The Balearics, three islands that agree on almost nothing

In the winter of 1838, the composer Frédéric Chopin and the writer George Sand took rooms in a former Carthusian monastery at Valldemossa, in the mountains behind Palma, hoping the Mediterranean climate would ease Chopin's tuberculosis. It rained for most of the stay, the locals were wary of an unmarried couple with an ailing house guest, and Sand later wrote an entire book, mostly complaining, about the experience. It is not the advertisement Mallorca's tourist board would choose today, and it is a useful corrective to the idea that these islands have always been about sunshine on demand. They have spent a very long time being several different places, often uncomfortably, and the differences are still there to see.

Mallorca: mountains behind the coast

Most visitors to Mallorca never leave the coastal resorts, which is a pity, because the island's spine is the Serra de Tramuntana, a mountain range so distinctive in the way farmers have terraced and watered it over the centuries that UNESCO lists the whole landscape, not just a monument within it, as a World Heritage Site. Walking routes thread between Sóller, Deià and Valldemossa itself, through olive terraces and along paths built for mule trains long before anyone came here for a beach.

Menorca: older stones, a fought-over harbour

Menorca is the quiet cousin, and the more ancient one. The island is scattered with talayots, navetas and taulas, Bronze Age stone monuments unique to Menorca, whose largest T-shaped taulas still puzzle archaeologists as to their exact purpose. UNESCO added the whole prehistoric landscape to its list in 2023, more than three thousand years after it was built.

Much later, Menorca's harbour at Mahón, one of the deepest natural anchorages in the Mediterranean, made it a prize worth fighting over. The island changed hands between Britain, France and Spain repeatedly through the eighteenth century; the British moved the capital from Ciutadella to Mahón for the sake of that harbour, and traces of the occupation remain in the island's gin distilling, an eighteenth-century British import that Menorcans took to and never gave up.

Ibiza: older than its reputation

Ibiza's modern fame rests on its nightlife, which is real enough and not this piece's subject. What tends to get lost is that Dalt Vila, the fortified old town above the harbour, is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its walls raised in the sixteenth century over a settlement the Phoenicians founded some two and a half thousand years earlier. The Phoenician and Carthaginian necropolis at Puig des Molins, one of the most important in the western Mediterranean, sits a short walk from streets that fill, a few hours later in the day, with an entirely different crowd.

A number of cruises calling in the western Mediterranean, among them Fred. Olsen's Discovering Italy with the Amalfi Coast, take in one or two of the Balearics on their way between the Spanish mainland and Italy, which suits travellers curious about the islands without wanting to commit a week to any one of them.

Choosing between them

If you want mountains and quiet walking, go to Mallorca and stay away from the coast road. If you want prehistory and a slower pace, Menorca rewards patience more than any other island in the group. If you want a genuinely old town alongside the reputation, Ibiza has both, and they are easier to keep separate than the brochures suggest. Ferries link all three, so a fortnight based on Mallorca can still take in a day on either neighbour; a cruise itinerary that includes two of the islands is, in that sense, simply doing the ferry-hopping for you.

None of the three islands much resembles the others, which is worth remembering before booking a single week and expecting to have "done the Balearics." You will have done one of them, and there will be two left to argue about with anyone who has been to a different one.