Palma

“Try Majorca,” Gertrude Stein told Robert Graves. “It is paradise... if you can stand it.” Graves checked into Palma’s Gran Hotel in 1929, and plenty of visitors have followed him across the bay since. Many give the capital an hour on the way to the beach: a coffee, a photo of La Seu doubled in the lake beneath its walls, and then the sand.

That lake is a stand-in. Until the 1960s the sea broke against those walls and the cathedral rose straight out of the water. Then engineers filled the shoreline for a coastal motorway, and the city dug the lake to give La Seu its reflection back.

VoiceMap’s self-guided audio tours lead you from the water’s edge into Ciutat, as Mallorcans still call it, past the Gothic Llotja, where ships once moored at the doorstep. Step inside La Seu to hear what Gaudí changed. In the old Jewish quarter, find out why Inquisitors walked the lanes on Saturdays looking up at the chimneys. And if lunch at Mercat de l’Olivar runs long, hit pause.

Put your earbuds in and take the long way back to the sea.