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East Enders’R’Us

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Tuesday 8 October. We had a car and a driver booked for a 4-hour slot from 10am. Jane had formulated a plan about roughly what might be achieved in that time, and so we prepared ourselves for some relentless tourism around the sights of the east end of the island. Angel, our driver, swished us around the island in his big Merc and – surprise! – I took lots of photos. As ever, I’l try not to bore you with too many of them – but it was an interesting day.

Our first port of call, almost literally, was a fishing village on the north coast called Fornells. This is a genuine fishing village (see later for my reason for the word “genuine”) and it’s very pretty. You can tell it’s genuine from the fishing boats in the foreground here

which are called “llauts”, with the characteristic Spanish pronunciation of the ll as something between a y and a j – therefore possibly the derivation of the English word “yacht”? Anyway the harbour has a great panorama.

Fornells is also well-known for having a tower which was part of the defensive arrangements against various invasions (poor old Menorca has had its share of invading hordes – Romans, Turks, Christians, Moors, British Empire, they’ve all had a go).

We had originally planned to visit a lighthouse right at the northern tip of the island, but decided against on the grounds of time – wisely, as it turns out. So our next trip was to the mountain at the middle of the island, called Mount Toro, which offers some superb sweeping views over the whole island.

There’s also a hermitage at the top

inside which there are some remarkably intricate tapestries – very unusual for Menorca in our limited experience so far –

and, outside, a succulent which has grown out in a very strange way!

The next two stops on our route were a couple of Talaiotic sites. First, Torralba, a site which promised a hypostyle (an underground chamber with the roof supported by columns). It’s most obvious feature was a vast Taula.

and it had other typical components of a Talaiotic settlement, too, and a demonstration that showed that, whilst not Inca standard, their “Cyclopean” (i.e. giant) wall building from great chunks of masonry was pretty skillful.

We were just beginning to think we’d been diddled on the hypostyle when we came across it, and very impressive it is, too.

The next site was called Rafal Rubi, and its USP was a pair of “navetas” – two-storey burial chambers which have a inverted boat-like shape.

I was even able to get into one of them to take some photos.

In the one above, you can see at the far end that there were indeed two storeys to the chamber.

Our final port of call was a “pretend” fishing village, called Binibequer Vell, designed by Spanish architect Antonio Sintes in 1972. It has the same sort of feel about it as Portmeirion, although its architecture is all of one piece – but it’s artfully designed to look pretty and to attract holidaymakers.

And then it was time to rush back to Mahon, as it was the end of our four hours with Angel. We went down to Mahon harbour for a Nice Lunch at a posh place called Minerva, which featured a gastronomic menu including, as dessert, cheese-flavoured ice cream, which is better than you might think.

Bursting at the intestinal seams after that, we tottered up to the museum, which is housed in a Franciscan church. The church itself is a recommended sight and happily, it was open and so we took a look inside.

As well as some nifty trompe l’oeuil, there is some magnificent stonework in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception.

After the church, we went next door into the museum and discovered, to our delight, that entry was, for some reason, free. So we first wandered round the handsome cloisters

and then went into the museum proper, which basically used two storeys to tell Menorca’s story. The first floor was, for us, the more interesting, as it dealt in some detail with the pre-history, meaning the Talaiotic culture. The display included some models of the latest thinking about how the various structures probably looked – Taula, Settlement, Naveta and Talaiot.

So now we know what they would have been like had they not been raided for their stone over the centuries….

The final task for the day was a quick potter along the upper walkway by the water, to see if the town looks nice illuminated. It does.

That’s it for today, and we haven’t got a formal plan for the morrow. We could go for a hike, but with the limited bus service now we’re out of season, it’s a faff, so we may end up just being idle. Who knows? Not us, not yet….

Blow the wind northerly

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Monday 7 October. We decided to tick a few more local boxes – see the cloisters at the local Carmelite church, visit the museum, attend the daily organ recital at the cathedral, that kind of thing.  As we walked out of the hotel, it was clear that there was a very, very blustery wind today, which meant that items such as any bit of furniture outside cafes not chained down was blown around a lot; no umbrellas were up; and all the lovely touristy things like glass-bottomed boat trips were orff!

The first item on the agenda, though, was to walk along Cami D’Es Castell again in search of something we’d completely missed the day before – a windmill, called the King’s Mill – Moli del Rei.  When we found it, you can understand why you have to know it’s there, otherwise you’ll walk right on by.

GOB is the Balearic Group of Ornithology and Defence of Nature; “Conscientious Ecology” is their strapline, and it has adopted the mill.  Entry is free, they have a pleasant exhibition room

and when you finally get to the top, you get a nice view over Mahon

including one where you can see the windmills of the future on the horizon.

It’s impossible to see the mill itself from any of the nearby streets, so we fossicked about until we found a car park from which you can actually see it.

After that, we tried to get into the museum, but it’s closed on Mondays, so instead we went to the Carmelite Church, which has a cloister courtyard

now the scene of a market, which was quite busy on a Monday morning.

We went back later so I could get a less crowded shot of the inside of the cloisters

as well as to buy some of the local gin, which we’d seen attractively framed on the wall of a coffee shop

the gin being available in the large modern supermeercat supermercat  to be found on the floor beneath the cloister market pictured above!

You’ll have seen in an earlier post that the cathedral, Santa Maria, has an impressive organ; every weekday there is a recital at 1pm for half an hour, so we thought we’d drop in on that.

The organ is at the back of the church, so seated people face away from the organ.  To counter that, a screen had been set up which we guessed (correctly, as it turned out) would replay video of the organist as he played.

This was all being set up by a dodgy-looking, long-haired geezer (we’d spotted him earlier in the cafe over the way, the one with the framed gin bottles) who was feeding cables down from the balcony and setting up the projector and generally looking like a typical AV support chap.  It turned out he was the organist, as, after setting things up, he sat down and started playing:

It was all very interesting to watch.  The organ makes a very impressive sound, almost all of it in tune, but it has to be said that the acoustics of the church swallow up any delicacy of execution and it just makes a wall of organ-type noise.  But we were glad to have seen the proceedings.

After that, there was nothing for it but to be blown to pieces walking about trying to find a restaurant for lunch.  Monday appears to be the day that all decent restaurants close, so we settled on a place called Pierro’s, along the waterside, which bills itself as selling pizza, but also does pasta, paella, curry, burgers and sandwiches as well as your standard selection of fish and meat dishes – truly a multi-purpose eatery.  I had a burger (after all, I’ve had nothing but fish for days!) and Jane tried a noodle paella, a concept we’d heard mooted by our friend Deborah in Barcelona.  It turned out to be really rather good, much to her surprise.

Lunch over, we sought a further tourist box to tick – the “Little Mermaid of Mahon”, Sirena Mô.  Rather like her Copenhagen sister, she’s easily missed, as we’d walked past her several times since arriving in Mahon.  But we did find her, just along the road from the restaurant – at exactly the wrong time for photography.

Then it was back to the hotel for some admin time (e.g. paying for tomorrow’s adventure, which you’ll have to wait to read about, obvs).

Later on, just as the sun was going down, we set out with a couple of objectives:

  1. Get Jane a pair of shoes in the Menorquina style, called “Abarcas” – the market under the Carmelite church had a boutique that she thought worth exploring;
  2. Get me some photos of Mahon as the light faded, given that we knew that Mô had her own private street light which might enable a worthwhile shot.

On 1. we had success, but in two stages.  The boutique had plenty of shoes in the style that Jane was after, but nothing in her size or the right colour.  So Google Maps found us a street which appeared to have very little other than shoe shops, although they all seemed to have really fancy shoes, whereas Jane was after something much more traditional (and cheaper).  However, one of them, which seemed to sell mainly handbags, had just what Jane wanted, mirabile dictu, and only twice the price of the market boutique.

With that box ticked, we headed down to the harbour, and guess what was the first shop we passed on the waterfront?

Yes, a shoe store specialising in abarcas, all neatly arranged by size and everything! (But it wasn’t worth going in, as Jane had what she wanted.)

We moseyed gently out towards Mô, and by the time we got there, the light was about right, so I took some shots of her under her own private sun.

and then we headed back to the town proper in the hope that there would be some nice shots of illuminated buildings.  There are indeed some good shots to be had, but not from the waterline, as boats’ masts get in the way.  We might try from the upper walkway on another evening to see if we get better results.  Here’s what I managed this evening.

It’s been a pleasant day, despite getting blown to buggery by the strong winds – some small but unexpected and therefore delightful nuggets during the day.  Tomorrow we have booked a driver to take us around the eastern bits of the island, so we’ll be in full tourist mode.  I’ll try not to bore you with too many photos, but I can’t promise anything at this stage, you understand…

 

Then and Maó*

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Sunday 6 October. One hears a lot about Menorca – it’s nicer than Mallorca, it’s quieter than Mallorca, it’s more old fashioned, etc. etc. All of these are certainly true, but one thing I hadn’t known about until we arrived here a couple of days ago is that Menorca has a significant Megalithic history, or perhaps pre-history is more accurate. All over the island are dotted some 1,500 megalithic sites, also called Talaolitic sites.

Conveniently, one such, called Trepucó, is just a couple of kilometres outside Mahon, so it seemed a perfectly sensible idea to include that as part of a day’s exploration to see how my foot is standing up (sorry) after yesterday’s Incident. So we set off, passing a wonderful piece of defensive graffiti.

(Attack is clearly the best form of defence!)

The sites are well-signposted.

and so we walked south of Mahon, past a rather bizarrely-located boatyard

(I suppose if you’ve got to move big boats 20 metres from the water, a couple of kilometres isn’t too much more trouble).

We spent a happy hour or so pottering around the site, which is well-documented via noticeboards explaining what you’re looking at (and also confessing that there are many unknowns about the constructions, such as what they were actually for). There are central mounds called Talaioti

(some filled, some hollow, all made with some pretty sizeable lumps of stone, hefted about several hundred years BC and causing later inhabitants to believe that they must have been made by giants; hence one might find the name “Cyclops” included in some of the descriptions),

Taula (“tables”),

standing stones with a horizontal stone across the top – this one was hugely reminiscent of “2001, a Space Odyssey”, except it wasn’t black, but the dimensions felt right – and other indications of civilisation, such as excavated areas which could have been rooms

arches in walls

and so forth. Trepucó’s location, overlooking Mahon, made it an ideal defensive location and in fact the site was used as such during a siege in the 18th century when the Duke of Crillon augmented the site with more modern defensive walls. I hope to go back with a drone to get my own photo, but for now, here’s one they prepared earlier, in which you can clearly see the formation of the more modern walls.

There’s a huge amount more to see on the island, megalithically speaking, and maybe we will – who knows what the rest of our week here will contain?

Trepucó features in a walk described in the Landscapes of Menorca book, so we used that route to carry on back towards and then around Mahon – and A Nice Lunch – past an equestrian centre, where they had some dramatic training going on (which might be a local speciality, going by the main building there)

a cave (with goat),

an example of wild capers growing on a rock face,

and some allotment-type areas

(one of which included an aviary featuring some very loud tweeting).

and a lovely carpet of morning glory.

The walk took us down to the waterside in Mahon, with a good view across the water of Golden Farm, once the home of Admiral Lord Collingwood, C-in-C of the British fleet (and rumoured to have been the site of a liaison between Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton in 1799).

and then we carried on back to the town and rambled around looking at some sights we’d seen before (see Friday’s entry) and some we hadn’t such as Cami d’Es Castell, a charming, but narrow, street with a lovely line of trees down the middle.

and some unusual arrangements to help with sorting out the wiring!

Lunch was a fine affair, at a posh-looking and old-fashioned-feeling restaurant by the waterside called Jàgaro, where Jane finally got her scorpion fish, although it was somewhat bizarrely accompanied by a fried egg on the chips.

And then it was time to stumble back to the hotel so I could process some photos and describe the day for your delectation. My foot seems to be OK, if severely bruised, and so, given that today’s peregrinations covered 8 miles, we might well go for a walk along some of the Cami de Cavalls, the track that goes right around the outside of the island. There’s a good candidate section on the south side which looks promising. Let’s see how we go….

* idea for the title is © the distaff side