Mallorcan mysteries
Another slightly later than planned start (that free tequila again!) meant we decided to stay local on Tuesday, and try again where we'd failed earlier in the week.
So after lunch, we set off for Ses Paisses, only a 20 minute drive away. We took the signed way off the roundabout just outside the town of Arta, saying "please let it be open, please let it be open" and it was! A brand new sign had appeared screwed to the gatepost, announcing opening hours of 10 - 12:30 and 14:30 - 18:30 from April to October, the gates were open, and having paid the entrance fee of 1,55 euros each, plus 2,05 for a guide leaflet, we followed the wall round to the magnificent entrance we'd only been able to glimpse through the trees earlier in the week.
And what an entrance!
I was expecting great things. We wandered round the area just inside the wall, checking out new excavations, and then followed the rather neatly signposted route through the trees into the main body of the site - past the pillared rooms
round the bottom of the great talaiot and eventually up the side of it to admire its construction and gaze down into the tower.
The route then takes visitors past one of the alternative entrances to the settlement, and past some more pillared rooms, and then back past the talaiot and out again.
The sun was shining, there were only another 4 people there, that main entrance is impressive ..... but the place just didn't grab either me or Beardy. Maybe we'd been so amazed by the structure and scale of Son Fornes the previous day that nothing would have done.
Checking out the information leaflet, I was mystified - there's a page which explains the different shapes of talaiot and gives examples and pictures: square is Son Serra de Marina, which can also be called Santa Margalida - no problem with that - but the round example was "circular talaiot in Sa Canova". The introduction to the island in TME mentions the great talaiot of Sa Canova, and that it's ruinous now, and therefore not included, apart from a picture - only not a picture of the same structure I was looking at a picture of (grammar pedants, yes, I know, but it makes sense to me!). Checking back at my translated notes, the picture in TME is of the square talaiot of Canova d'en Morell but about 300 metres away from this, is the round and very impressive looking talaiot of Sa Clova d'es Xot which was the one in the Ses Paisses guide. Hmmm. I speak very very little Spanish (ie I can order a beer!) but can understand a bit more, so tried to have a conversation with the guy manning the ticket booth - I pointed to Sa Canova on my map, and the picture in the guide, and he told me it was on private land, and seeing as we'd been along the road where you should be able to see both of these structures a few days before, we just shrugged and decided to make a second attempt at Es Claper des Gigant - nearby and signposted.
Again - the gate was open - hurrah! We parked up and followed the pink sign almost hidden in bushes to the left of a building and came out on the path round a golf course. Almost immediately, there's a path off to the left with a wooden sign for "Es Clapers" so we followed the way through a wooded area until we came to a gate and turned right at the T head through it on the basis that my instructions said the talaiot was on high ground. There were gardeners out on the wide sandy track cutting back the undergrowth, and a few minutes walk later we caught a glimpse of some stone ahead so took a left fork off the main path and after a short climb found ourselves here:
Just to the right of the clearing (still being cleared by yet another gardener while we were there) was a talaiot
with a path up its side to let you see its centre
and what appears to be steps in the internal wall, as we'd seen in Son Fornes talaiot 2.
The surrounding area had walls
A beautiful spot - apart from the sounds of quarrying coming the far side of the golf course. But then I dug out my notes again, and realised we were actually looking at the poblat of S'Heretat, not Es Claper, after all. The surrounding area was still quite overgrown, but we tried to find the other structure mentioned in my research notes, and although there were several piles of stones on the way, we didn't find anything identifiable on the way back to the car.
A day of confusion!
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Mallorcan central circuit
Monday 1st May
Another sunny day dawned, and our shortlist of 10 sites were between the towns of Inca, Algaida and Manacor, in the centre of the island but north of the main C715 highway.
As usual, we managed to make our approach from the opposite direction to our instructions, but, being right alongside the road, we had no problem locating the pair of talaiots of Es Racons.
The one nearer the road has not been excavated, and is crumbling away
The one set back from the road is the more impressive
and having entered the talaiot the remains of the central pillar is visible.
The site was quite overgrown, but it was well worth going round the back of the second talaiot into the wood to see where a tree has grown into its structure, and to find the megalithic locker described in TME.
With no information about what we could expect to find at Son Creixell or Sa Ritxola, both marked as places of interest on the map, we decided to head for the village of Costitx and soon found ourselves in a traffic jam caused by the local fiesta. The village was closed to through traffic, so we rejoined the PM324 to Inca and took the PM312 back down again to approach from the other direction - and then just before Sencelles we took the left turn to Son Fred.
The information board was just about undecipherable, and there were two huge mounds of sandy coloured rubble round the outside of the talaiot.
There's been excavations carried out here - the central pillar is propped and wrapped
and the area at the front has been dug to expose a step
but there's no way in through the unusual curved entrance passage.
The directions in TME are good for Son Fred - and it's easiest to find heading north from Sencelles. Our next site was to be the sanctuary of Son Corro, and the recommendation is to be travelling east to west, from Costitx to Sencelles, or you will do as we did, and miss the sign! The usual pink one has company - a white municipal sign which I believe dates the restoration of the site as having taken place in 1994.
The sanctuary is on shelf overlooking fields
with six tall columns
forming a corridor to the shorter column, still used for offerings today.
The finds from this site include 3 life-size bronze bulls heads, now in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid.
Feeling a bit more confident with our navigational skills, we went back to Sencelles and took the PM314 south to Cas Canar. After the houses at Cas Canar, just as the road bends sharply to the right, we took the turning to the right and drove slowly on, watching the fields to the left. A couple of kilometres later, we turned round, and on the way back to the main road, on a whim, stopped at a pair of gates - one low and rusty, the other over 8ft high with spikes on the top, opposite a sign saying "Sencelles 2,8", - and there in the field to the left as we looked at gates, we spotted the first of the pair of square talaiots.
The nearer one is surrounded by a modern wall and is overgrown, making it impossible to distinguish any of the expected features - a staggered entrance and part of the central pillar.
The second of the pair is barely recognisable as a talaiot anymore and will be no more than a cascade of stones in a field boundary before too long.
Enough for one day? Time for a break? No! Onwards to somewhere incredible - Son Fornes, just north of Montuiri.
The site is reasonably well signposted, and when you go through the narrow gate it's only 50 yards or so to the trees where it's best to park. Follow the track uphill on foot, and then through the gate on the right into the site. There's an information board - completely blank!
In the picture above, the talaiot to the right is talaiot 2, further away from the gate. This talaiot has a central column, and 3 steps are clearly visible in its inner wall.
The first talaiot is magnificent - 17 metres in diameter - with a huge central pillar, a side chamber big enough to climb into
and 5 metre entrance passage to negotiate.
Surrounding the two talaiots are numerous rooms and enclosures, some with pillars - in magnificent location. I was still exploring talaiot 1 when Beardy shouted to me "there's more in the next field" and sure enough, another circular building
with rooms beyond it
stretched down into a wooded area.
We then took the path to the north east into the trees on the higher part of the site, behind talaiot 2, and found a strange construction
and a beautiful section of wall.
The best was yet to come though - the huge circular platform with steps down towards the track.
The site is being excavated periodically by a team led by the "Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona" and there's a museum in the nearby town showing the finds and its website has an excellent site plan - confusingly not oriented with north at the top! - the museum is closed on Mondays; the site plan link gives full opening times and contact details.
What a glorious day!
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Mallorca part 2 (of many?)
A quiet evening enabled me to check through my research and plan a full day's activites and we had a short list of 18 possible sites for Sunday 30 April, travelling north of our base in Cala Millor. The trip planning had of course started with the relevant section of TME and I'd found http://www.mallorcasonne.com/en/index.html which covers most of the sites in the book plus a few more, but having got the (AA) map of the island (don't get the Rough Guide one as I did initially - hardly any archaeology marked on it so it went on Ebay and I went back to the shop for a better version), there were many many three-little-red-dot markings to indicate excavations, and some googling later, I found http://personales.ya.com/chanches/arqueobalear/intro/div1esp.htm and set about babelfishing a laborious translation - which came out quite interesting, shall we say. The town of Porto Christo became "I carry Christ" and many of the directions left a lot to be desired, but at least we had areas to check out and pictures to help us identify what we found.
So after an early-ish breakfast we set off with the plan to check out the monument at Pula first of all - "In the highway of Son Cervera to Cala Rajada, in lands of golf of It polishes, one is in a small alongside same hill of the highway, in its right side" - and surpringly enough, we didn't find it from those instructions!
So onwards, and having ruled out trecking a few kms away from the roads across farmland to find the navetas of l'Angel and the two of Canyamel, we headed to Es Claper des Gegant, marked on the map and signposted - hurrah! - and realised the poblat of S'Heretat had to be nearby too. A pink sign led us to a gate on the left hand side of the road to Canyamel beach - with a huge padlock across it and no way in. Bugger! Dodgy directions meant abandoning looking for the poblat so we drove on, feeling just a little despondent.
The caves at Son Jaumel and poblat of Sos Sastres were ignored and we headed to the highly-recommended-to-me site of Ses Paisses - marked clearly and signposted - only
Could the day get any worse? There was no indication of when we could expect to visit either - if only I'd read http://www.mallorcaweb.net/sespaisses/index1/f_index.htm but I'd had enough of translating by the time I'd found it.
So with even heavier hearts, we travelled on away from the town of Arta and took the turning off the C712 towards the Colony of St Pedro (marked as Sant Pere on our map - spelling varies quite significantly from maps to signs!) in search of the dolmen of S'Aigua Dolca (apologies for the lack of appropriate accents!) and the talaoits of Sa Clova d'es Xot and Canova d'en Morell - and failed to locate any! (Later revelations about these last two to come).
The next on our list - Son Serra de Marina - we knew would cheer us up as the directions said we couldn't miss it "on the brink of madness (of) the highway" and sure enough it was!
A policeman on a motorbike stopped in the middle of the junction, I initially thought possibly to scold me for hazardous parking (more abandonment half in a ditch!) but he was just stopping the traffic for a huge party of cyclists - complete with following ambulance, how reassuring! - to turn towards the town of Son Serra.
The talaiot here is square
Mallorca has both round and square talaiots (oops, should have explained by now that these are towers!) whereas Menorca has only round ones but this latter island also has taulas - huge T shaped monuments - which are not found on Mallorca.
Slightly more cheerful, we continued to follow the C712 north west towards the necroplis of Son Real - follow the directions in TME carefully as the track you need to take is signed, but on the wall next to the gate rather than from the road itself. We parked up, and wondering about the lack of "toilets and information by the official car park" (TME page 366) but happy as
the pigs in shit in the farm alongside the track marked "necropoli", in glorious sunshine heading towards the beach.
A fair few yards further on, the track forked with both ways being marked as necropoli, so we kept to the left and found ourselves at the beach, near a tall watchtower - at the necropolis of Illot des Porros - on an island!
Wandering north up the coast, past some caves
we eventually arrived, after only abut 1km, at Son Real itself.
with its amazing tombs - rectangular, circular and even boat shaped
A stroll back following the inland path brought us to the aformentioned fork in the path and we headed back towards Son Real farm where we failed to find the way to take to visit Es Figueral.
Dodgy directions again meant missing the dolmen of Son Baulo de Dalt, and after a well deserved and very late lunch in Porto de Pollenca, we continued north to Cala Sant Vicent - called Coves d'Alzinaret in TME but the sign - for once almost legible - was clear about the name
and helped us identify the numbers allocated to the caves by W Hemp who carried out the excavations.
This site is signposted from Porto de Pollenca - take the turn from the PM220 indicated, and when you see the pink sign to the caves off to the right, just as the houses start, beware that the taula (not native to the island, so more modern?) mentioned in TME is hidden by trees. Almost as soon as you've turned off the highway, turn left onto Carrer de Joaquim Sorolla and park up immediately. The path to the caves will be directly to your right.
Past the information board, follow the path to the right to the caves.
Cave number 6
impresses, but then on through the tiny square entrance (of which I seem to have omitted to take a picture!) into an inner entrance and then into cave 7 itself.
There are sizeable rooms to each side, and a shelf runs along both sides. The hole in the floor at the end of the cave
is a modern alteration, made possibly by smugglers, and the series of holes below the shelf on the side walls (visible in the previous picture) were made as late as by prisoners occupying the site during the Spanish civil war.
Cave number 8 is set back - maybe it originally had an inner chamber too?
Cave 9 defintely does though:
Caves 10 and 11 are much shallower
and cave 5, on the opposite side of the road leading down to the cove, has collapsed.
It had been a long day, and we were a fair way from home - at almost the most northerly part of the island, so it was then time to turn round and head back. On the way, we attempted to find the square talaiot at Llenaire, but being on an obviously marked private road - the expensive looking automatic gates just happened to be open - up to an impressive building with flags flying (now known to be an exclusive hotel), we were put off by an extremely unfriendly dog, so gave up and just went home.
To be continued .... we're not even half way through our holiday yet!
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Browsing the Balaerics again ...
Last May, Beardy and I had thoroughly enjoyed exploring Menorca and its talaiotic remains, so the renewal of annual leave entitlements, a lack of cheap fags, and the desire for some sun, lead us to head to Mallorca at the end of April.
A couple of days were spent relaxing in the city centre in Palma, but then it was time to pick up the hire car, have the usual screaming rows about how to get out of the mad city traffic and onto the correct road, but eventually we checked into our hotel on the east coast of the island and almost immediately headed out in search of the local sites.
Less than 5 km down the road, that being the main road from Son Servera to Porto Christo, the (left) turn to Sa Coma also had a pink archaeological sign to the Talaiot de Na Pol. We pulled in just past the police station, and when I checked the rear view mirror, there, on a corner lot, was the circular talaiot.
It was built over a natural cave - here's Beardy climbing out
which appears to have had much rubble and rubbish tipped into it.
I can't remember if there was an information board about the site - legible ones are few and far between, we were to discover later - but the place felt unloved and ignored, despite its signage from the road.
The gathering clouds started to chuck rain down with some force, so we retreated to the car and set of to find the Poblat Talaiotic de S'Illot - via the scenic route through the resort, with the rain worsening every second, visibility down to almost nil, and with the roads rapidly flooding. It was actually only a couple of km further south, and again signposted from the main road - but we found it eventually squashed in with hotels and holiday homes on 3 sides.
The most prominent feature is the external wall
Yes - quite wet! There are numerous rooms and enclosures around a central monument but it's hard to distinguish what's what in the ruins.
The information board had been trashed, and the continuing downpour led us to beat a relatively hasty retreat to the novelty of a free bar ....
Sat April 29th
Ah. That'll be a hangover then. Remember, free tequila always hurts more than the stuff you pay for! The plans to explore the north east of the island were put on hold to allow recovery and eventually the rain stopped, so we headed out. South again - this time off the main road from Porto Christo to Porto Colom. Just past a zoo, there's a left turn to Cales de Mallorca - also with the pink sign to Hospitalet Vell. The first site that was clearly marked on our (AA) map as "ruinas prehistoricas"!
Only about 1km down the road, you can see what appears to be a huge wall to the right a way off the road, and soon after there's another sign and a layby in front of a gate where we parked up and walked up the track to the poblat.
Before you actually get to the wall you've seen, a signpost directs you to the left to the foundations of 3 naviforms with a small wood still separating you from the major part of the site.
Back round the wood and the sheer scale of what appeared to be a wall reveals itself as a rectangular monument
with the huge blocks of stone typical of the building style of the era.
The interior of this monument had inner walls added later.
Exploring round the back, a path leads to the left to a square talaiot with a series of rooms around it
and wooden steps to allow visitors to admire the central support pillar of the talaiot and the only known remaining spars which formed the ceiling and second floor - the last century hasn't been kind to the momuments on the island and many have been left to go to ruin, if not ruined intentionally.
Beyond the talaiot and surrounding rooms, there's a heavily overgrown area with more ruins extending into the woods.
With the sun shining, we decided to continue south to just beyond Porto Colom. We ignored the first road into the town, the PM 401, but took a more minor road to the left opposite a golf course. Our directions were based on coming from the town - the opposite route - but after about 2km we spotted some stones right on the edge of the road on the left
so parked up and went to explore.
Almost all the site - called Es Closos de can Gaia - is in the process of being excavated, but at a very slow rate (20 days a year apparently) and almost all was covered with black tarp and spikes
and we could only make out only one naviform in the uncovered area and that was becoming overgrown
The site is on the road out of Porto Colom towards S'Horta - the road narrows as it leaves the urban area and the roadside stones - a naviform - are clearly visible on the right hand side.
Feeling weary, and with sunset almost upon us, we headed back for a gentle evening in preparation for a full day of exploration.
And that day's adventures will be coming soon ....
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Megalithing in Menorca (Part 2 now I kind of know what I'm doing ...)
No, we'd not had enough. When you've enjoyed the first few days so much, why change the plan?
Sunday 15th
Stick a pin in the map and that's where we'll go today. Time to check out the north east. There's something about roads with big PRIVATE signs and then gates across them that makes you think an irate farmer will appear and shout "get offa my land!" (except in Catalan or Castillian and I won't understand it). We'd already worked out that Sa Torreta wasn't marked in the correct place on our map - but then Binissafullet hadn't been either, my map reading isn't that bad! - so British guilt about being caught in the wrong place got the better of us - OK me, but I was driving and had already put the hire car through a few assault courses - and we gave up. Later in the bar, the ex-pat who offered us an aerial archaeological tour in his plane (150 euros for up to three people, in Sa Musculera (sp?) in Binibeca, if anyone's interested - he owns the place I think but doesn't work there) confirmed had we just followed the standard "if the gate's closed, close it again" rules, no one would have minded. Beardy tried to persuade me to look again on the way to the airport at the end of the trip ....
So it became the day of the naveta.
We turned off the main road at the signpost to Biniac l'Argentina Occidental and followed it round, and round, and twisty, and narrow, and ended up back at the main road but at Biniac l'Argentina Oriental. Huh!? How did that happen? Never mind!
and climbed on in!
This is the better preserved of these two sites, carefully walled off in the middle of some development.
Then back to retrace our route, narrow twisty round and round. We pulled up opposite the last (or first if you're coming in) posh villa on the road, and Beardy leapt out and followed the path between the houses. Meanwhile, I pulled TME out of the boot, seeing as the map wasn't specific (one blob for Biniacs, so no, it's not really that excessive to have taken TME with us) and double checked - 400m from the junction. I walked back up a little way, and saw two gates, one of which had a blue menorca monumental bin just behind it - ah, that's where it's hiding!
The theme of the day continued with navetas d'enterrament do Rafal Rubi.
Norte
Indeed, sponsored by Spar!
and then Sud or Meridional
with its fabulous interior.
Monday 16th
What shall we do today? Stay local? Why not! The majority of the day was in fact spent scrambling round the rocks and remains of who knows what at the very pretty village of Sant Esteve. On the way there, we checked out the Talaiot de Trebalugeret, one of the oldest on the island according to its sign, and built on the remains of a pre-talaiotic construction.
One of the easiest to climb, there are the remains of the walls and pillars of a house at the top, though these are thought to have been added at a later date. The site has been enclosed by a modern wall, and houses are creeping up along one side.
Then on to the fabulous Talaiot de Trepuco with that taula
There's a shed on the car park, impying that when it's not siesta time, an entrance fee may be payable and information, ice creams and a range of jewellery may be available. I've got a thing about red poppies; in fact, if Beardy and I hadn't managed to arrange getting wed where we did (Castlerigg!) I'd requested a cornfield with red poppies just taller than the crop; I kind a like this place.
Tuesday 17th
Where have these last few days gone? Can it really be the last full day of the holiday? Time to reacquaint ourselves with the roads round the airport and off to the Talaiot de Torellonet Vell.
This site has 3 elements:
Torello 1 - the main talaiot
Torello 2 - a second ruinous talaiot in the adjoining field
Two fields away, there's the Circle of Torello - listed in TME as a possible taula sanctuary but more likely to be the remains of a house with pillars around a central courtyard.
We did try to ask permission to cross the fields to this last one, but a lack of basic Spanish lead to much giggling and gesticulating with a wonderfully weather beaten elderly lady at the nearby farm - it seems the one word we had in common was Torellonet!
From there, onto the Taliti de Dalt, under the care of Arqueomenorca in the drizzle (see, not a beach day at all!) a fabulous site with 2 caves, a spectacular taula sanctuary, a central talaiot and at least 2 if not more surrounding it, covered rooms .....
On the way there, Beardy had spotted something else, so we went back to investigate. Some guessing of which road to take and a thirteen point turn later (still no scratches on the hire car!), we found two unloved unlabelled off-map talaiots at Curnia. If you don't get to them by road, get a window seat in the plane - they are under the flight path north east of the runway.
The better preserved one:
and its ruinous companion
And there endeth the megalithing for this trip!
We could easily have spent longer - we missed so many places we've found out about since - a week well spent and somewhere to return to in the future.
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Yorkshire based stone searcher and Cope music fan with intentions to be tidy and green, and with a fondness for baking.
Married to Beardy - at Castlerigg - and honeymooned round Perthshire, Aberdeenshire, and the Western Isles.
Recently taken to European excursions.
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