Walking the GR221, Mallorca – Postscript
Postscript
Hotel Maristel, Estellencs
Link: Hotel Maristel, Estellencs
The Maristel is a pleasant hotel with good facilities. It’s in two parts. The main hotel is on the side of the road further from the coast and rooms at the back have restricted views. Front-facing rooms face the road but would not be particularly noisy. The other part of the hotel on the sea-facing side of the road has no services but the rooms have good views. All the staff we dealt with were friendly and helpful.
As well as a modern lounge and bar there is an indoor and an outdoor pool, a terrace bar by the outdoor pool, and a spa facility. The dining room is on the first floor with a panoramic window. While we were there dinner was a self-service buffet with a good selection of dishes changing daily. The food was generally good though not fexceptional, although the steak I had on our last night was one of the worst main courses I’ve had in a long time! Just bad luck, I think. Self-service breakfasts were good with a wide choice of hot and cold food to appeal to most European cultures.
Sanctuaria de Lluc
Don’t expect a village – there isn’t one. Apart from the religious parts the Sanctuary operates like a large hostel with rooms rather than dormitories. You make your own bed on arrival (bedding and towels provided, shower gel but no soap) and the rooms aren’t serviced during your stay. There’s a large refectory/dining room mostly with large tables for groups, although there are smaller tables for 1 – 4 people. A bar in the refectory serves drinks. There’s a small reception office, a (not very) secure baggage store and an internet room with questionable wifi service for which you have to pay.
Within the boundaries of the Sanctuary there’s a café, a souvenir shop, a cash machine and a small store (opens at 8.00am) selling bread and a small range of mostly pre-packed food, sweets and chocolate and a small selection of fresh fruit along with a few essentials like soap, toothpaste, suncream, etc. Just outside the main entrance is another café with an almost identical offering to the one inside. Apart from a tourist information office which seemed to be mostly closed that’s about it.
Guided or DIY?
I’d originally thought we would do the walk ourselves using the excellent Editorial Alpina maps. I’d contacted Jaume via his website (look for ‘Paths – Guided walks’) and he was very willing to do us a deal whereby he would arrange all the logistics and advise us on the route but not accompany us during the walk. Knowing a little about the access problems I eventually decided to engage Jaume as guide too. This turned out to be well worth the extra cost because his local knowledge of the Mallorcan trails and footpaths is unsurpassed and we avoided any number of potential problems which it would have been very difficult to deal with on our own – not least with our poor Spanish and Mallorquí (no offense, Clive!). The logistics all went very smoothly too, so we never needed to worry about taxis or buses: Jaume took care of it all.
Although the GR221 is an official long-distance trail not all parts of it are well-established or well-marked. As we found on day 2 there are some deviations that have been forced upon the original route as landowners have successfully contested public rights of access. The southern part of the GR as far as Deiá is the worst for route-finding. There were sections here where even with a good map it would be easy to lose the trail. Without a guide I can imagine us losing an hour or more each day simply finding the right path.
Two Million Stones? The terrain
The alternative name for the GR221 is The Dry Stone route. The official line is that this pays tribute to the great number of dry stone walls in the Serra Tramuntana, including the prolific use of stone to build terraces for cultivation (this picture from day 4 is a good example). However, anyone planning to spend a week walking in the area needs to know that underfoot the terrain is hard. There may be times when you’re not walking on hard stony tracks but respite is rare and soft going almost non-existent.
My advice is to make sure your boots or shoes have good padding to absorb the impact stress. I wore an old pair of lightweight trail boots which have done me good service over the years. Even so, after four days my right heel was starting to hurt, and on the last day I had to stop to strap some padding under it. I realised that the footbed (insole) had got so compressed that it was about the thickness and texture of a cardboard cornflakes box! Oddly, the injury got worse after I got home and it took about two weeks before I could put full weight on the heel again. The footbeds have now been replaced with new Sorbothane insoles!
Jaume Tort
And finally, what of Jaume himself? He is the man behind the various best-selling Editorial Alpina guidebooks and maps for Mallorca and Menorca – you’ll see his name along with others if you look at the credits. He has a network of collaborators who help him keep the maps up to date and accurate and who spend time, mostly in the winter season, waymarking paths and trails with discreet paint marks. At the end of a day’s walk he would often dash off in his car to resupply one or other outlet with maps and guidebooks.
In October 2013 he was coming to the end of his first season as an independent guide after working for many years for a German holiday company. His client base was still predominantly German (he speaks the language fluently) and I was surprised to learn that we were his first ever English walking group. His English too is good and well up to the job of guiding Brits.
We found him to be kind-hearted and generous, and determined we should have a good time walking the GR221. I suspect he found us a touch more rebellious and independently-minded than the German clients he is used to, but by the end of the week we had trained him well in dealing with us! Just one tip: if on reading this you decide to ask Jaume to guide you on a Mallorcan trip be prepared for an almost uninterrupted discourse on everything Mallorcan, from the government’s tourism policies to the best way to use olive oil in your picnic lunch!