Son Penya Petit Hotel

The restoration of the original farmhouse was light: stone walls left raw, original beams kept, lime-washed walls throughout. The new wing — a single-storey row of rooms around the pool — is built in the same local sandstone, with terracotta floors and shutters in the muted green Mallorcans use for window frames. Furniture is mid-century Spanish and Italian, picked piece by piece. The lobby reading room is one of the most quietly considered interiors in the interior of the island.

A little over twenty rooms, split between the original farmhouse and the new ground-floor wing. All are quiet, simply furnished and generously sized. The country rooms look onto the garden; the suites have private terraces and small plunge pools. Beds are firm, linens are heavy, and there is, deliberately, no television in any room.

A long unheated pool runs the length of the new wing, set into a lawn shaded by old olive trees. Around it: a kitchen garden that supplies most of the herbs and vegetables on the table, a small orchard, and a walled flower garden kept in the soft Mediterranean palette. Loungers are spaced widely; conversation, by unspoken rule, stays low.

Breakfast is a long, late affair in the courtyard or, on cooler mornings, in the old farmhouse kitchen. Dinner is a daily-changing menu drawn from the kitchen garden and the small producers of the Pla de Mallorca — honest Mallorcan cooking, well-made, paired with a short, mostly Spanish wine list. There is no buffet at any meal.

The interior of Mallorca, the part most visitors miss. The medieval town of Algaida is a ten-minute drive; the wine villages of Binissalem and Santa María a little further. Palma — its cathedral, its Sant Joan market, its small grid of Gaudí-influenced architecture — is twenty-five minutes by car. The Tramuntana mountains, the coves of the southeast and the salt flats of Es Trenc are all within forty minutes.