Hotels in Lloret de Vista Alegre

Lloret de Vista Alegre

Lloret de Vista Alegre, known to everyone on the island by its older name Llorito, is a village of some seventeen hundred people at the exact geographical centre of Mallorca. It is ringed by Montuiri, Sineu, Sencelles, Costitx, Algaida and Sant Joan, and reached along the old Sineu road rather than by any main highway, which has kept it out of the way of most visitors. The Arab farmsteads on this ground were shared out after the conquest by King Jaume I, and one of them, Benigalip, went to Ponc Olzet and five knights from Manresa who renamed it after their own city. By the fourteenth century it was outgrowing its neighbours, by the sixteenth it counted twenty families, and the founding of the convent of Our Lady of Loreto pulled the settlement together and replaced the name Manresa with Llorito. It stayed a dependency of Sineu until 1924, when it finally became a municipality in its own right and took the more formal name of Lloret de Vista Alegre. The village still works its land: cereals, figs and vegetables in the fields, poultry, sheep and pigs in the yards, with a handful of agroturismos added in recent decades. Its best-known day is Es Sequer, held on the first Saturday of September and built entirely around figs, the drying floors that give the festival its name, and every dish that can be made from them. The patron is Sant Domingo and the patroness the Virgin of Loreto, whose name the village carried for four centuries. Being in the middle of the island means everything is roughly equidistant: Palma, Alcudia, Manacor and the eastern coves are all around half an hour by car. Lloret is for travellers who want to stay somewhere entirely unstaged and drive out to the coast when they feel like it.