Menorca (Spain) > Reviews > Minorca: a place to unwind

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Small, quiet
Disadvantages:	Little shopping/culture

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I go to Spain frequently, but I had never been to Minorca before. I imagined it to be a smaller version of Mallorca, but this proved not to be the case. Mallorca is not only bigger, but it is more urbanised, more developed, more commercial and has a greater diversity of scenery. Mallorca is much quieter, and whilst tourism may be its major industry, it impinges on the island much less brashly than in its larger neighbour.

We booked a last minute break with Citalia (The Real Spain) staying in a two bedroom villa with pool on the south coast. All the villas we've ever stayed in in Spain before have been in the middle of nowhere (which we like), so I was slightly worried that this one was next to a hotel, as I feared for disturbed nights. I needn't have worried, though. Minorca doesn't seem to be the place for 24 hour partying.

The tourist resorts in Minorca seem rather suburban. They have, by and large, been built to isolate the Brits and Germans from the local population. Our nearest 'proper' town was Alaior, which was pretty and untouristy and had some excellent bars and cafes providing you had a reasonable command of Spanish and were happy to blend in. It certainly wasn't a place for organised bar crawls!

The biggest towns are Mao (or Mahon) and Ciudadella, though both are small and provincial. I prefered the old capital, Ciudadella, where you could buy vegetables in the market which had been pulled from the ground only hours before. One of the biggest pleasures of self-catering in Spain is to rediscover the quality of really fresh food that hasn't been doused in chemicals to give it a long shelf life in supermarkets.

The really distinctive thing about Minorca is the landscape, and human interventions on that land. It's flatter and scrubbier than Mallorca, with none of the spectacular mountain scenery of the north of that island, but it does have a 'parque natural' protecting much of the land, especially the coatline, which means that you can still find beaches which are like the Costa Brava must have been in the 1950s - beautiful, unspoilt, and almost empty.

Minorca is littered with Bronze Age archaeological remains, some of them like small Stonehenges, others more like Aztec ruins. Equally Aztec in appearence are the zigurats which appear in fields across the island, though these are more recent and were built as grain stores and animal shelters. What is surprising about some of the ancient sites is that they are scarcely developed for tourists at all, but just lie there, unprotected, giving visitors the unfettered chance to clamber all over them. It's a nice change from the 'don't touch' attitude in other archaeological sites.

A week was long enough for me. I'd just about taken enough reading along, the villa was pleasant and had a DVD player, the pool big enough to take a little exercise, and the food and drink was wonderful, but I missed the option of a day or so in the city looking at galleries and doing a little shopping. If you want to get away from it all, Minorca certainly provides the opportunity to escape the crowds, but if you want variety from a holiday, it is perhaps not the best choice.