Deià

One road, and what it does to you

Mallorca's north-west coast is served by a single mountain road running the length of the Serra de Tramuntana, and Deià sits on it roughly halfway along. Arriving means driving that road. So does leaving, so does dinner in the next village, so does the run back to the airport. It is spectacular and slow — hairpin after hairpin above a drop — and through late winter and spring it carries a great deal of cycling, the range being one of Europe's favourite training grounds.

Two things follow. Parking in the village is genuinely scarce, so a hire car is a mixed blessing and somewhere to leave it is worth more than a balcony. And distance here is measured in minutes of concentration rather than in kilometres: Palma is under an hour away and feels a good deal further.

When to come

May, June, September and October. The Tramuntana holds its green well into early summer, and by late September the sea is still warm while the light has gone long and gold. July and August are hot, and a village this size feels every additional car.

Winter shuts a fair amount of it. Restaurants close, hotels take their break, and the walking is superb for anyone content to have the mountain to themselves.

Couples do best in the weeks either side of the peak. Evenings stay warm enough to eat outside, the terraces empty once the day visitors have driven back towards Palma, and the village returns to itself and whoever is staying in it.

Whether it is expensive

Yes, and scarcity rather than glamour is the reason. Deià is a protected village inside a protected landscape, which caps what can be built and keeps good rooms permanently in short supply. Nobody is adding a resort here, and demand arrives every summer regardless.

Cost then splits along a single line: whether you sleep in the village or near it. Inside, you are paying for the address, the stone and the view, and you walk to dinner. A few minutes along the road, in a farm estate or a house on a terrace, the same money buys considerably more space, and a car stops being optional. Eating divides the same way — village restaurants price like a small famous place, the market towns behind the mountain do not. Comparing current stay and experience options early matters here, because the inventory is small enough to sell out completely.

Where to stay

Splurge

A converted stone estate on the terraces above or below the village: an old finca with olives still working around it, a pool set into a level someone built by hand, the sea in the middle distance. Right for travellers who want the landscape to be the room's principal feature and do not intend to move much once they have arrived.

Mid-range

A small hotel, or a handful of rooms, inside the village itself — a stone house on one of the stepped lanes. Grounds are what you give up; what you gain is being in Deià in the evening, after the coaches have gone and the place belongs to itself again. Good for a first visit, and for anyone who would rather walk to dinner than drive to it.

Good value

A room or apartment in Sóller or Valldemossa, the villages either side, with Deià as a short drive. Both are larger, better supplied and cheaper, and one of them runs a wooden tram down to its port. You trade the address for the budget, and the coast road is the same in either direction.

What is worth the money

Walking comes first. The old routes between these villages predate the road and remain the honest way to read the terraces, built to farm a slope that had no soil until somebody put it there. The cove below the village, earned on foot. A day on the water, because this coast looks like a different place from beneath the cliffs. And the literary side, which is not invented: the churchyard on the hill holds the grave of the English poet who settled here in the twenties and stayed for the rest of his life, and the house he lived in is open to visitors.

At a glance