Graves came to Deià in 1929, the same year he published Goodbye to All That, the bitter, brilliant memoir in which he settled accounts with England and the war that had nearly killed him. A friend, the writer Gertrude Stein, had recommended the island. He built a house on the edge of the village and named it Ca n'Alluny, Catalan for the faraway home, and faraway was rather the point. Here, at a safe distance from the country he had said goodbye to, Graves wrote much of his most enduring work, including the Roman novels that won him a wide audience. The Greek myths and ancient histories he retold from this remove would shape how generations of readers imagined the classical world. He lived in Deià, with some interruptions, until his death in 1985, and his house is now a museum, opened to the public in 2006, its study and garden kept much as the poet left them.

Deià is tiny, home to only about 700 people, and it clings to the steep western flank of the Serra de Tramuntana some 30 kilometers north of Palma. Terraces of olive and citrus step down toward the Mediterranean, held in place by dry-stone walls that generations of farmers built by hand. The road in from Palma runs first to Valldemossa and then twists north along the coast, a drive slow enough that the village feels genuinely remote even now. The village itself is walkable in minutes, its lanes winding up to an eighteenth-century church on the high ground to the north. Below, reached by a twisting path, lies Cala Deià, the village's only beach, a small stony cove sheltered between cliffs where boats still pull up. It is a place that rewards slowness, and it has drawn writers, painters and musicians for the better part of a century.

When Robert Graves died, he did not go far. He was buried in Deià's small churchyard, on the hilltop at the edge of the village, beneath a great cypress tree that shades the graves. The setting is modest for a man of his fame, a simple slab in a country cemetery looking out over the mountains and the sea he had chosen above all others. Readers still make the climb to find it, tracing the same lanes the poet walked for half a century, past the olive terraces to the quiet plot where England's reluctant war poet finally came to rest in the hills of a Spanish island. Even in death he kept things plain, in keeping with the unshowy life he had built here.

Graves was not the first outsider to fall for this coast. The land around Deià had been lovingly guarded decades before his arrival by Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, the Habsburg naturalist who bought the nearby Son Marroig estate and much of the shoreline between here and Valldemossa. An early champion of what we would now call conservation, he protected the wildlife and the views, and the village still names its streets for him, Arxiduc Lluís Salvador. The stretch of Tramuntana that so entranced him, and later Graves, is now recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The bus from Palma still winds up to the village square, disgorging day-trippers who rarely stay long enough to understand why others never left. Deià, it turns out, has a long history of making people never want to leave.