PALMA, Majorca -- The afternoon sunlight, bright with reflections from the nearby sea, brushes the cafe table where Pere Serra sits at Es Baluard, Palma's new museum of modern and contemporary art. Serra, a Majorcan art collector and businessman, holds the unlighted stub of a Monte Cristo cigar in his hand and squints at the museum he helped create.
''So many people come to Majorca for the sun and the sea, for cheap wine and cheap food," he says. ''In other resort towns -- in Cte d'Azur, Nice, Cannes -- there are many museums and cultural attractions. I wanted Majorca to be more like that."
Serra is getting his wish. The largest of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea off the east coast of Spain, and once primarily thought of as a giant playpen, Majorca has been transforming itself into a cultural destination. Here in the vibrant capital city, and in fact all over the island, one can, without too much digging, find much more than crowded tapas joints and noisy beaches. (Not that we don't enjoy those.)
Palma is a lively amalgamation of narrow, winding streets, outdoor cafes, shops, and eclectic architecture that reflects its history from Roman times to the present. With 380,000 residents, about half the population of the Balearics, which also include Minorca, Ibiza, and Formentera, Palma is a bustling metropolis with the feel of a seaside town. You can eat well, drink well, and for the most part, you can walk everywhere.
The recently opened Es Baluard museum is in the old quarter of Palma, a few blocks from the city's iconic cathedral, a multi-buttressed 14th- to 16th-century Gothic wonder that is worth a visit on its own, if only to see the hallucinatory wrought-iron candelabra by Antoni Gaud. The museum's contemporary structure is built within, and incorporates a corner of, the city's 16th-century walls. The ancient and modern materials (limestone, glass, and steel) mesh seamlessly, providing stylish galleries with 27,000 square feet of exhibition space.
The collection spans 1900 to the present, presenting a history of the island through artists who lived there or passed through. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, and drawings are represented by Pablo Picasso, Joan Mir, Gustav Klimt, Paul Czanne, Henry Moore, Antoni Tpies, Fernand Lger, Alberto Giacometti, Robert Motherwell, and the more contemporary Sean Scully and Magdalena Abakanowicz. The outdoor exhibition area on the top level offers stunning views of the city and harbor from a portion of the bastion walls. Of particular interest is a below-ground exhibition space in a 17th-century cistern, slated for a series of changing installations starting with ''Light Imprisoned in the Body of the Whale" by the German artist Rebecca Horn.
If Es Baluard is a showplace, the Mir Foundation is a low-key gem that offers an equally satisfying aesthetic experience. You may not notice the foundation from the street; it blends into its tidy and upscale residential neighborhood outside the old city center. Once inside, the world of Mir blossoms through the 5,000-piece collection, presented through a changing selection of his paintings, collages, sculptures, prints, sketches, ceramic murals, and notebooks. The main building, designed by the architect Raphael Moneo for exhibitions and foundation services, is itself a work of art. Set in a slope of almond orchards, along the path leading to the painter's studio (built by Josep Llus Sert, a former director of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a friend of Mir), Moneo employs a series of interlocking spaces that use alabaster, light, and waterto reflect the spirit of Mir's painting.
In addition to the exhibition space and studio -- where the artist's paints and brushes are, eerily, exactly where he left them -- you can walk the path to Son Boter, a 17th-century farmhouse that Mir bought in 1959. He used the interior walls of Son Boter as an enormous sketchbook, covering the whitewashed surfaces with myriad graffiti-like images for larger-than-life sculptures and paintings. It feels as if the artist has just stepped out for a cup of tea, and will return at any moment.
There are a number of other museums in Palma that offer a range of work for divergent tastes, and all are within walking distance of the cathedral.
To be sure, there is more culture on the island than what is found in the capital, some of it in surprising and out of the way places.
A drive northeast of Palmabrings you to one of the more curious and interesting places on the island. The Yannick and Ben Jakober Foundation wears the personalities of its founders on its sleeve: quirky, ambitious, welcoming, artistic, surprising, and visionary.
Where to start? First, there's the house, Sa Bassa Blanca, home and studio of the artist couple. (Yannick is half French and Vietnamese; Ben is Hungarian and British.) In 1978, the couple commissioned an Egyptian architect to convert an old farmhouse with a view of the sea into their domicile. You can easily miss the museum, which is below ground in a converted reservoir. It holds dozens of portraits of young children, from formal court paintings of young nobility to naive provincial depictions, done in the 16th to 19th centuries by Dutch, English, Italian, German, and Austrian painters.
''We cover the history of Europe through children," says Yannick, whose daughter died at age 19 and in whose memory the collection is dedicated.
Continuing the cultural tour into the mountains on the northwest side of the island is the town of Valldemossa. There, in a church property that was seized by the state in 1835, in a former monk's cell, is the apartment shared by composer Frdric Chopin and the writer George Sand in the winter of 1838-39. His two pianos are there, as are the handwritten books he left behind to pay the rent, some of Sand's notebooks, and drawings by Sand's son, Maurice, for her book ''Winter in Majorca."
For those who like to be pampered while looking at art, there is the Gran Hotel Son Net in the village of Puigpunyent, 7 miles north of Palma. This 1672 farmhouse was renovated by David Stein, an American, who renovated it first as his home, then again in 1998 as a luxurious hotel, but left his art collection behind. When you have wandered the hallways and parlor rooms and seen the original works by Christo, Robert Longo, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and David Hockney, proceed to the dining room for some art of the culinary kind, along with a glass of fine Majorcan wine. Pere Serra would surely approve.
Necee Regis is a freelance writer who lives in Boston and Miami Beach. She can be reached at neceeregis@yahoo.com.
