Hotels in Montuiri

Montuiri

Montuiri is a hilltop village of some three thousand three hundred people in the middle of the Pla, the agricultural plain that fills the centre of Mallorca, roughly halfway along the Palma to Manacor road. It was founded as a royal town in 1300 under the charter of King Jaume II, part of the deliberate settlement of the island's interior, and it was laid out on a mound a hundred and seventy metres high, so the village is visible for miles across the flat land. The municipality borders Algaida, Llucmajor, Porreres, Sant Joan and Lloret de Vista Alegre, and its landscape of low hills and shallow valleys is as typical of the Pla as anywhere on the island. Just outside the village lies Son Fornes, one of the most important prehistoric sites in the Balearics, a talayotic settlement occupied for well over a thousand years and now open to visitors. Montuiri is one of the small handful of Mallorcan towns that still keep the ball dels cossiers, a ritual dance with medieval roots performed in the streets at the patronal festival. Until the 1960s this was purely a farming village, and the fields around it still carry cereals and almond trees; the vines disappeared after the phylloxera plague of the nineteenth century. Water is scarce here; the flats around the village are dry now where they were once marshland, drained by acequias into the torrent of Pina. The village sits where the island's main roads cross: Palma is around half an hour west, Manacor and the eastern coves half an hour east, and the beaches of the south are a similar distance. Accommodation is small-scale and rural, a couple of country hotels and an agroturismo rather than anything larger. For a traveller with a car who wants the whole island within reach and none of the coastal crowding, Montuiri is one of the best-placed villages on Mallorca.