Fornalutx
Landmark · Mallorca
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Fornalutx is a stone-built village high in the Serra de Tramuntana above Sóller, founded as an Arab farmstead and ringed by orange and lemon groves. It is one of Spain's officially recognised most beautiful villages, joining the Pueblos Más Bonitos association in 2017 after also winning a national prize in 1983. Its centre is pedestrianised with scarce, paid parking, better visited on foot than ridden through; it also lies on the quieter road toward the long climb up Puig Major.
Fornalutx has kept its medieval layout more completely than most of the valley: the parish church, dedicated to the Nativitat de la Mare de Déu, has stood on the square since the 13th century, its Gothic origins reworked over time into a Baroque interior of side chapels holding 17th and 18th century artwork. Next to the town hall, a squat crenellated tower from the same century, once part of the old Can Arbona house, was built to watch for raiders sailing over from the Barbary coast, who came for captives rather than plunder. A network of irrigation channels dug in Moorish times still carries water down through the terraces above the village. Sóller and Fornalutx shared one town council for centuries; two bids for Fornalutx's own council failed, in 1812 and 1820, before a third succeeded in 1837. The GR221 long-distance trail runs straight through the centre on its way across the Tramuntana, so as many people arrive on foot as by bike or car.
What you see
Plaça d'Espanya, the village's main square, is barely bigger than a courtyard: café tables sit on worn stone paving under the walls of stone houses with green-shuttered windows, and narrow, stepped lanes climb away from every corner of it.
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