Blog One: Menorca and Barcelona
[28th October-8th November 2025]
Each of our five previous post-retirement trips has ended up with a week or two in Menorca, which provides a stepping stone from our home-from-home to our actual home. It feels strange to be starting off on the island this time around, as the first part of our longest (geographically) trip so far.
We are here at the latest part of the year since we first started visiting Menorca in 1993 – arriving right at the end of October and staying past the first week of November. La Gardenia’s gardens look about the best we’ve ever seen them, lush and deep green, including banana plants over 2 metres high. The quality of the light is a very welcome contrast to Edinburgh at this time of year.
We pack in visits to our favourite restaurants before they close for the season – Sa Punta in Calas Fonts and Bodegas de Binifadet, where the vines are withering to an autumnal rust. Our “local” bar in Mahon – Cristinal e Gradinata – remains faithfully open for its actual locals and for us. Bar Nou and its delicious sangria de cava are also much appeciated.
We expect the weather to be changeable and unpredictable, and it doesn’t disappoint. Two days bring stormy wind and rain, but the rest are a perfect antidote to Scottish winter, with some late sunshine in agreeable temperatures.
One lovely afternoon, we go round the coast to Es Grau, for a sunny walk along the beach and through the nature reserve. The local wild tortoises, often shy, seem to be out in abundance, and are not too bothered about a couple of humans keen to use their new camera phones. Two of las tortugas have just ambled across the trail through the reserve when 3 or 4 neoprene-bollocked middle-aged male cyclists whizz through, at far too high a speed for the surroundings. Why do you never have a flamethrower to hand when you need one?
We try as often as possible to visit a new (to us) archeological site on the island – this time it’s the Dolmen de Ses Roques Llises, an ancient megalithic burial site which contains one of the oldest known structures on the island, the dolmen itself. This odd boat-shaped structure with neat holes in the stone contained the bones of the deceased through thousands of years. Beside it is a very large building with huge stone pillars and a T-shaped taula, thought to have been of religious importance, but as yet virtually unexcavated.
Ses Roques Llises is about a 15 minute walk from the entrance to huge and much more famous site of Torre d’en Gaumes. Which turns into a 40 minute walk if you first think you have found it (behind a locked gate), you then return to the main site to be told you haven’t walked far enough down the path, so you go back down again, and finally have to retrace your steps all the way back up to the car after your visit. And it rains.
Inevitably, our thoughts turn to Jean, an old friend who introduced us to Menorca in the early 1990s, and lived there from 2020-24, sadly passing away in Edinburgh a few weeks before we left on our trip. Her time here wasn’t always a happy one, but she passed on her love of the island to us and our family, which has been a huge positive in our lives.
Strangely, we feel exactly the same as we normally do as we reluctantly leave Menorca, and La Gardenia in particular, even though we are not headed for home on this occasion – quite the opposite. Barcelona beckons!
A slightly delayed flight gets us to Barcelona and the quirky Pau Room Mate Hotel, just off the Placa Catalunya, in plenty of time for our booked visit to the Casa Batlló, Antoni Gaudi’s masterpiece of a house built in 1903 for the Batlló family. We travel upwards through this unique modernist building in the oldest electric lift in Barcelona.
Casa Batlló is situated on the ever trendy Passeig de Gràcia in the Eixample district – a new weird and wonderful photo opportunity presents itself at every turn. The staff are setting up for a wedding – bet that will be an expensive event! The emails we get ahead of our visit inform us that the staff members are all neurodivergent young people. They are super pleasant and helpful and definitely contribute positively to an enjoyable visit to this astonishing property, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2005.
On the way back up Passeig de Gràcia for a tapas dinner in El Nacional food market we pass a surprising number of, mainly young, men settling down in the doorways of designer shops for the night, in the shelters they have built from cardboard boxes. The cardboard looks new – we assume it is supplied afresh each night by either a homeless charity or the local authority. The numbers of homeless people take us by surprise, contrasting with this affluent part of central Barcelona.
We have breakfast in the morning in the Pau Room Mate, and muse on the wisdom of having videos playing in the lifts and public areas, all showing other hotels from the same chain, in various interesting cities of the world, all of which look nicer than this £200 a night 3* in Barcelona.
A taxi takes us to the cruise terminal where we go through the now familiar rituals of check-in and security before boarding the MSC Fantasia. Within our first few hours we manage to lose each other (twice) on the ship, the latter culminating in each of us sitting in the bar we thought we were going to on different decks of the ship. I was wrong, obviously.
We are off!
My dozen favourite images from our stays in Sol del Este and Barcelona are included in the gallery below. Click on a thumbnail to see a bigger image. If you’re using a mobile phone, turn your screen sideways to see the bigger image to best effect.
Image Gallery
