Passeig des Born takes its name from a wooden ball. Knights jousting along this street attached a small ball to the tip of their lances to avoid killing each other, and that ball was called the "born" in Catalan.

Until the seventeenth century, the torrent of Sa Riera flowed straight down the middle of what is now the boulevard, dividing Palma in two. To the left was the lower city, home to corsairs and petty merchants. To the right was the upper city, for the nobility, the clergy and the king at the Almudaina Palace. The torrent was diverted after catastrophic flooding, and the boulevard was laid out in its place.

Today Passeig des Born is Palma's main promenade, lined with trees, grand buildings and café terraces.

VoiceMap's tours walk the full length of the Born, tracing how a flood-prone torrent became Palma's most elegant street and mapping the social divisions it once enforced.