Mallorca is the giant, and its capital, Palma, wraps a working harbour and a historic core around streets best explored on foot. Palma alone can hold a visitor for days, its cathedral looming over a marina crowded with masts. Ibiza pairs a walled fortress town with the pedestrianised port that made its nightlife famous the world over. Menorca is the quiet one, holding the archipelago's UNESCO Biosphere Reserve — a landscape of dry-stone walls and prehistoric monuments. Low-lying Formentera trails off to the south like an afterthought of white sand. Two languages carry the conversation across all of them: Catalan, spoken by most residents, and Spanish, which virtually everyone speaks fluently. In the tourist towns you will also catch English, German, French, and Italian traded across café tables — the accents of a place the whole of Europe treats as its summer garden.

There is only one railway line worth taking for its own sake. From Palma's station on the Plaça d'Espanya, an antique wooden electric train sets off into the Serra de Tramuntana, rattling over viaducts and through tunnels until it reaches Sóller, a village folded into a valley of citrus. Everywhere else, the islands run on boats. Roughly 150 ferry crossings a week connect Mallorca to the mainland alone, and a modern night boat from Barcelona covers the distance in about eight hours while you sleep. In Palma itself, the smartest way to arrive is to leave the car in a municipal park, where the city hands you a free bicycle to explore the centre until you come back for it. Sailors know the archipelago as a maze of fine anchorages, though the best-protected coves fill early with mooring buoys, and dropping anchor onto the protected seagrass meadows below can earn a stiff fine.

Mallorcan cooking wears its ingredients boldly. Sobrassada, the island's soft cured pork sausage, glows a deep red from generous amounts of sweet paprika, spreadable and beloved well beyond the Balearics. Spread on bread, it is the taste of a Mallorcan afternoon. The ensaïmada, a coiled spiral pastry, takes both its name and its tenderness from saïm — lard — and is often filled with a sweet squash preserve the locals call angel's hair. And then there is the oil. Mallorcans guard their gnarled, centuries-old olive trees with something close to reverence, and the extra virgin oil they press is prized precisely because so little of it ever leaves the islands. To taste it here is to taste something most of the mainland never gets to try.

When it is time for a digestif, two bottles come out. Palo is dark and bittersweet, brewed from the fruit of the carob tree; mixed with soda water it becomes an aperitif, and islanders have long taken it as something close to medicine. Hierbas is its herbal cousin, an anise liqueur steeped with a tangle of Mediterranean herbs and poured sweet, dry, or somewhere in between. Both are local through and through, reached for by residents far more often than by the tourists who pack the coast. Order either at a village bar as the evening cools, and you taste the paradox of these islands whole. This is a place the world flies to for its nightclubs and beaches — yet underneath, it still runs on carob trees, olive groves, and recipes older than tourism itself.