Palma Old Town Walk

On a walking tour of Palma, Mallorca’s historic old town, twenty ASM members discovered we knew less about our capital city than we thought.  For two hours professional tour guide Xisco Marqués gave us the real story behind Palma’s multi-layered history and how that shaped the city’s current form and architecture. We learned that some of our most important streets had been streambeds until a massive watercourse diversion in the 17th century.  We discovered how much Roman and Moorish construction is embedded in more recent buildings.  And for some of us, what we thought were facts have now been relegated to the realm of myth and urban legend.  Despite that, we still don’t know whether it’s fact or fiction that Palma was visited by a crocodile a few centuries ago.  Either way, that mammal rewmains memorialized in stone near the cathedral.   

Afterwards, many of us continued our historical experience by lunching on traditional Mallorcan fare at Celler de sa Premsa, a 68-year-old family restaurant in a former warehouse on one of Palma’s placas. Many of us are already looking forward to our next tour, in March:  Castillo San Carlos, a fort constructed to guard Palma’s harbor.