Qualla: Colom Island

Colom Island: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a scrap of land barely half a square kilometer, off Menorca's northeast coast, lives a lizard found nowhere else on Earth. The Illa d'en Colom, or Colom Island, is small enough to cross on foot in an afternoon, yet it shelters its own subspecies of Lilford's wall lizard, Podarcis lilfordi brauni, a creature that endures here on an island only two hundred meters from the shore precisely because the mainland's foxes, cats, and snakes never crossed the channel. Two beaches, a single old farmhouse, and a population of jewel-toned reptiles: that is Colom, more or less, entire.

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Colom Island: An Island of One Species' Own

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The little lizards are the island's true celebrities. Once, wall lizards like these ranged across all the Balearic Islands, but the arrival of humans and the predators that came with them wiped them from the large islands and left them clinging to a handful of undisturbed islets....

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Colom Island: Beaches at the Edge of a Wetland

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For visitors, the draw is the water. Colom's west coast holds two fine-sand beaches, Arenal d'en Moro and Els Tamarells, reached by a short boat hop from the fishing village of Es Grau across a shallow, turquoise channel. The island sits within the S'Albufera des Grau Natural Par...

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Colom Island: Plague, Pastures, and a Single House

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Colom has not always been so quiet. In earlier centuries the island served as a pesthouse, a place to isolate the sick and quarantine arriving passengers, keeping contagion at arm's length from Menorca's crowded ports. Its separation by water, the very thing that saved the lizard...

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Colom Island: A Private Island Changes Hands

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

An island for sale is a rare thing, and Colom spent decades on the market. Advertised at roughly six million euros in 2010, it finally sold in 2018 for 3.2 million euros to Alex Meruelo, a Cuban-American businessman born in New York to immigrant parents. Owning it, however, confe...

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Colom Island: The View from the Water

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Approach Colom by boat and it reveals itself slowly: a low green hump ringed by pale sand and clear shallows, the kind of place that looks unchanged for centuries because, largely, it is. Snorkelers drift over seagrass meadows; walkers follow faint paths past the old house to the...

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