The building with the flowers crawling all over it is the Gran Hotel, and when it opened it was the most modern object on this island by a distance nobody could quite believe.
Look at the front of it. There's almost no flat surface. Ceramic flowers, sculpted heads, balconies that bulge out over the square, a roofline that refuses to be a straight line. That's Lluís Domènech i Montaner, who was doing the same thing in Barcelona at exactly the same moment, and this is the building that brought the whole style across the water.
It opened in nineteen oh-three, and the specification list is the part that gets me.
First luxury hotel on Mallorca. First building on the island with its own electricity supply. First with a telephone. In a city where most people were still lighting rooms with oil, somebody built a palace for foreigners and wired the entire thing for a technology most guests had never touched.
They were forty years early.
Because the visitors this hotel was built for did not
yet exist in any number. Mallorca in nineteen oh-three got a few thousand curious travellers a year — wealthy, eccentric, mostly writers and invalids sent south by their doctors for the air. The Gran Hotel was a bet that they would keep coming, and keep getting richer, and want somewhere with a lift.
The man who took that bet was worth knowing about. Domènech i Montaner was one of the two or thre
