Stories and legends of La Calatrava
Before La Calatrava became the neighbourhood of golden facades and quiet courtyards that surrounds Es Princep today, it was a land of orchards, Muslim bathhouses, a cloistered convent and glassmaking workshops. Every era left behind a story, and some of those stories turned, over the centuries, into legend. Walk its streets slowly enough and you will stumble into them.
The name that arrived with the conquest
The neighbourhood's name is no accident, even if it is easy to forget while wandering past its terraces and art galleries. Shortly after the Christian conquest of 1229, Count Nunyo Sanç, a cousin of King James I, donated this land, then orchards beside the Arab palace of the Almudaina, to the knights of the Order of Calatrava, a military-religious order from mainland Spain. That is where the name comes from, eight centuries later, even though little remains of the knights themselves beyond the neighbourhood their donation set in motion.
The mystery beneath the orange trees
A few steps from Es Princep, hidden among orange trees and quiet gardens, stand Palma's Arab Baths, inside the gardens of Can Fontirroig, one of the few surviving pieces of Islamic architecture left in the city. And yet no one knows for certain when they were built, or who commissioned them: historians place them cautiously between the 10th and 11th centuries, and believe they were once the private hammam of a Muslim nobleman's palace. Their twelve columns, no two alike, give away that they were built from recycled stone taken from earlier Roman buildings, a sign that the neighbourhood was reinventing itself long before the word renovation existed. A thousand-year-old mystery, still standing in the shade of the same orange trees that give the garden its quiet reputation.
The pulpit that reached California
In the heart of the neighbourhood, on Carrer del Fonollar, the Convent of Santa Clara holds a lesser-known story. Founded in 1256 by Poor Clare nuns from Tarragona with the backing of King James I himself, it still preserves the exact pulpit from which, in 1744, Friar Junípero Serra preached the four lessons of the Seraphic school: the only documented instance of him teaching from a pulpit before sailing for the Americas, where he would go on to found the missions that gave rise to cities such as San Diego and San Francisco. Today, the cloistered nuns still sell handmade mantecados and almond biscuits through the torno, the revolving wooden hatch that lets a sale happen without either side seeing the other, just as it did centuries ago.
The legend the glass keeps
On the neighbourhood's southern edge, next to the Arab Baths, the Gordiola glassworks operated between 1929 and 1969, before relocating to Algaida, where it still works today. A tile preserved on site recalls an older tradition still: that the same premises were already being used for glasswork back in 1719, in a building that, according to local legend, had once belonged to the Knights Templar. No one has ever fully confirmed the story, but the tile is still there, weathering the years, and the legend survives with it, passed down among those who know the neighbourhood best.
A neighbourhood that tells its own story
Little of this makes it into the tourist leaflets. Knights who gave their name to a district, bathhouses with no known owner, a pulpit that crossed the Atlantic, and a tile guarding a Templar secret: La Calatrava does not need to invent anything to be a neighbourhood of legend. Anyone staying at Es Princep sleeps, quite literally, surrounded by these stories. For more practical details on the neighbourhood, we have already covered that in our guide to La Calatrava.
