For most visitors, Palma is a gateway rather than a destination. Its airport is the entry point for every resort on Mallorca, and a swathe of hotels stretches for 20 kilometers along the coast on either side of the city. The crowds pour off the planes and scatter to the beaches, and many never pause in the capital at all. Those who do find a different city behind the sprawl, one built for strolling, with narrow shady streets and glimpses into private courtyards. The Mediterranean keeps it livable. A steady sea breeze holds the summer heat in check, rarely much above 25 degrees, and cool enough in the evenings that you might reach for a jacket. Palma also administers the uninhabited Cabrera archipelago, a protected national park in the sea to the south, a wild counterpoint to the city's summer bustle.

Palma's story is a stack of conquests. People have lived on Mallorca since around 2500 BC, but the city itself was founded by the Romans in 123 BC, who used its harbor to trade with mainland Spain and North Africa. Roman rule lasted nearly six centuries before it frayed, and Vandals and North African Arabs took their turns. In 902 the island fell to the Emirate of Córdoba, beginning more than three centuries under Muslim rule that left a lasting mark on the streets and gardens. Then, in 1229, King Jaime I of Aragon conquered the island and made Palma the seat of his new Kingdom of Majorca. Hard centuries followed. Turkish and Berber pirates raided the coast in the 1500s, plague thinned the population, and stability returned only after 1716, when the Bourbon dynasty came to power and trade with the Caribbean refilled the city's coffers.

The heart of Palma is El Casco Antiguo, the old town, still traced by the line of the Dalt Murada walls with their star-shaped Renaissance bastions zig-zagging outside. Everything worth lingering over is here. La Seu, the vast Gothic cathedral, rises straight from the seafront beside the Almudaina, the royal palace whose Moorish gardens still bloom to the west. History layers thickly in these streets. The Banys Àrabs, the Arab baths, survive from the Muslim centuries. The Basílica de Sant Miquel began as a mosque, converted to a church in 1229 and rebuilt and expanded over the centuries that followed. At the Convent of St Clara, cloistered nuns of an order founded in 1212 still sell homemade cookies to passersby, taking your money and pushing out the sweets through a revolving hatch, never seen and never speaking.

Ask the people of Palma what they are, and many will tell you Catalan rather than Spanish. The island's own dialect of Catalan is widely spoken, and a few words of it will earn a visitor more warmth than fluent Castilian ever could. That distinct identity survives beneath a modern economy built almost entirely on tourism, which began quietly in the 1880s and exploded from the 1950s once cheap flights brought northern Europe within reach. The city has learned to be many things to many people. In August 2026, it will briefly be an astronomer's city too, when a total solar eclipse is due to sweep the island, the sun going dark for some ninety seconds as it sets over the western sea. Old capital, party town, gateway, home. Palma has always been more than one place at once.