Qualla: Deia

Deia: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LBM1948, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the summer of 1916, The Times of London printed Robert Graves among the war dead. A shell had torn through his chest at the Battle of the Somme, and word went home that he had died of his wounds. He had not. Graves recovered, read his own obituary, and lived another sixty-nine years, most of them in a small stone house on a mountainside above the Mallorcan sea. The village was Deià, and the poet who had survived a war he could never quite forget spent the rest of his life there, writing.

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Image: LBM1948 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Deia: A Poet's Faraway Home

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Grzegorz Wysocki, CC BY-SA 2.5. 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 edg...

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Image: Grzegorz Wysocki | CC BY-SA 2.5

Deia: The Village on the Cliff

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chixoy, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

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Image: Chixoy | CC BY-SA 3.0

Deia: Buried Under a Cypress

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Kunert, CC0. 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 ...

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Image: Thomas Kunert | CC0

Deia: The Archduke's Coast

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WiDi, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 ...

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Image: WiDi | CC BY-SA 3.0