Sóller

There is a way to arrive in Sóller that turns a transfer into the best hour of your trip, and almost no one with a driver uses it. You leave the car in Palma and take the train — a wooden, narrow-gauge train from 1912 that climbs out of the city, bores through thirteen tunnels in the Tramuntana, and drops you into a valley so thick with orange and lemon groves you can smell it before you see it. It is slow. That is the point.

Sóller sits in a bowl of mountains on the island's northwest flank, about forty minutes from Palma by road and a good deal longer — happily — by rail. For a century it was rich on citrus and cut off from the rest of the island by the mountains, which is why it built its own railway to Palma and its own tram down to the sea. That isolation gave it a completeness most Mallorcan towns lack: a proper square, a grand church, a modernist heritage, and a valley of hamlets that feel sealed off from the modern island entirely.

The square, the train, and the tram

The heart of Sóller is the Plaça Constitució, where the cafés spill out under plane trees and the Sant Bartomeu church presents a facade designed by a pupil of Gaudí. Sit there long enough and the vintage tram — open-sided, wooden, painted orange — rattles straight through the middle of the square on its way down to the port. It has done so since 1913, and riding it the four kilometres to Port de Sóller through the orange groves is one of the genuine pleasures of the island, tourist cliche notwithstanding.

Do not skip Can Prunera, a modernist mansion a few streets off the square, now a museum of modern art with works by Miró, Picasso and Léger inside a perfectly preserved Art Nouveau interior. It is the kind of small, serious place that rewards the traveller who came for more than a photograph of the tram.

The valley villages

The real luxury of Sóller is using it as a base for the two villages above it. Fornalutx, a few minutes up the valley, is routinely called the prettiest village in Spain — stone houses, stepped lanes, painted roof tiles, and a fraction of Sóller's foot traffic. Biniaraix is smaller still, the trailhead for the Barranc de Biniaraix, a stone-stepped ravine path that climbs into the high mountains and is, for walkers, one of the finest stretches in the Tramuntana. You can spend three days here and never repeat a view.

Where to stay

In town, the Gran Hotel Sóller is the established five-star — a restored nineteenth-century mansion a minute from the square, with a rooftop pool that looks straight at the mountains and a spa for the days your legs need it after the Barranc. It is classic rather than design-forward, and it suits the town.

For something more secluded, Ca's Xorc sits above the valley on a former olive estate — a small retreat with terraced gardens, organic kitchen and the kind of silence you came to the mountains for. Down at the water, the Jumeirah Mallorca commands the cliff above Port de Sóller with the widest sea views of any hotel in the area. Three very different propositions; we place the guest according to whether they want the town, the mountains, or the sea at their feet.

Where to eat

At the port, Es Fanals — on the ninth floor of the Jumeirah, in the Michelin Guide — does a Balearic tasting menu with the bay laid out beneath it; it is the destination dinner. In town, the better tables cluster around the square and the side streets, and they fill fast in season, so the booking is the thing. And at ground level: buy the local oranges, drink the fresh juice, and have an ice cream from one of the long-standing gelaterias — Sóller's citrus is not a marketing story, it is the actual reason the town exists.

When to come

Spring is Sóller at its best — the groves in blossom, the walking weather ideal, the valley green before the summer heat. Autumn brings the harvest and the cooler light. Summer is warm and busier, though the valley's altitude keeps it a degree kinder than the coast, and the sea is ten minutes away by tram. Come for at least two nights; Sóller is a place to settle into, not a stop to tick.