Deia and Valdemossa
Beowulf
Tom Fenton and Faith Ressmeyer
Mon 9 Sep 2013 18:30
From an ancient communal wash house fed by a vigorous spring, the Fonte Fresca, you can walk down small cobbled lanes among stone houses built into the hillsides, and their orchards. We lunched at the Can Boi Mountain Refuge (a sort of Youth Hostel I think). I remained on their terrace drawing while Faith walked down to the port in the small cala below.
The bus took us on to Valdemossa, famous for its Carthusian Monastery, disentailed in 1835 just in time to accommodate George Sand and Frederick Chopin on a naughty escape in 1838. The Guide Books say her 'Winter in Mallorca' is no good. They are quite wrong. It is funny, wise, intelligent, and evocative.
The Monastery contains not only the baroque church and the Prior's rooms (not a bad life for a celibate pauper) and the Chopin/Sand apartments but also a museum that has some good paintings of Mallorcan scenes by local artists but also a rather desperate attempt to do a modernist thing to provide context for Miro, Picasso and the local boy, Julio Ramis. But the whole experience, which we came back for on Monday) was great. We returned to Sóller happy and fulfilled.