Sóller

At eight o’clock the stone benches around Soller’s main square are already warm. Waiters ferry coffee across the flagstones while the church clock strikes the hour and the first tram of the day clatters past, bell ringing like an impatient school bell. By half past, the air carries a faint sweetness—orange blossom drifting down from the groves that stripe the valley floor. It is a small daily miracle, and it happens whether there are five visitors or five hundred.

Soller sits thirty-five kilometres north-west of Palma, cupped between the saw-toothed Tramuntana range and a fertile flood plain planted with lemons, almonds and, above all, oranges. The valley’s nickname—“Valley of the Oranges”—is no tourist office invention; look up from almost any street and you will see citrus glowing between the houses like low-hanging lanterns. The crop once underwrote grand townhouses built by merchants who shipped fruit to France and returned with Art-Nouveau ironwork and a taste for modernist facades. Joan Rubió, a disciple of Gaudí, reshaped the parish church of Sant Bartomeu in 1904, giving the medieval shell its present caramel-coloured frontage and swirling rose window. Stand in the porch at noon and the stone glows the colour of burnt sugar.

Getting there is half the story

Most British visitors arrive on the narrow-gauge railway that has linked Palma to Soller since 1912. The journey takes fifty-five minutes, punches through thirteen kilometres of mountain tunnel and rattles across iron viaducts that drop away into pine-clad ravines. Carriages are varnished wood, windows stay open and the guard still clips paper tickets with a silver punch. At peak times the train fills with day-trippers; buy your return seat at Palma’s Plaza de España station to avoid a sweaty stand-up ride. If you hire a car, the Ma-11 tunnel costs €6.55 each way and spares you the old mountain road, spectacular but single-lane and merciless on clutch cables. Once in town, use the signposted underground car park (€6 a day); street width was designed for mules, not SUVs.

From the railway terminus an identical vintage tram continues to the coast, swaying three-and-a-half kilometres to Port de Soller. The fare is not cheap—€9 return—but the journey is half pleasure, half transport. Sit on the left for views back up the valley, then on the right for the first glimpse of the horseshoe bay. Fishermen still mend nets on the harbour quay, though their catch now competes with tripper menus of swordfish and chips.

Two places, two rhythms

Soller town and its port feel like siblings who took different career paths. The town wakes early, shutters clacking back at sunrise, bread queues forming at Forn de Sant Bartomeu before the school run. By ten the bars are serving tall glasses of café con leche and spiral ensaïmadas dusted with sugar. Walk Carrer de Sa Lluna, once the merchants’ high street, and you pass Modernista doorways, wrought-iron balconies and the faint smell of polished wood from inside the pharmacies and hardware shops that still close for lunch.

Port de Soller, meanwhile, operates on tourist time. The beach—coarse golden sand shoe-horned between two breakwaters—rents sun-loungers at €15 a pair and fills by eleven. A pedestrian promenade arcs around the bay, punctuated by gelaterias advertising eighteen flavours of citrus sorbet made from local fruit. British reviewers warn that August feels “Costa-by-coincidence”; visit in June or late September and you can still find a table for supper without a reservation, though dinner service still shuts down around 10.30 pm—astonishingly early by Spanish standards.

Walking off the pastry calories

The valley is threaded with stone-laid irrigation channels and Moorish staircases that climb through olive terraces. The shortest rewarded effort is the Barranc de Biniaraix: two kilometres of polished steps rising to the hamlet of Biniaraix, where the only traffic is cats. Allow forty-five minutes up, half an hour down, and carry water—there is no kiosk. For a full day, continue on the old mule track to the Cúber reservoir, then loop back via the col of L’Ofre. Winter snow can dust the summits above 1,000 m as late as March; in July the same paths shimmer with thyme and rosemary scent. Whichever route you pick, proper footwear is non-negotiable: Mallorca’s limestone grips like glass when dry and turns treacherous after rain.

Oranges, ice-cream and other edible souvenirs

Breakfast in the square can be as simple as pa amb oli—country bread rubbed with tomato, olive oil and a pinch of salt—or as indulgent as a bocadillo of sobrassada sausage and local honey. For tentative young eaters, several cafés will assemble a bacon-and-egg roll without batting an eyelid. Gelateria Mestre on Calle Cristòfol Colom turns valley citrus into a sharp, fragrant sorbet that even teetotal grandparents love. If you are self-catering, stock up before Saturday 2 pm; the small supermarket on Avinguda de Cristòfol Colom shutters on Sunday and the nearest out-of-town hypermarket is back in Palma.

When to come, when to stay away

April and May deliver daytime temperatures in the low twenties, blossom scent at full volume and the Fira de Maig food fair, when market stalls spill across the square selling spiced olives, mountain honey and the first apricots. October brings clearer light, still-warm seas and the grape harvest; restaurants roll out temporary tapes (tapas) of roasted peppers and botifarra sausage. August, by contrast, is hot (32 °C), crowded and short on parking. Hotels near the port double their rates and the wooden train becomes a sauna on wheels. If you must come mid-summer, plan hikes for dawn and siesta through the hottest hours; the municipal museum (Ca’n Prunera) is mercifully air-conditioned and houses a small but excellent collection of Picasso ceramics.

A few home truths

Soller is neither undiscovered nor cheap. A coffee on the main square costs €2.80, almost Palma prices, and the tram fare outstrips most urban bus networks. Wi-Fi can be patchy in old stone houses, and mosquitoes appear at dusk around the port—pack repellent if you fancy a sunset beer by the water. Most hotels lack pools; check before you book if a plunge matters. Yet the place retains a stubborn civic pride: shopkeepers still sweep the pavement before opening, neighbours greet the postman by name and the evening passeig—the slow pre-dinner circuit of the square—feels like a ritual rather than performance.

Leave before the last tram and you will hear the church bell strike eleven, the slam of wooden shutters, the final clatter of citrus crates being stacked for market. Somewhere up the valley a nightingale starts up, audible because traffic is thin and the sea, though only three kilometres away, is muffled by lemon leaves. It is a quiet worth travelling for—just remember to book your train seat home.