Anyone driving through the tunnel today is half an hour from Palma. That half hour has only existed since 1997. Before it there was exactly one usable road out of the valley, over the Coll de Sóller, fifty-eight hairpin bends up to almost five hundred metres, often in cloud in winter and barely passable with a lorry. To the north and south there were mountain paths and nothing more. Sóller and the neighbouring village of Fornalutx were effectively cut off from the rest of the island.
That isolation explains nearly everything the place is today. It explains why people here looked to France rather than to Palma, why the valley built its own railway, why the houses look different from the rest of Mallorca, and why a town of ten thousand people keeps institutions you will not find elsewhere. And it explains why the people of Sóller were alone on a morning in May 1561, when twenty-three galleys sailed into the bay.
At dawn on 11 May 1561, twenty-three Algerian galleys lay in the bay of Sóller. They were commanded by Uluç Ali, one of the most feared corsairs in the Mediterranean, born Giovanni Dionigi Galeni in Calabria and later commander-in-chief of the Ottoman fleet. The town had no garrison and no prospect of quick help. Captain Joan Angelats had the alarm bells rung and put himself with around five hundred men between the attackers and the town; another hundred arrived from Alaró and Bunyola during the morning.
By early afternoon the corsairs were rowing back out. Two hundred and eleven of them stayed behind; on Sóller's side six men had fallen. Remembered alongside them are the Valentes Dones, the brave women who took their place in the fighting and whose names are still awarded anew every year. In that same year, 1561, the Ca'n Det oil mill in the old town began pressing olives. It is pressing them still.
Sóller still celebrates that morning, and not as a show for visitors but as its own festival. The Fira runs over several days in the second week of May, on the Thursday evening the year's Valentes Dones are installed in the church of Sant Bartomeu, and on the Monday afternoon the Moors land on the beach at Port de Sóller. Half the town is on one side and half on the other, there is shooting and running and shouting, and in the end the attackers are pushed back into the sea. In 2026 that Monday fell on 11 May, four hundred and sixty-five years to the day after the original.
If you are here in May you should see it. People come from all over the island, the streets are full, and it takes about a minute to realise that nobody here is performing for an audience. The families who take part have been taking part for generations. A room for those days should be booked early.
The valley grew more citrus than it could ever consume, and the way to the market in Palma went over that same pass. Sailing across the sea to the south of France was simply easier than driving twenty kilometres over the mountain. So the fruit went to France, and many families went with it. In Sète, Marseille and Perpignan the people of Sóller became fruit merchants, some of them wealthy ones, and they sent their money home.
What they had built with it still stands in the middle of the old town: houses in Modernisme, the Catalan Art Nouveau, of a kind you will hardly find elsewhere on Mallorca. The façade of the parish church of Sant Bartomeu on the Plaça de la Constitució is by Joan Rubió i Bellver, who worked with Gaudí, as is the bank building beside it. Can Prunera, a house built between 1909 and 1911, belonged to a man who had come home rich from the French fruit trade; since 2009 it has been a museum, the original interiors downstairs and upstairs works by Miró, Picasso, Klee, Léger and Toulouse-Lautrec from the collection of the publisher Pere Serra, himself a native of Sóller.
Since nobody would build them a connection, the merchants of the valley paid for one themselves. The narrow-gauge line to Palma opened in 1912, known to everyone as the Express de las Naranjas, the Orange Express. Twenty-seven kilometres, thirteen tunnels, the longest of them just under three kilometres, and the Els Cinc Ponts viaduct. The journey takes a good hour, and it is still made in the carriages of the day.
A year later came the tram, from the station straight through the town, past gardens and orange trees to the harbour promenade. Both lines were built as commercial assets, and today they are the thing most guests remember most precisely. No museum saved them. They simply never stopped running.
On 19 February 1997 the Sóller tunnel opened, 3,023 metres beneath the Serra de Alfàbia. With it ended what had been the basic condition of the valley for four hundred years. Palma was suddenly half an hour away, goods came and went without the pass, and people could work in the capital and live here. Years of argument had preceded it, and one of the largest construction scandals on the island; the toll was long considered the most expensive in Spain, and it was only abolished on 29 December 2017.
What the tunnel did not manage is just as remarkable. The valley has not been built over, the old town looks as it did, the railways run, and the mountains are where they always were. Sóller has become reachable without becoming interchangeable. That is exactly why people come.
Something has survived from those centuries of isolation, and you notice it quickly here: people look after their own, because for a long time there was nobody else who would. Estel Nou, a workshop for people with disabilities that is regarded as a model across the region, has existed since 1981. When the Fet a Sóller brand was founded in the early nineties, starting with ice cream, it had its jams made there from the very beginning.
The Fet a Sóller shop is on the Plaça des Mercat, and if you want to take something home, take it from there. The organic orange marmalade is the classic, the citrus ice cream just as much, and both are genuinely made here rather than merely sold here. It is that rare souvenir where you know where the money goes.
These stories have long since become novels. The author Lilly Alonso has lived on the island for more than two decades and has her Sargento Lluc Casasnovas of the Guardia Civil investigate in Sóller; the books are published by Heyne. The first three cases are set in exactly the places this page is about: the first on the Orange Express, the second in the thick of Es Firó, the third in the orange groves.
Mallorquinische Rache Mallorquinische Strafe Mallorquinische Sühne
What is left of this history is still standing and still running, and you can stay in the middle of it. Enter your dates and you will see what is free.