Banyalbufar Terraces
Landmark · Mallorca
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These dry-stone terraces (marjades) above Banyalbufar were cut into the coastal slopes by Moorish farmers in the 10th–11th century, along with an aqueduct irrigation system still used today. They once grew the Malvasia grape that made the town's wine famous, until phylloxera destroyed the vines in 1891; growers revived the variety in the 1980s, and Banyalbufar's Malvasia became Spain's first certified Malvasia in 2006. The terraces lie within the Serra de Tramuntana, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Ride the Ma-10 into Banyalbufar and the terraces are impossible to miss: thousands of dry-stone marjades stack the mountainside from the road almost down to the cliffs, planted with olives, oranges and vines. The Moorish engineers who first cut them shaped around 2,000 individual terraces, all fed by one connected system of stone aqueducts and cisterns that still carries water down from the mountain springs. Nowhere else on Mallorca has kept this much of the terraced landscape intact; only neighbouring Estellencs shares walls on a comparable scale. The Malvasia grape grown on these slopes once travelled well beyond the island, carried by Venetian merchants to trading warehouses as far away as Lviv, where it was kept as a prized delicacy.
What you see
Rows of unmortared stone walls stairstep down the mountain face in tight bands, some holding olive and orange trees reckoned to be over a thousand years old, all the way to where the terraces meet the cliffs above the sea.
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