For quiet
Son Brull
Pollença · Mallorca
An 18th-century Jesuit farm in the Tramuntana foothills, kept deliberately plain, where the estate still presses its own oil and the kitchen cooks what the land outside sends in.
Son Brull sits a couple of kilometres out of Pollença, on 32 hectares of vineyard and old olive, an orchard behind. The Jesuits built it as a working farm and gave it, so the story goes, as many windows and doors as there are days in the year. The present owners left the stone alone and stripped the inside back to something cool and close to monastic: pale walls, dark wood, long silences. The Serra de Tramuntana closes the view on one side, the sea is six kilometres the other way, and the place seems to have decided, firmly, to be quiet.
The restaurant borrows that farm legend for its name and calls itself 365. Andreu Segura cooks it, and he cooks close to the ground: the estate's own oil, fruit off the orchard, wine from the slope, whatever the day happens to send. It is precise without being fussy, and Mallorcan before it is anything else. A more relaxed bistro takes lunch and the hours in between. Breakfast, on the terrace under the pines, is the meal people tend to remember.
We like a hotel that knows what it is. Son Brull is a farm that feeds its guests, dressed with a light contemporary hand and otherwise left unbothered. There is a spa with an indoor pool for the grey days and an outdoor one set among the vines, a Relais & Châteaux badge that here reads as restraint rather than gilt, and Pollença with its Sunday market a short drive off. Come for the cooking and the quiet. The rest of Mallorca can wait.
