The castle's advantage is the mountain itself. The Puig d'Alaró rises in near-vertical cliffs, and whoever held its summit could watch the approaches and defy almost any attacker below. People grasped this early: the fortress is first documented in the Moorish period, when Arabic chronicles knew it as Hisn Alarun, and it earned a reputation for holding out long after resistance elsewhere had collapsed. Enough survives to make the climb worthwhile — stretches of wall, the main tower, and the old entrance gate still stand against the weather. Near the top a mountain hostel, the Hosteria del Puig d'Alaró, offers a bed and a meal to those who make the ascent, and the reward at the summit is a view that runs clear across the island. On a fine day the sea itself glints on the horizon. For all its ruin, the place still feels defensible, as if it might yet turn back an army.

The castle's most enduring story is also its cruelest. In 1285, as the forces of Alfonso III of Aragon overran Mallorca, two local men — Guillem Cabrit and Guillem Bassa — refused to surrender the stronghold, holding it in the name of the king to whom they had sworn loyalty. Legend has it that when the fortress finally fell, Alfonso had them put to death by fire. The islanders wove the horror into defiant humour: the king's name, Alfons, echoes the Catalan word for a grouper fish, and the tale casts the two defenders as men who mocked their executioner to the last. Whatever the truth beneath the legend, Cabrit and Bassa became folk heroes — martyrs remembered in altarpieces and paintings in churches across Mallorca, two ordinary men who kept their word at the highest possible cost.

Life in Alaró itself moves at an easier pace. The parish church of Sant Bartomeu anchors the main square, the Plaça de la Vila; parts of it reach back to the fourteenth century, though most of what stands is a baroque rebuilding from the eighteenth. The square is the town's living room — the kind of place where the whole community seems to pass through in the course of a morning — and a small, cheerfully chaotic theatre sits a short walk away. Twice a year the streets fill for festivals: Sant Pere on 29 June and Sant Roc on 19 August. Scattered through the surrounding fields are talaiots, the stone ruins of the island's prehistoric villages, though most around Alaró have long since been ploughed over or robbed of their stone.

Alaró sits in the Raiguer, Mallorca's inland wine country, and the vineyards spread out below the castle's crag. The nearest bodega, Oloron, lies just a kilometre west of town, and the region's reds and whites reward anyone who lingers after the descent. Getting here is part of the pleasure: a train runs from Palma up the valley to Consell, where a short bus ride finishes the journey. For all the drama of the mountain above, the town at its foot is a quiet place — a working community that happens to keep watch beneath one of the most storied ruins on the island. The contrast is the whole appeal: bloodshed and legend on the summit, and at its foot a bodega, a market square, and the unhurried rhythm of a Raiguer town.