Castell de Bendinat

Legend says the name comes from King Jaume I, who camped here after his 1229 conquest of the island and, having eaten well, declared 'Bé hem dinat.' The land is older than the legend: a Moorish farmstead stood on this ground from at least the 13th century, held by the Burgues d'Ença family from the 1400s. The Gothic-looking castle a rider actually sees only went up in the 1850s and 60s, after the fifth Marqués de la Romana, Pedro Caro y Álvarez de Toledo, married Elisabeth Szécsényi Zichy-Ferraris and decided the old farmhouse was not grand enough for her. Ownership kept moving after that: to the Truyols family, the Counts of Montenegro, in 1880, then through the Sureda, Fortuny and Montaner families across the twentieth century. In 1999 the accumulated furniture and paintings of those families went under the hammer at Christie's, in a sale record-setting for Spain. The last heirs sold the castle and its 700 hectares in 2008 to a foundation that ran it briefly as a museum.