Palma De Mallorca

1. 123 BCE

   Rome Founds Palma at the Bay's End

   The Roman consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Balearicus landed with his legions in 123 BCE to suppress the Balearic pirates who had terrorized Mediterranean trade routes for decades. He founded two cities on the island: Pollentia in the northeast to serve shipping lanes toward Rome and Gaul, and Palma in the southwest bay, oriented toward Africa and Hispania. Palma was laid out in the Roman grid pattern — cardo and decumanus cutting through whatever Talaiotic settlement had stood there before. For this work, Metellus kept the island's name as his own surname, Balearicus, which tells you roughly how proud he was of the job.

2. 427 CE

   Geiseric's Raiders Claim the Harbor

   When the Vandal king Gunderic swept through Hispania in 427, Mallorca fell almost incidentally — a useful harbor on the way to North Africa. His successor Geiseric made it something more deliberate: a base for naval raids that reached Sicily, Greece, and ultimately Rome itself, which he sacked in 455 CE. Byzantine general Belisarius ended the Vandal kingdom in 534 and the Balearics returned to Constantinople's distant orbit, early Christian basilicas appearing where Vandal damage had been. Byzantine authority dissolved quietly through the 8th century without anyone quite noticing.

3. 902 CE

   The City Becomes Medina Mayurqa

   Issam al-Khawlani, a commander from the Emirate of Córdoba, seized the Balearic Islands in 902 CE — reportedly sheltering from a storm in Mallorcan waters during a pilgrimage to Mecca and deciding not to leave. The city was renamed Medina Mayurqa, and over the following three centuries it became one of the western Mediterranean's busiest trading ports. The Roman grid gave way to narrow winding streets, hammams, mosques, and irrigated orchards that occupied roughly a fifth of the city's interior. The Jewish cartographers and scholars who settled here would eventually produce some of the finest navigational charts ever drawn.

4. 1114

   Five Hundred Ships Batter the City

   In 1114, a Christian fleet of approximately 500 vessels from Pisa, Genoa, and the Catalan counties descended on Medina Mayurqa in one of the largest amphibious operations the medieval Mediterranean had yet seen. They captured the city, took thousands of prisoners, stripped it of portable wealth, and then withdrew when an Almoravid counter-force appeared on the horizon. The city was left severely damaged but still Muslim. The raid confirmed something both sides already suspected: this harbor was too valuable to leave in someone else's hands indefinitely.

5. December 31, 1229

   New Year's Eve Ends 327 Years of Islamic Rule

   Six soldiers scaled the walls of Medina Mayurqa on the last night of 1229, planted the banner of the Crown of Aragon, and ended 327 years of Muslim rule. King James I — 21 years old, already calling himself the Conqueror — had spent three months besieging the city after landing at Santa Ponça in September with 155 ships and approximately 15,000 troops. The man who led the scaling party, Arnaldo Sorell, was knighted on the spot. The great mosque was demolished within months, its site cleared for a cathedral, and the street names, language, and population changed within a generation.

6. c. 1232

   Ramon Llull: Born Into a Conquered City

   Ramon Llull was born in Palma around 1232, three years after James I's conquest, to a Catalan settler family who had arrived with the conquering army. He spent his early years as a courtly troubadour, married, had children, then around age thirty experienced a series of visions that redirected everything. Teaching himself Arabic and studying logic and mathematics, he invented a philosophical system he called the Art — a combinatorial diagram-machine for proving Christian doctrine through pure reason, which Leibniz examined 400 years later as a precursor to computational logic. Three missionary journeys to North Africa followed; he died around age 83, probably after being stoned in the Algerian city of Bougie; his tomb has been in the Franciscan church in Palma since 1448.

Who lived here

• Philosopher, Poet, Mystic · c.1232–1316

  Ramon Llull

  Born in Palma

  Born into the merchant class of a newly conquered Christian Palma, Llull spent his first three decades as a court poet before a series of visions of the crucified Christ turned him toward theology. He went on to create one of the first systematic philosophical logic systems, wrote the first major novel in Catalan, and died — according to tradition — stoned by a mob in North Africa at 83 while attempting to convert Muslims. His tomb is in the Basilica of Sant Francesc, two minutes' walk from where he was born.

• King, Conqueror · 1208–1276

  James I of Aragon

  Conquered Mallorca 1229; ordered La Seu built

  James I landed on Mallorca with 155 ships and 15,000 men on September 10, 1229 — then 21 years old, already king of Aragon, acting on intelligence from a Catalan merchant about the island's wealth. He took the city within four months, and legend holds he vowed during a fierce storm at sea to build a great cathedral if God spared his fleet. Whether or not the storm happened, construction on La Seu began that year. James also wrote about the campaign himself, in Catalan, producing the Llibre dels Fets — the first royal autobiography in European history.

• Architect · 1852–1926

  Antoni Gaudí

  Worked at La Seu cathedral 1904–1915

  The Bishop of Mallorca invited Gaudí to restore La Seu in 1904, expecting something conservative. Instead Gaudí moved the medieval choir out of the nave to open the sightlines, hung a wrought-iron baldachin above the altar, and redesigned the lighting to fall dramatically onto the presbytery — all inside a Gothic cathedral built five centuries before he was born. The result was either inspired or outrageous depending on who you asked, and locals debated it fiercely. In 2026, the centenary of his death, La Seu is running a full events programme in his honor.

• Painter, Sculptor · 1893–1983

  Joan Miró

  Lived and worked in Palma 1956–1983

  Miró first came to Mallorca as a child to visit his mother's family, and when he returned permanently in 1956 — aged 63 — it was partly to escape Barcelona and partly because the island's light suited the scale of work he wanted to make. His studio in Cala Major, Son Abrines, was designed by his friend Josep Lluís Sert; he worked there every day until the year he died. The studios are preserved exactly as he left them: paint-spattered floors, half-finished canvases, the particular quality of afternoon light he chose the building for.

• Painter, Sculptor · born 1957

  Miguel Barceló

  Born in Mallorca; created La Seu's Barceló Chapel

  Born in Felanitx, 60km east of Palma, Barceló became the most internationally prominent Spanish artist of his generation — known partly for the ceramic mural covering the ceiling of the United Nations Human Rights chamber in Geneva. His most intimate work is closer to home: the Chapel of the Sacrament inside La Seu, where he spent six years creating a landscape of sea creatures, stalactites, and skulls in ceramic that covers every surface. The bishop who commissioned it died in 2003 before the chapel opened, which gives the whole thing an appropriately melancholy weight.