Belmond La Residencia

Belmond La Residencia

Mallorca is the largest of the Balearic Islands, about an hour's flight from most of Western Europe, and it contains multitudes. The south has resorts and package tourism and the kind of beach infrastructure that could be anywhere. The northwest is something else entirely: the Serra de Tramuntana, a UNESCO World Heritage mountain range that runs the length of the coast, all dramatic limestone peaks, terraced olive groves, and stone villages clinging to hillsides above the sea. This is the Mallorca that people mean when they say they love Mallorca, and Deià sits at the heart of it. Deià is a village of around 850 people, honey-coloured stone houses on a hillside above the Mediterranean, and it has been drawing artists, writers, and creative escapees since the 19th century when a guidebook already noted its collection of strange and eccentric foreigners. The poet and novelist Robert Graves arrived in 1929 on the recommendation of Gertrude Stein, found everything he needed, and stayed until his death in 1985. His presence made Deià a magnet: García Márquez came, Ava Gardner came, Anaïs Nin came, Kevin Ayers and Robert Wyatt of Canterbury scene fame made it a base. In the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Branson bought a property here and his Virgin Records artists followed. Mick Jagger jammed at the local bar. The village has a way of accumulating serious people who need to be somewhere beautiful. Graves is buried in the cemetery behind the church on the hill. His house is now a museum. The DNA has never entirely left. La Residencia was opened in 1984 in two restored 16th and 17th-century manor houses on thirteen hectares of olive and citrus groves on the edge of the village. The local Sheridan family, art collectors, donated pieces from their own collection to furnish the rooms at opening, and the hotel has maintained a close relationship with Deià's artistic scene ever since, including a long-standing connection to the legacy of Joan Miró whose work was deeply shaped by Mallorca. Branson bought a stake in 1987, which is why the guest history reads the way it does, and the hotel eventually passed to Orient-Express and then to Belmond, one of the great luxury hotel groups in the world, whose portfolio runs from the Venice Cipriani to the British Pullman. They run La Residencia now with a level of care that justifies the price, and the price is significant. The crowd reflects all of this: European old money, creative industry figures who have made real money, people for whom a stay at a Belmond property is the natural register of a serious holiday. It is not showy in the way some luxury hotels are, because Deià itself does not permit showiness, but it is unambiguously the finest address on the island and everyone there knows it. There are around 67 rooms and suites, all individually decorated with Mallorcan antiques and local art, beamed ceilings and terracotta floors and whitewashed walls, and some of the higher suites have private pools and 360-degree views of the mountains and sea. Two outdoor pools sit in the gardens among the olive trees. The hotel runs its own shuttle to Cala Deià, the small rocky cove below the village where Graves swam daily and local artists continue the tradition of long afternoons in the water. El Olivo, the main restaurant, is housed in a 500-year-old olive press and serves Mallorcan cuisine with an encyclopedic wine list. It is one of the finest restaurants on the island and the kind of place worth booking a night around. The art collection and sculpture garden are woven through the property throughout. Open March to November. The people who come here are those for whom the combination of serious literary history, genuine landscape, and a hotel that has been doing this specific thing for four decades is the entire point. It is not a hotel that needs to explain itself. The short version: Two 16th-century manor houses on thirteen acres of olive groves in Deià, the village where Robert Graves lived and died, in the UNESCO-listed mountains of northwest Mallorca. Rooms furnished with Mallorcan antiques, a 500-year-old olive press turned restaurant, a sculpture garden, two pools, and a guest history that includes everyone from García Márquez to Mick Jagger. A Belmond property in the full sense of that word. Open March to November. The definitive address in one of Europe's most quietly extraordinary villages.