Artà keeps its Arabic inheritance in its very name. The town first appears in the written record in 1232, listed as Yartân in the Llibre de repartiment, the register of lands James I distributed after his conquest of the island; the word traces back to Gertan, Arabic for garden. People had worked this ground far longer than that. At Ses Païsses and Sa Canova stand the stone remains of the Talaiotic culture, settlements that flourished roughly between 1300 and 100 BC, and their coins, seals and vessels now fill the town's regional museum on the Plaça d'Espanya. Even the fortress on the hill is older than it looks: its core predates the island's Islamic period, and through the Moorish centuries it was known as the Almudaina — simply, the stronghold.

That old stronghold still crowns the town, though a church now stands where soldiers once did. A wall a meter thick, studded with nine towers and anchored by the great tower of Sant Miquel, wraps the pilgrimage sanctuary of Sant Salvador. Inside waits a carved and painted Romanesque figure of the Virgin, which tradition holds was carried to Mallorca by James I himself during the conquest. To reach it, pilgrims climb a Calvary staircase of 180 steps that ties the parish church at the foot of the hill to the baroque sanctuary of 1832 at its summit, 182 meters up. Layers of faith stack one atop another here: the town's late-Gothic parish church, finished in 1573, rose on the site of an earlier one consecrated in 1248 — which had itself replaced a mosque.

Artà occupies the wild northeastern shoulder of Mallorca, some 60 kilometers from the bustle of Palma. More than half the municipality is taken up by the Massís d'Artà, the highest and most compact block of the Serres de Llevant, crowned by Puig Morei at 561 meters. Its 25 kilometers of coast are the district's quiet marvel — dunes at sa Canova, the high rocky coves below Cap de Ferrutx, a string of small bays running out to Cala Torta, almost none of it given over to development. Ospreys and peregrine falcons nest in the sea cliffs; feral goats pick across the slopes. The hills themselves are harsher than they once were, scarred and thinned by repeated forest fires, and much of the northern reach now lies protected inside the Parc Natural de la Península de Llevant.

For centuries the people of Artà have made a living from a knee-high palm. The fan palm, Chamaerops humilis, grows wild across the country between Manacor and Artà, and its tough, pliable leaves are the raw material for llatra — a basketry tradition counted among the oldest crafts on the island. The rhythm follows the calendar. Leaves are cut in June and July and dried in the sun until they pale to a yellowish white, then split into strands, sorted, and softened before they can be worked. Skilled hands weave them into baskets, hats, bags and packs, sometimes layering dyed strands into intricate patterns; even the scraps are broken down into fiber for brooms and rope. On Tuesdays the finished work still turns up at the town's weekly market on the Plaça del Conqueridor.

Artà's fortunes have risen and fallen with the centuries. Between the 1500s and the 1700s the town grew and took up textile-making alongside its farming, until an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1820 killed some 1,200 people and set it back hard. The 1800s reshaped the map as well: Capdepera and Son Servera broke away to become municipalities of their own, and in 1880 the coastal settlement of Colònia de Sant Pere was founded on newly divided farmland. A railway reached Artà from Palma by way of Manacor in 1921, though the trains have long since stopped running — a line locals still hope to see revived. Tourism has since become the island's great industry, yet Artà, thinly settled and slow to build, has kept much of the unspoiled character its neighbors traded away.