Four Short Walks Through Olive Groves …

1) El Cami de Muleta

Distance: 4,8 Km. About an hour an a half, not counting stops.

This walk begins on the Sóller to Deià road (the MA10) at kilometre 56.9. Head for a tarmac track that leads toward the sea. After a few hundred metres the track divides, forking left and right at 90 degree angles. If you take the left-hand fork, you get to Béns d’Avall, an excellent restaurant with superb sea views. If you decide to break your walk before you’ve almost even stated, try to get a table on the left hand side of the terrace. Order fish.

If you can resist the temptation of a good meal, take the right-hand fork and continue along the tarmac track.

The tarmac soon gives way to an earth track marked GR221. Continue along this forest track, wide enough for a car, until just before a series of houses called Muleta Gran. The track leading up to the buildings and the area around this estate have plenty of gnarled and twisted scary-movie olive trees. At this point, look for the signs for track GR221 indicated toward the Port of Sóller.

The track goes round the buildings until it reaches a little gate. You then enter the Cas Avinyons olive grove and, a few metres further on you’ll see the famous old tree, Es Camell, remarkably deformed so as to offer speculation on what it looks like – a camel, a kangaroo, an old Boris Karlov character?

To the right of the path, close to Es Camell, there are lots of other olive trees worth spending some time looking at, and perhaps speculating about like cloud formations. You will, of course, have brought your camera.

Be aware that although the path itself is public, the land where the olive trees stand is private, whether walled off or not. Please respect this private property so the owner doesn’t get fed up and wall it all off from the public.

Continue along the path and go through another little gate. Now the track is a cobblestone one, marked by boundary stones. It descends toward the right, crossing a torrent – a torrent out here is like an arroyo, a deep gulley usually dry but which turns into, you’d never guess, a torrent of water when it rains).

Anyway, this torrent is just before another little gate that you also need to go through. Continue along the track and, just five minutes later on the left, you will see a good example of a rural mountain mansion called Muleta de Ca s'Hereu or Muleta Petit, now a rural hotel. You can stop here if you wish, sample some dishes made with oil from the trees you just looked at, and if the season is right you’ll be able to see the olive oil press and find out how olive oil used to be made on the island.

2) El Barranc de Biniaraix

Distance: 2 Km. You can do this in an hour, but it’s more fun to take your time.

This walk begins in the bijou postcard village of Biniaraix in the Sóller valley. From the village, take a forest track, your old friend from Walk No. 1, the GR221. It’s on the right-hand side of the road from Biniaraix to Fornalutx. Walk along the track toward Barranc de Biniaraix, L'Ofre and Cúber.

Almost immediately you will be walking through a typical mountain olive grove with ancient trees twisted into surrealistically distorted shapes on hillside terraces. These were irregularly planted on small plots of land so that one terrace can have trees belonging to a dozen different owners. The track itself is a good example of traditional dry-stone engineering and Barranco de Biniaraix is listed as an work of cultural heritage, protected by the Heritage Act.

The entire length of the path demonstrates the ingenuity of the ancient Mallorcans (or whichever of the various invading cultures taught them) with bridges and terraces built on the hillsides and the slopes at the base of imposing cliffs.

After you’ve climbed up the cobblestone track for about forty-five minutes and are close to the L'Ofre torrent, just after the olive grove ends and an area of natural vegetation begins (I’m translating a lot of this text, and won’t say “uncultivated wasteland”), you reach an intersection where there is a red sign marking the forest track GR221 – again; they really want you to know you’re on the GR221. The sign tells you where you have come from (Biniaraix) and where the path leads: on to L'Ofre and Cúber. I recommend these kinds of signs, the ones that tell you where you are, where you were, and where you’re going, a sort of stationary GPS.

About twenty-five metres beyond this sign, you can see Sa Madona des Barranc to the north, another magnificently gnarled tree. Around this spectacular tree are others of the original grove, all very picturesque..

If you continue toward L'Ofre and Cúber, a few metres further on you can drink from a small drinking fountain, sourced from the spring known as Font des Verger just a little higher up from the path. If you stand here and look north, toward the part that stands above the path, you can see a charming slender olive tree with natural holes through it. From this point, you can do one of two things: either continue upwards to the peak known as Puig de l'Ofre (two more hours) and on to the Cúber reservoir (adding another hour), a walk that introduces you to all of the charms of Mallorca's mountains, or you can simply retrace your steps to Biniaraix

If you do the latter, the path back to Biniaraix gives you another good look at typical Mallorcan mountain olive groves and the way in which dry-stone building techniques were used. If you are not too tired, just where the track back down comes to an end, at the entrance to Biniaraix, you can take the tarmac path on the right-hand side called Camí des Marrois (4.2 km up a fairly steep slope), which crosses one of the most important mountain areas where olives that are used to make Mallorcan olive oil with a Designation of Origin are grown.

If you continue along this path you reach Fornalutx, with lovely views of orange, lemon and olive trees on the hillside terraces and spectacular views of the Sóller valley.

Save some film in your camera, or space on your digital chip, for Fornalutx, a village I’ve mentioned before as being pretty as a picture postcard.

3) Cami de la Font Garrover

Distance: 2,4 Km, a short hour if you keep moving.

This outing begins in the municipality of Mancor de la Vall, on the north-east side of the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range. We should warn you that the last part of the hike goes through a private estate and so you should arrange a visit in advance by telephoning the owner of Oli Sa Font Garrover (Tel. 687 474 187). But unlike the owner of the property in the last walk, down below, he won’t charge you to traipse across his property if you’ll do it in a civilised manner.

From Mancor, take the road that climbs up to the Santa Llúcia Oratory. About four hundred metres after you have left Mancor, once you have passed the cemetery, take a tarmac road to the left which is signed Camí de Sa Font Garrover. After you have climbed up a steep tarmac track for just under two kilometres, you will see some splendid examples of Mallorcan olive trees.

Keep to the main track and you will come to a little metal gate. Remember the Law of Country Gates; leave ‘em open if they were open, shut ‘em if they were closed. Immediately afterwards, on the right, you’ll see a magnificent olive grove, very old. Stop an consider the fifteen or twenty generations of men who cared for them and harvested their oil. Gives you some respect for history if you even try a little to imagine who they may have been.

Two hundred metres on, the track divides. Take the left-hand fork and, fifty metres later a little gate leads through to a property called Sa Font Garrover. At this point the path descends for a few hundred metres, with successive gates, until you reach the houses at the bottom of the valley.

At Sa Font Garrover, the Campins family have a small olive press where, winter after winter, they make delicious Mallorcan olive oil from olives grown on the property. I’m trying to find out if they’ll sell you some. Watch this space, or leave your own comment down below if you find out.

Don't leave without asking the owner of the property to show you the Tanca de s'Atzeroler olive grove. It’s another of those local groves with dozens of fantastically shaped ancient olive trees. Indeed, those trees tend to turn up in the work of numerous painters and photographers who visit and see how Ma Nature outdoes them as artists.

4) L’Olivar de Coma-Sema

Distance: 2,6 Km, can be done in half an hour if you’re up for a really brisk hike.

This journey starts in the village of Orient, on which I’ve also commented in other contexts, set at the foot of the valley of the same name, in the middle of the east side of the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range.

From Orient, take the Bunyola road and a few hundred metres later on the right you will see the entrance to Coma Sema. Go through the first gate and some five hundred metres along you’ll see a group of houses on the left called Son Vidal.

If you continue along the main track, about seven hundred metres past Son Vidal, you come to the entrance gates to Coma-Sema estate. At this point, you cross private land and the owner charges a fee for you to visit the olive grove and houses of Coma-Sema (Tel. 971 180 117). Again, I’m trying to find out the cost, but as of this writing (translating), he hasn’t responded to the messages I’ve left on his phone.

But we’ll find out – or you will – and we’ll post it here.

At any rate, to return to the walk, as soon as you enter Coma-Sema, you will be walking through a splendid olive grove set on hillside terraces. Five hundred metres later, keeping to the main path, you pass through some metal gates that are usually open. On the right, there is a field where animal fodder is grown and, just in front, another olive grove with whimsically shaped trees.

From the top of a little hill at the end of the track, you see the houses of Coma-Sema.

Coma-Sema is a good example of a rural Mallorcan mansion in the mountains. It has a traditional mechanically-operated medieval olive oil mill which, thanks to the owner’s dedication, still works today.

Attribution: These walks come from information put together by Illes Baleares Qualitat, an organisation that does a splendid job of helping promote the best of Mallorcan traditional foods and preserve the historic means by which they are produced.

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