The oldest structure here is the central talaiot, a cylindrical tower the builders raised sometime around 900 to 800 BC. It still stands four meters tall, its walls so massively thick that a staircase climbs inside them, though the stone column that once held up its upper floor fell long ago. Talaiots like this one are scattered across Mallorca and neighboring Menorca — at least 274 of them survive — and all belong to the same distant window of time, roughly 1,300 to 900 BC. Some are round and some square, each built of rough stone around a central space. Visitors cannot enter the Ses Païsses tower today, but they can still trace the low passage, only about three-quarters of a meter high, that tunnels straight through its base to the rooms beyond.

Over generations, the settlement grew outward from that first tower. Attached to its northeastern side is the hypostyle chamber, named for the three squat columns still standing at its center and the remains of seven more embedded in its walls. Roughly twelve by eight meters, it ends square at one wall and curves into a rounded apse at the other. A second horseshoe-shaped chamber lies to the south, and it carries a longer history. Dated to the post-Talayotic period between 500 and 123 BC, it was excavated in 1959 and 1960, revealing hearths littered with bone fragments, charcoal, and broken pottery. The diggers also uncovered a burial and iron tools here — evidence that people were still living among these walls centuries after the first stones were set.

The settlement's most imposing feature was one of its last. Sometime between 650 and 540 BC — long after the central tower — the inhabitants ringed their home with a wall of cyclopean masonry, so named because later Greeks imagined that only giants could have shifted such stones. Its base is a row of enormous outer boulders, some weighing around eight tonnes, with smaller rocks stacked above and a facing of lesser stones within. The wall runs some 350 meters around an elliptical enclosure and was pierced by three gateways. The main one, at the southeast, is elegantly simple: two upright boulders with a third laid across them as a lintel, opening onto a short passage flanked by stairs. A western gate, now stripped of its lintel, once led down to a spring.

The Talaiotic culture flourished for roughly a thousand years and then ended, abruptly in the long view, when Rome annexed the Balearic Islands in 123 BC. Its people left no written records, so nearly everything we say about them is inferred from stone and ash. Even the purpose of the talaiots is still debated — ceremony, storage, and territorial display have all been proposed, and none has been proven. Into that silence, later Mallorcans poured their own imagination: island legend made the talayots around Ses Païsses the haunt of Nuredduna, a seeress whose story the island's poets would one day retell. Walk the overgrown enclosure at dusk, with holm oaks rustling overhead, and the invented myth can feel almost as solid as the walls themselves.

Ses Païsses is one of the finest talayotic sites, but it is far from alone. Capocorb Vell, south of Llucmajor, is reckoned the most important on Majorca, with five talaiots and the remains of an ancient village, while neighboring Menorca is dotted with its own — Torre d'en Galmés, Trepucó, Talatí de Dalt. Stranger still, the talaiot builders had counterparts across the western Mediterranean who raised eerily similar towers of stone: the nuraghi of Sardinia, the torri of Corsica, the sesi of Pantelleria. Whether these island cultures learned from one another or arrived at the same ideas alone is yet another question the silent stones refuse to answer.