Majorca Travel Guide: Tranquility Among Olive Groves | What to do

It's a bright, open-air summer day in Mallorca, a Balearic specialty, and I'm walking with my husband and son Leo through the ancient hillside olive groves that surround La Residencia Hotel. The gardens are bathed in sunlight as rich and shiny as the oil they produce, the silver leaves of the trees glisten and smile in the hot breeze. (If this were my permanent address, I'd laugh too.)

We spot some of the property's occupants—two adults and a baby—relaxing in the moving shade, fancifully patterned like a Joan Miro canvas. (Miro spent his later life in Mallorca, and 33 of his original works of art adorn the hotel.)

Tucked between the Tramuntana mountains and the breezy Mediterranean Sea, a trio of donkeys ambles uncomfortably towards us, seemingly living at the Belmond Hotel in Deia, an artists' village. – kidney like a flamenco skirt. I also wonder (there is a lot of wonder and wanderlust here) if there is anything more satisfying than stroking the sun-baked velvet ears of a donkey on a Mallorcan hillside.

When Leo was a toddler, we read more of William Steig Caldecott's masterpiece Sylvester and the Magic Pebble than olive trees in Mallorca. (About 750,000 trees, which turns out to be the best guess. But I'll get back to the olive population later.) The book is a heartbreaking and heartwarming story about donkey parents and their only donkey son, Sylvester. For a moment when I see this baby donkey, I feel like I'm meeting a real-life Sylvester.

When I share this observation with Leo, pleased with myself, he (naturally) disagrees: “I feel like we're in Puss in Boots,” he says, referring to the 2022 film starring Puss. voiced by Antonio Banderas.

The Deia is a honey-colored, red-tiled, 17th-century stone architecture, with bouquets of paintbrushes on the windows, green shutters shaded by Spanish island palms and cypresses. This picaresque looks like a fairytale location straight out of a Dumas novel or DreamWorks production, where you spot a ginger cat slurping down a bowl of gazpacho at a local outdoor cafe.

If I mention a few children's book characters, it's because the place – with its sunshine and beauty – feels so cinematic and poetic. It takes about 15 seconds to understand why artists have long flocked to Deia to settle, why the poet Robert Graves moved here in 1929.

Graves fought in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, where he was badly wounded, and moved to Deia to escape the shell shock that had plagued him since the war. For 56 years he lived and planted olive trees in his garden for exercise.

“Perfect silence reigns,” he once wrote of the Mallorcan countryside. Graves' eldest son, William, wrote a memoir about growing up in Deia, calling it “Wild Olives.” Every story in this part of the world seems to revolve around olives.

Spain produces about 50 percent of the world's olive oil, fueling a growing trend in oleotourism (olive oil tourism). Olive cultivation in Mallorca dates back to Roman times. Every Mallorcan finca or hotel seems to insist on hand-picking its groves, with Arbequina, Empeltr and Picual olives among the local varieties growing.

In Mallorca, people talk about terroir and flavor profiles and tasting notes the way oenophiles talk about wine about olive oil. Oleophiles can finca-hop over Picual olives (which taste bitter and yield a robust oil) and discuss how Miles waxed poetic about the Pinot Noir grape in Paul Giamatti's The Side..

The fruit (yes, olives) from the groves of La Residencia is harvested there and then cold-pressed in the neighboring village of Soller. It is used in the hotel's spa treatments and its restaurant, El Olivo, named for the building's 17th-century olive oil mill. I told you all the roads here end with olives.

After our meeting with Donkey, I pop into El Olivo, whose menu celebrates zero kilometer food. The moment chef Pablo Armando Aranda Moreno introduces himself, he shows me a bottle of homemade olive oil, and it would be rude not to introduce me to a family member in the room.

He picked up the bottle from the table and said, “This is my baby!” he announces with fatherly pride. “It's soft and round,” he told me, explaining that the olives, shaped by the soil, the climate, the environment, were harvested miles away, close to the sea.

He gives me a piece moreno — a traditional bread, dense, aromatic and slightly sweet, made from xeixa, a type of wheat grown on the island — on top of ramallet (Mallorcan winter tomatoes). Adding a generous and theatrical drizzle of oil, she said, “Oh boy!” says.

“Do you taste red fruits and forest?” he asks me. I'm not sure if it does, but it's sunny and green and unique, and makes me want to buy supermarket EVOO forever.

As I was leaving the restaurant, I met a hotel employee who asked how my day was going. I made it through the groves, met donkeys and tried some extra virgin olive oil – it couldn't have been better. But that's it maybe obviously. “Did you go to the donkey picnic?” he asks me. I didn't.

It's perfect in the spring, he says, when the valleys are full of flowers and the citrus and almond trees are in fragrant bloom. You can enjoy a Majorcan picnic among the olive groves, walking in the hills. “You haven't lived until you've walked with donkeys,” he tells me. I'm inclined to believe him.

Olivia Stren stayed as a guest at La Residencia, a Belmond hotel, and did not review or endorse this article.