Hotels in Vilafranca de Bonany

Vilafranca de Bonany

Vilafranca de Bonany is a town of a little under four thousand people in the Pla de Mallorca, on the main road between Palma and Manacor, bordering Felanitx, Porreres, Sant Joan, Petra and Manacor. Across the island it is known for one thing above all: melons. Melons have been grown in the fields around the town for generations; they are the subject of the September melon fair, and strings of them hung up to keep through the winter are still a common sight on the house fronts. Unlike most Mallorcan villages this one has a precise date of birth, though the land itself belonged long before to the Muslim district of Yiynau-Bitra. It was founded in 1620, when Pau Sureda Campfullos divided the lands of his barony of Sant Marti and set aside a part, Son Pere Jaume, on which to gather all the workers of the estate into a single settlement. The new settlement was made exempt from taxes to attract labourers, and that exemption gave it its name: vila franca, the free town. It worked: the name already appears as Villafranca de San Martin in Joan Baptista Dameto's history of the kingdom, published in 1633, and by 1685 some eighty new houses stood on the site. The town separated from Petra in 1813 to become a municipality in its own right, and until the reform of municipal names in 1916 it was called simply Villafranca; the qualifier de Bonany, taken from the sanctuary on the hill in neighbouring Petra, was added then. The Palma to Manacor road runs straight through it, which makes it a practical base: Palma and the airport are half an hour west, Manacor and the caves ten minutes east, and the beaches of the east coast around twenty-five minutes. This is a market town that lives off its own agriculture rather than off visitors, and it makes no attempt to look like anything else.