Hotels in Selva

Selva

Selva is a small inland town thirty-two kilometres from Palma, on the edge of the Raiguer where the plain gives way to the Serra de Tramuntana. It is the head of a municipality of five separate settlements with a little over four thousand people between them, and three of those settlements matter to anyone booking here: Selva itself, Caimari on the mountain slopes, and the hamlet of Binibona. The town appears in the Llibre del Repartiment of 1232 as the alqueria Xilvar, within the district of Inca; etymologists are divided between the Latin silva, "forest", and a pre-Roman root, with no settled answer. Its landmark is the Gothic parish church of the thirteenth century, dedicated to Sant Llorenc, reached by a broad flight of steps that gives the town its profile from the plain. Local lore holds that the highest point of the town stands at exactly the same altitude as the square at Lluc, high in the mountains to the north. Inca, the market town of the interior and the centre of the Mallorcan leather trade, is the immediate neighbour and a few minutes away by road. Selva makes a practical base for the Tramuntana without paying mountain-village prices: the pass road to Lluc, the Gorg Blau reservoirs and the north coast are all within half an hour. Accommodation here is overwhelmingly rural: converted farmhouses and small stone hotels, with nothing built on the scale of the coast. The town keeps a working agricultural calendar, and the November olive fair at Caimari and the international early-music festival held in the same weeks both fall inside the municipality. Travellers who want to see Mallorca as its residents know it, with the mountains twenty minutes uphill and the coast forty minutes down, will find Selva unusually well placed.