Mallorca is three islands pretending to be one, and the mountain one — the Tramuntana — is where the photography is.
The Serra de Tramuntana runs the whole north-west coast, fifteen hundred metres of limestone dropping straight into the sea, terraced with olive groves that are nine hundred years old and listed by UNESCO for exactly that. It faces north-west, which means it holds the last light of the day on its seaward side long after the rest of the island has gone flat, and the villages strung along it — Valldemossa, Deià, Banyalbufar — are all stone the colour of the hills they are cut from. The other two islands are the south, which is flat, dry, and edged with the turquoise coves everyone books the flight for, and Palma, which is a working Mediterranean city with a cathedral standing directly on the water. La Seu is worth its own paragraph: it faces south over the bay, so it is lit all day rather than for one hour, and the reflecting pool in front of it doubles a hundred and twenty metres of gothic sandstone. It is the easiest great location in this entire catalogue — no permit, no timing, no queue.
Pick the session and roughly when. Thirty seconds, and the price is fixed there.
They pick the hour, because in Spain the hour decides the photograph.
Edited photographs in your private gallery, on the turnaround stated for your session.
April to mid-June and September to October are the months. April is the one to argue for: the Tramuntana is still green, the almond and citrus are over but the wildflowers are not, the sea is cold and looks it, and the island has perhaps a fifth of its August population. July and August are hot, still and completely booked — the Sa Calobra road takes two hours instead of forty minutes. November to March the Tramuntana gets real Atlantic weather, the coast road closes for rockfall several times a winter, and Palma carries on regardless at 16 degrees.
Here is where to shoot in Mallorca, with ideal times and permit notes.
A hundred and twenty metres of gothic sandstone standing over a saltwater lake, facing south across the bay. The south orientation is the gift — there is no wrong hour, only different ones — and the pool gives a full reflection whenever there is no wind.
A village of ochre stone stacked on a spur between the mountain and the sea, with a steep track down to a shingle cove at the bottom. North-west facing, so the last hour lands on the village front-on and the sea behind it goes silver. The walk down is twenty minutes and the walk back up is thirty-five.
A viewpoint on a knife-edge ridge two hundred metres above the sea at the island’s northern tip, with cliffs falling away on both sides. The summer road closure is the thing to know: from June to September the peninsula is shuttle-only from mid-morning, which effectively makes this a sunrise location.
Dry-stone terraces running from the road down to a two-hundred-metre drop, planted with olives that have been worked continuously since the Moorish period. They face west into the sunset, and the low light picks out every wall on the hillside. It is the UNESCO landscape, and it is visible from a layby.
These come under the Mallorca rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Mallorca itself.
The colour is a midday phenomenon — it needs the sun high enough to go into the water rather than bounce off it — which is the exact opposite of every other recommendation on this page. So a turquoise-cove session is a separate, short, eleven-to-one session, usually at Caló des Moro or Cala Varques, and it is not combined with a portrait session in the same afternoon.
For a landscape, yes. For a session, rarely. It is thirteen kilometres of hairpins each way, the cove at the bottom is a narrow gorge mouth that the sun reaches for about four hours, and in season there are four tour coaches in the car park. The Torrent de Pareis is spectacular; it is also a two-hour round trip to photograph something that is at its best when the light is at its worst.
