Plaça del Mercat has been many things to the people of Palma: a marketplace, a bullfighting arena and, most grimly, the city's principal site of execution under the Holy Inquisition.

Founded in the eleventh century during Arab rule, the square served as Palma's commercial heart from the Middle Ages until 1950. The market stalls are long gone, but the square's darker history lingers in the stonework: the Inquisitor's Slope, which descends directly to it, was the route walked by condemned prisoners on their way to die. Jewish residents bore the worst of it, persecuted here for centuries until 1834.

The square is framed today by two of Palma's finest Art Nouveau buildings, including the early twentieth-century Grand Hotel, the island's first luxury establishment, designed by Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

VoiceMap's tours use the square to trace Palma's layered past, connecting its Moorish origins, its role as a site of Inquisition terror, and its reinvention as a modernist showcase.