Somewhere To Hide

A pair of architects transforms the traditional toolsheds of Mallorca’s olive farms into radically minimalist residential caves.

- Nancy Hass

When the 34-year old Spanish architect Mar Vicens turned 16, her father got on his Vespa to begin the task he had undertaken for each of his three children: searching for a bit of property for her in the Serra de Tramuntana mountains on the northwestern coast of Mallorca. Although based half of the year in Valencia — Spain’s third largest city, an hour away by plane — the family also has roots going back generations in Mallorca, the largest of the Balearic Islands. The Tramuntanas, named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2011, are sui generis, from both a geological and an aesthetic perspective: Fifty-five miles long, with summits of up to 4,700 feet, the one-time coral reefs from the Miocene era have eroded into sharp peaks that are sheared cleanly off in many places, dropping vertiginously to the sea.

While Mallorca’s southern beaches have been host to a massive Pan-European party scene since the 1970s, the Tramuntanas remain craggy and unspoiled. The ancient villages that punctuate the cliffs — the island was settled in prehistoric times and claimed over the centuries by Phoenician, Roman and Moorish invaders — have long attracted cultured bohemians, including the British writer Robert Graves, who in 1929 moved to the town of Deià with his lover, the American poet Laura Riding, and mostly remained there until his death in 1985.