Ah, Majorca! Fabled isle of orange groves and brilliant sunshine, of soft Mediterranean breezes and moonkissed golden beaches. Phooey. Balderdash. Balearics.
I have had severely mixed feelings about this place ever since a family holiday in 1981 when I celebrated my first ever trip to a continental resort by stripping down to my bathing attire and lying for 11 straight hours in the fiery light that beats down on Palma Nova like a hammer. Without putting on any sun screen.
You don't want to know the details. Let's just say that by the time the sun went down, my chest and thighs were the colour of a London bus. So excruciatingly bad was the burning that even to have a sheet laid on top of my naked, scalded body felt like being scraped to death with the sandpaper from Satan's toolbox.
As you can imagine, Palma Nova was a tremendously exciting place for a teenager with acute sunstroke. I spent three days in bed throwing up. But after that, things improved a lot. I began to have hallucinations. I would peer out of the window at my beloved family sporting themselves in the kidney-shaped pool and marvel at how like aardvarks they seemed.
The power of movement gradually came back. After five days, I could eat again. By the end of the first week, I was actually allowed to leave the hotel room, but only after sundown. Every night, when my sisters and stepmother had retired, my father and I would venture down to the local bar and play the Space Invaders machine for about four hours.
Some nights he would control the directional lever and I would be in charge of the firing. But other nights we would get bored with that and decide to push the boat out a bit. He would do the firing and I would operate the directional lever. By the end of the holiday, we were really very good at Space Invaders. (My father is now a Jedi knight.)
On the second last day of the trip, I was finally allowed to venture out into daylight again. Eyes blinking like those of a mole, I was somewhat crestfallen to note that the various teenagers I had befriended on the flight to Majorca had all been busy having fun, drinking sangria and getting off with each other.
Overcome with emotion, I spent the last night trying to get off with the tour guide, Valerie. I felt it was the only way I could redeem the trip. But Valerie wasn't having any of it. For some odd reason she seemed to feel that restless young males on holiday were a bit of a professional hazard, that despite my declarations I didn't really want a meaningful relationship, I only wanted to get her into bed. Nothing could have been further from my mind. Given the right circumstances, a telephone box would have done just as well.
In the 18 years that have elapsed, I have learnt a thing or two about life. This time, I was determined to enjoy Majorca to the absolute limit. So I brought two vital adornments to holiday enjoyment with me: a large bottle of sunscreen and my present wife.
La Residencia in Deià is an expensive hotel. It is chic. It is classy. It is the type of hotel where they knock on the door once every hour and come in to turn down the bedsheets. Personally, I am not at all used to this. The type of hotel I usually stay in, they knock on the door once every hour and shout "time's up, Mac".
This is a place that reeks of unending choice. Two swimming pools, four lounges, an art gallery, a gymnasium, a massage centre, a beauty salon, three restaurants and a lovely bar on the sunsplashed terrace where you can order cocktails so strong they get you drunk in five minutes. If you then want to sober yourself up in two, you just take a quick glance at the bill. So, that's handy.
La Residencia (or "La Rez", as it seems to be known to its admiring flock of largely English regulars) is part of Richard Branson's Virgin empire and is also the home of El Olivo, the most expensive dining place on the entire island of Majorca, if not in all Spain. The comprehensive menu features all kinds of heady delights such as salmon broiled and tuna seared and lobster lightly bored to death by the matre d.
Like many such joints all over the world, the staggering cost of eating is in inverse proportion to the efficiency of the service. " Mucha calma " is said to be the traditional motto of Majorcans, which roughly translates as "hey, relax", or, perhaps more accurately, "sod'em, they can wait". But I must record that the only place in Majorca we encountered this seeming indifference to our continued existence in the corporeal realm was at El Olivo. We ate there twice, and it happened both times and, as Oscar Wilde said, twice begins to look like carelessness.
Around us, the talk was of movie deals and model-ling contracts, and the bougainvillea-scented air rang with the buzzing and bleeping of mobile phones, as well as the thunderous rumbling of stomachs eagerly awaiting satiation. Indeed, a mobile phone would seem to be as much de rigueur at La Residencia as a thong bikini and a set of perfect choppers. You wonder, really, why some people go on holiday at all, so keen are they to keep in touch with the office.
But that is La Residencia for you. A tremendously lovely and unique place, there is no doubt, but it attracts, shall we say, a certain type. Perhaps it will give some indication of the predominant socio-economic profile of the clientele to say that the most disturbing sound I heard all week was the plaintive cry from the swimming pool, "Mummy, Mummy! Caspar's got a verruca!"
And I shall never forget the sight of all those suntanned faces peering up in shock from behind their Vogues and Wall Street Journals when a couple of exhausted-looking Australian backpackers wandered in off the street and had the temerity to dangle their proletarian tootsies in the deep end. I honestly thought one guest was going to summon a waiter and ask for a 12-bore.
The surrounding village of Deià, and the pleasant nearby towns of Andratx and Sòller, have all the commerce the heart could desire, but, unlike in the sprawling tourist resorts to the south of the island, nothing here hits you across the face. There are nice little restaurants, galleries and bars, pensiones and bodegas catering for all budgets; you get that rarest of feelings here, the sense of a region functioning in more or less easy relationship with the tourism that keeps it alive.
But scratch the surface and you find things are more troubled. In recent years, house prices in the area have rocketed, as foreigners have briskly bought up everything in sight. (It is a telling fact that Deià is simultaneously the richest town on the island and the one with by far the lowest rate of continuous home occupancy.) Geography, economics and almost baroque levels of governmental ineptitude have conspired to bring about a situation where it is impossible for a Majorcan to afford a house in the region anymore.
One night in a local bar, I overheard a conversation so emblematic of the problem and so toe-curlingly embarrassing that I could barely walk home afterwards. (At least that's my excuse.) The friendly barman was explaining how his fiancée and himself were extremely worried about where they would live after their marriage. Each of them had been born and raised in Deià but they simply couldn't afford to buy a home there, there was no point in even fantasising about it. "Exactly, exactly," a sloshed London yuppie was fervently agreeing. "I really know how you feel. Every time we come here, we try to buy a house. But it's 70 mill pesetas for a total fucking dump, and I mean, you don't even get a parking space for that!"
Poor, well-meaning Robert Graves probably had a hand in all this. He fell in love with this gorgeous place, lived and wrote here for many years but is no longer to be seen due to the highly technical business of interment. His affectingly simple tomb - "Robert Graves, Poeta" - is in a quiet corner of Deià village church, which stands on a steep hill overlooking the kind of vista you only see in dreams or television commercials.
The azure sea, the broad, irregular stone terraces snaking up hills that rise from gentle, sloping pastures to pine covered mountains, speckled with battered little olive trees growing at every possible angle to the ground except the strictly vertical. The sheer tropical lushness of the vegetation, the trickle of water over the rocks, the great swaths of myrtles and caper bushes, woodbine and asphodels, lemon and orange groves everywhere you look. That extraordinarily pervasive aroma of citrus and honeysuckle on the hot, sweet air late at night. You can see why this is the kind of place people have wanted to write poetry about.
Long before Graves' time, the surrounding region had become something of a haven for poets, musicians, novelists and arty types. The centre of it all used to be Valldemossa, a thriving market town 25 kilometres north of Palma, nestled neatly around a former Carthusian monastery which is now a vast souvenir shop with a small museum attached. The great Frédéric Chopin himself lived here for a while, with a girl whose name was George. (It was the first recorded instance in Majorcan cultural history of real life imitating a Famous Five novel.)
Chopin's girl was George Sand, the noted Parisian novelist, cigar-smoker and controversial trouser-wearer. Ms Sand believed in free love, revolutionary socialism and the immediate and preferably violent destruction of the Catholic Church, so it is perhaps not much of a surprise that the God-fearing local peasants regarded her with something like suspicion.
Majorca is a place where religious iconography is absolutely ubiquitous, where the Virgin Mary appears on the labels of wine bottles and matchboxes; where every single town you visit has tiled images of the local saint adorning the walls of the houses; where to this day you see people old and young make the sign of the cross when they pass by a church. (George would have found this difficult to do because she would have been trying to chuck a petrol bomb into it at the same time.) No, the locals didn't take to George one bit and there wasn't too much love lost on George's side either. Nor was she the kind of gal to pull her punches.
Her little-know memoir, A Winter in Majorca, is almost amusing in its splenetic hatred for all things Balearic. A Majorcan, she writes, "is entirely without scruples, more a savage than a man...nothing but a monkey, a creature clothed in human form, vegetating in an aimless existence. He would eat his fellow-man without remorse, were that the custom of his country. He cheats, extorts, lies, insults and plunders without scruple.
A foreigner is not a fellow-man for him. He would never rob his neighbour of so much as an olive; for in God's great design of things, those human beings from across the sea exist only to bring small profits to the Majorcans...They are the most stupid people in the world."
A tad bizarrely, she reserves a special loathing for Majorcan food, perhaps the most inoffensive cuisine on the face of the planet. "Twenty dishes appear on the table, looking like any Christian food: but take heed, for they are hellish concoctions brewed by the Devil himself...Their [olive] oil is so vile that every house, man and carriage on the island and even the very air of the fields becomes impregnated with its stench.
Since it is an integral part of their cooking, the fumes rise up two or three times a day from their homes and the walls are steeped in it. If, deep in the country, you lose your way, you need only sniff the air, and if a rancid stink wafts past your nostrils on the wings of a breeze, you may be sure to find a house hidden behind some rocks or a clump of cacti. And if in the wildest and loneliest areas this stench pursues you, look up and you will see some hundred paces away, a Majorcan on his donkey."
Wonderful stuff. But Valldemossa has had perhaps the best revenge on Madame Sand and her consumptive, ivory-tickling boyfriend. Today, every souvenir stall, burger shop and tapas bar in the town has on offer an attractive selection of George 'n' Chopin memorabilia: busts, T-shirts, boxer shorts, key rings, shaving mugs and - my own personal favourite - little plastic pianos embossed with Chopin's miserable face that play Y Viva España when you open their lids.
All in all, northern Majorca has a lot to recommend it. Far enough from the fleshpots and discobars of the south to guarantee peace for the soul and a good night's sleep, it is still near enough to the capital to be accessible in 40 minutes from Palma airport.
Once you get there, there's all the wildness and isolation you can handle, long walks, deserted coves, mountain tracks, verdant valleys. The only problem is those damn house prices, really. It's just not fair, when you think about it.
• Joseph O'Connor's latest novel, The Salesman, is published by Vintage Paperbacks at £5.99.
The practicals
Airtours (01706 260 000) and Virgin Sun (01293 432 100) do sesat-only charter flights between Palma and a variety of British airports. Expect to pay around £200/£250. Most travel agents, such as Going Palces and Thomas Cook, offer cheap packages. It is essentail to book accomodation as the island has a high-season occupancy rate of 98.7%. Standard rooms at La Residencia (00 34 97 1 63 90 11) cost around £200 a night on B&B basis, with a minimum 5 night stay.
