Joan Miró helped transform the obscure island into an aesthete's refuge, much like Capri had been in the 19th century. Gertrude Stein came here, as did Anaïs Nin, D.H. Lawrence, and a small army of Hollywood stars.

These sorts of visitors fostered some charming rural luxury hotels, particularly in the island's wild interior and harder-to-reach northern coast. And in the last couple of years, Mallorca has embraced this side of its past, rebranding itself as a chic, high-end destination. The most celebrated new resort is Sir Richard Branson's Son Bunyola, a renovated historic finca on a 1,300-acre coastal estate that opened its doors last year. Other recent arrivals include the Grand Hotel Son Net and Mon Hotel Boutique Constanza, also transformed fincas. This year will see the arrival of the international luxe brands Mandarin Oriental and Four Seasons, with properties in prime coastal locations.

All this has left Mallorca with a split personality. I myself was hardly immune to the sensual allure of the island, with its promise of fine Spanish seafood and sangria in the sun. The temptation to loll like a lotus-eater on the sands is profound. But I also have the urge to seek out the culture and history of any new place, especially if they are half-forgotten, as in Mallorca. Many of us feel this internal tug-of-war on our Mediterranean journeys: hedonism versus curiosity. And since the island remains a crucible of modern tourism, I wanted to see if I could strike my own personal balance between sun worship and spiritual nourishment.

When I inquired about a base for exploring the island's culture, Mallorcan friends recommended a local favorite—and one of the first in the recent wave of historic rural hotels. The Castell Son Claret is a renovated 43-room “castle” in the foothills of the raw mountain spine of the island known as the Tramuntana, on a 330-acre estate that has operated since 1450. Crowned with towers, it feels a world away from the booze-addled coastal resorts, which I was relieved to learn are concentrated almost entirely in Mallorca's southwest. Located inland only a half-hour drive southwest from the island's capital, Palma, the Castell is a bastion of calm and old-world Spanish taste. Instead of being blasted by dance-pop, I sank into my private pool surrounded by flowers and lulled by the all-encompassing harmony of cicadas, Mallorca's seductive summer soundtrack.

The Castell's cultural insights begin with its focus on Mallorcan cuisine. A waiter brought me lemonade mixed from citrus and mint grown in nearby groves. Lunch included “pink tomato tartare” from the estate's fields along with bread and goat cheese made on site. The resort's signature cocktail, the Tramuntana, combines herbs from its organic garden with the obscure (to outsiders) local liqueur called Palo de Mallorca—a bitter remedy beloved by Mallorcan connoisseurs that contains cinchona bark and gentian root.

Nearby Palma offers a surprisingly elegant crash course in the history of the island. There were no inebriated Britons or Germans in sight as I explored the port's winding medieval streets and broad, leafy boulevards peppered with gorgeous Art Nouveau confections. All roads lead to the harbor, crowned by the extravagantly ornate Gothic cathedral of Santa Maria. After the crown of Aragon seized Mallorca from the Arabs in 1231, construction took 300 years to finish. Today it is second in grandeur only to its counterparts in Milan and Cologne, Germany. Inside, along with the classic grisly Catholic relics (fingers, bones, and other assorted body parts of the saints are on plentiful display), I was delighted to discover that the revered Catalan artist Antonio Gaudí, who worked in Mallorca in the early 1900s, had created a seven-sided modernist canopy hovering over the altar like a reimagined crown of thorns.

But even Gaudí's celebrity wattage is outshone by Joan Miró's lovely house-studio on the western edge of Palma. The illustrious Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramist arrived in 1940, fleeing Paris to escape the Nazis, in search of the calm Mallorcan shores where he had summered as a child. From the mid-1950s, Miró set up an extraordinary complex here, with different structures for each of his artistic disciplines. Today, the painting studio is a work of art in itself. Designed by the architect Josep Lluís Sert, a fellow Catalan, it has a ceiling that evokes a wave. Its sun-filled interior is still crowded with Miró's deliriously cheerful canvases mixing abstraction and Surrealism, with animals, stars, and the moon swirling together in a hypnotic dance. But just as affecting are the tiny souvenir knickknacks, like pinned butterflies and a swordfish tusk mounted on the wall, and the eccentrically personal photographs Miró gathered over his life, including images of Easter processions. The walls of other rooms are still covered with his charcoal sketches, making it feel as if the artist left only yesterday.

The rugged northern coastline of Mallorca, where the Tramuntana meets the Mediterranean in mile after mile of dramatic cliffs, is the island's most isolated and spectacular region. But its narrow, winding roads are notoriously taxing to drive. The most central location for exploring, Mallorcan friends said, was the Jumeirah Port Sóller Hotel, which is perched on a precipice roughly in the middle of the coast, with panoramic sea views from every balcony. It was tempting to squander days in the rooftop infinity pool, gazing at the horizon and dining on chilled gazpacho with cherries. But the mountainous UNESCO World Heritage–listed coast is riddled with hiking trails with evocative names like the Trail of Dry Stones and the Trail of the Painters that lead to empty valleys and abandoned churches. The coast first appeared on Europe's artistic travel map when Chopin and his lover George Sand scandalously spent the winter of 1838 and 1839 in the village of Valldemossa. Today, Sand's memoir of their visit, A Winter in Mallorca, is sold in 10 languages on the island, despite the fact that she detested the weather, the local peasantry, and the cuisine. The somber monastery where the pair stayed is now a charming museum, with their room, “cell number 4,” preserved as a shrine.

The Tramuntana gained additional artistic attention after 1929, when the magisterial British writer Robert Graves, author of the classic World War I memoir Goodbye to All That, settled into the village of Deià, in part to calm his PTSD as a veteran of the Somme. The ancient Roman novel he penned there, I, Claudius, was a personal favorite of mine as a teenager and I longed to pay my respects.

To reach Graves's house-museum, I drove—very carefully—along the breathtaking mountain road. Every headland I passed was crowned with a crumbling tower built in the Middle Ages as a fire beacon to alert distant townsfolk of the arrival of pirates. Deiá itself was so busy I couldn't find a place to park. Before he died in 1985, Graves had lured many famous scribes and artists to the village, giving it such international cachet that it became a millionaire celebrity refuge in the 1990s; Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones bought a mansion, and Mick Jagger and David Bowie came to party. Gorgeous though it remains, the real estate boom has driven many less-moneyed artists out. But Graves' house on Deià's outskirts recalls a time when the village still exuded quiet charm.

It was fascinating to learn from the modest exhibits how the expat British writer set himself up in rustic comfort, pumping water by hand every morning and writing through the long winter nights in front of an open fire. I inspected the wooden desk where he wrote I, Claudius (not to mention others of his staggering 130 works) beneath a small Etruscan statue. Upstairs, another small exhibit recounted Graves's complicated love life. (One of his paramours nearly died after an act of “defenestration.”) On the way out, a tiny bookstore sold Graves's books and T-shirts with quotes from his poetry (“Love is a universal migraine / A bright stain on the vision / Blotting out reason...”).

It was my last day in Mallorca when I made my pilgrimage to Frenchman's Beach. There are no decent hotels there today, so I stayed a half-hour drive north at a trendy boutique beach resort called El Vicenç de la Mar, in the town of Pollença. Located at the end of the Tramuntana, it was another spectacular choice: From my balcony I gazed out at fingers of limestone rising from the sea. The landscape had a drama I normally associate with Polynesia.

The day unfolded like in ideal Mediterranean summer fashion: I breakfasted on luscious Spanish pastries and café cortado beneath the polished blue sky. By noon I was enjoying a dip in the gloriously calm and clear waters of Alcúdia. But as I emerged from the sea, I wondered if in simply visiting the location of the long-gone Club Med I had been too literal.

It was time to be creative and imagine how Monsieur Blitz would have achieved the same giddy sense of freedom on the island today.

I soon got my answer, while strolling past a waterfront kiosk for a boat-hire company advertising that it would rent motorboats “with or without a sailing license.” Really? I asked the cheerful owner, Ritchie, who was lounging on the marina by a mural of 19th-century sailors. You'll rent me a boat without any paperwork? Absolutely, he assured me. “You don't need a license in Mallorca!” (There are limits as to how far and fast an unlicensed boat can go.) Soon I was behind the wheel, ready to head for the high seas.

Ritchie waved me off amiably from the dock as I opened up the throttle and sped across the waves. Instantly, I felt the rush of excitement that the first Club Med guests must have felt in that long-ago summer of 1950.

I could go wherever I wanted! Swim wherever I liked! I cast anchor at a small rocky cove and jumped off the bow into vodka-clear waters, then continued around the bay's southern headland, where monstrous boulders had crumbled from sea cliffs and dark caves yawned poetically like refuges of the sirens. At last, the mythic Homeric vision of the Mediterranean had come to life.

As I returned to the jetty, I wondered what lesson Mallorca had taught me about balancing hedonism and high culture. I wasn't sure there was one—except perhaps that both should be taken in moderation. Ritchie recommended a neighborhood tapas shack near the dock for lunch, where I ordered gambas al ajillo and a crisp white wine as two fishermen regaled me about their morning catch from the next table. I knew there was another art site I had to visit somewhere, but it's important to know when to stop.

This article appeared in the April 2024 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.