The Gran Hotel opened in 1903 as Mallorca's first luxury hotel, and its designer wasn't chosen lightly. Lluís Domènech i Montaner, one of the great names of Catalan Modernism and a contemporary of Gaudí, gave the building a facade that announced Palma's ambitions to the whole of Europe.

Painters, writers and aristocrats from across the continent arrived seeking Mediterranean light and a certain exotic charm. It was, briefly, exactly the kind of place where you expect something interesting to have happened.
The hotel is a hotel no longer. Today the building houses CaixaForum Palma, a cultural centre for exhibitions, concerts and conferences. The architecture, at least, remains undimmed.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours place the Gran Hotel within Palma's broader modernist story, connecting Domènech i Montaner's ambitions for the building to the city's drive to reinvent itself as a European capital at the turn of the twentieth century.