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Published: January 22nd 2016
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Majorca
January 2016
A week in Majorca in January is a nice choice when the Lancashire weather is doing its worst with cold, frost and rain. Majorca, which had rain three days before our arrival, greeted us with brilliant sunshine and temperatures in the mid teens. Nevertheless we needed long gloves and leggings, as you may expect in winter, but on several days we took off a layer and had fingerless gloves after our alfresco lunch in the town squares. The first three days found us doing a total of 150 miles heading out of Pollenca in the north of the island. Port de Pollenca is a nice seaside town with loads of excellent restaurants and cafes with shops selling everything you may need. Car and bike hire is a big thing here, as is selling real estate to the 'invaders' - Germans and British. As you cycle along in winter you meet many race teams in groups chasing up and down the smooth tarmac getting prepared for the coming season. Some of the roads we rode on were not up to top standard but they were quiet and a pleasure to ride although in a couple of months things will
change when the hordes arrive. Pollenca has a full marina with pleasure boats of every size and it has a nice long beach which runs along eastwards to Alcudia, which again has a very, very long beach with many hotels and shops along its length all the way to the Albufera Wetlands. These wetlands take up 1700 acres of marsh and dunes and are 100,000 years old and home to a large variety of flora and fauna. On our visit we saw a great number of shore birds such as shell ducks, stilts, plovers, teales, cormorants, marsh harriers, night herons, black headed gulls, lapwings, snipes and redshanks. The minor roads are a pleasure to ride since they expose a large variety of agricultural scenery from vineyards to olive groves, almond trees, oranges, lemons and produce such as onions, potatoes, artichokes, carrots, leaks and broad beans. In the area around Muro, where the veg is grown, most of the small fields have a well with old broken windmills still in place, which are used to irrigate the soil, which I presume allows them to grow several crops each year in this warm climate. Many of the small towns are located on
the hills which I presume was a strategic move to ward off invaders of years ago. They also follow a similar patten with a central church with a square, with trees for shade, surrounded by cafes and bars providing tapas and drinks for hungry cyclists like us. Such towns are, Campanet, Sa Pablo, Muro and Maria de la Salut which have a nice atmosphere for visitors. Two more cycling days to go before we head home on Monday so with good weather still forecast we hope to find more small towns to visit and eat in as well as travel through glorious countryside with sheep and goats in abundance with the occasional donkey and red kites flying overhead.
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