England and Iberia Day 9

A hot castle, a lucky taxi, and Segways in Palma

Posted by Brian Hart on August 06, 2026 · 13 mins read
  • Start of day: Palma de Mallorca, Spain
  • End of day: At sea

It’s hot.

We started our day with a walk from the ship up to the castle on the hill, Castell de Bellver.

A weathered bronze bust of a bearded man in a jacket, holding a rolled document and a book, mounted on a pale stone plinth on a patch of dry burnt grass. Someone has balanced a small blue and white traffic cone on his head like a party hat. The plinth is inscribed AL CIENTIFICO RUMANO EMIL G. RACOVITZA, FUNDADOR DE LA BIOESPELEOLOGIA EN MALLORCA -- 1904, FUNDACION EUROPEA DRAGAN. Behind him, the curving dry-stone retaining wall of the castle grounds sweeps across the frame, topped by a pale stone balustrade with palms and pines above it against a deep blue sky.

There’s a beautiful small stone chapel near the castle that strongly reminded me of our 7 years in California. I took a few minutes to sit in the cool(er) chapel to recover from the heat and sit with my feelings.1 The front of a small stone chapel on the wooded hillside below the castle, shot straight on from the cobbled forecourt. The honey-colored limestone facade rises to a gable topped with an ornate wrought-iron cross, with a round rose window of tracery glass at its center and a pointed stone doorway below carrying a carved Marian monogram. The heavy iron gate stands open, and inside a person in white can be seen sitting in the wooden pews. Wrought-iron lanterns are bracketed to the walls at either side, pines press in from both edges of the frame, and the sky above is cloudless deep blue.

Sherri stands at the foot of a broad flight of rough stone steps climbing the pine-covered hillside toward the castle, turning back toward the camera. She wears a maroon sleeveless top, white shorts, and white sneakers. The steps rise from the cobbled terrace in the foreground and bend out of sight into the trees, bordered on the right by a dry-stone retaining wall with the corner of the chapel and its iron gate at the frame edge. Dry yellow grass, low scrub, and Aleppo pines fill the slope under a bright blue sky with a few thin white clouds.

The heat was oppressive, truly, and we were grateful they weren’t gouging on water at the castle. I should have brought water. I didn’t. We bought the kids water in town, but I figured I’d tough it out. It was a mistake.

I toured the castle, didn’t enjoy it much on account of said lack of water, and as far as I could tell there was no water fountain inside the castle on any of its three floors. I did briefly consider drinking from the bathroom sink faucet. There is a bar/restaurant outside the ticketed area, but I didn’t want to take the chance there was no re-entry. We grabbed bottled water here after the castle and sat for a few minutes.

A dark grey A-frame sign standing on the worn stone threshold of the castle's deep entrance archway, beside a heavy studded timber door. The panel is headed Castell de Bellver, Museu d'Historia de la Ciutat in white and pale green, below which three pictograms are struck through: a burger and soft drink cup in a red prohibition circle, a figure climbing the battlements, and a lit cigarette. The footer reads Ajuntament de Palma with the city crest. The surrounding walls are pale ashlar block, weathered and patched, with a terracotta saucer resting on the ground behind the sign.

The circular courtyard at the heart of Castell de Bellver, shot from the edge of a temporary black stage floor. Two tiers of arcades ring the whole space -- rounded arches on square piers at ground level, taller pointed Gothic arches on slender double columns above -- all in pale honey limestone, with the castle's freestanding keep visible over the roofline at the far side. Rows of white folding chairs are set out on the far half of the yard, and stage gear fills the foreground: black monitor wedges, microphone stands, cabling taped down, lighting bars rigged under the upper arcade at the left, and a white canopy against the far wall. Deep blue sky with wisps of cloud above.

With an hour until our arranged excursion and an hour’s walk in front of us (time got away from me at the castle), we started back down the hill. Would I have liked to summon a taxi from the top? Very much so. However, a recommended taxi app for Palma would not let me book a cab without a credit card on file (even when I indicated I’d pay the driver cash), and the app refused both a VISA credit card I’ve used worldwide and a debit card. The ticket office helpfully has a sign posted with the taxi company’s dispatch number, but I don’t buy voice service for these international trips.

A phone screenshot of the Palma taxi app with an error dialog over a dimmed street map. The dialog shows an orange circle with a white X above the message: You need to register a card to be able to order services. Click on the payment method selection option to add one, with a single Accept button. Behind it the map shows the Ponent District, Estadi Mallorca Son Moix, and Placa de Toros (Coliseu Balear), with route cards reading Carrer de Camilo Jose Cela, Palma, 7 min and 2 Wheel Tours Palm...eial, Palma, 13:21. The visible strip of the trip sheet shows Adapted Taxi at 8,50 EUR to 9,90 EUR, and the footer shows Seats 4(me), payment set to Cash, with the Book button greyed out.

We took paths down the hill into the edge of town and were then fortunate to find an idling taxi just a few meters from where we emerged from the woods. It was our destiny to take this cab. The driver cut a 50-minute walk down to a 15-minute, €8 ride with air conditioning, and got us to our tour with ample time.

Our excursion, booked through GetYourGuide2 (my first time trying that platform), was a two-hour Segway tour around the old town. It was great! The midday heat was relentless, and I doubt we would have seen even a twentieth of what we saw had we been on foot. Rowan did get the dizzies at one point, which we managed with sunglasses, adequate water, a Coke, and ice cream. I have some great GoPro footage of a lot of it, which I’ll cut into a proper video at some point.

The storefront of 2 Wheel Tours Palma on a narrow old-town street, with a large white SEGWAY sign mounted above the entrance. The glass frontage is printed with a wash of blue and white water, and a price list is taped inside reading Express Tour 1 hour 45,99 EUR, Deluxe Tour 2 hours 74,99 EUR, Palma and Portixol Tour 84,99 EUR, Private Tour 84,99 to 104,99 EUR, with the address Carrer del Palau Reial 12, 07001 Palma de Mallorca and contact details. Through the open door, several black Segways are parked in a bare tiled room. A Segway stands at the right of the frame in the foreground, a yellow TOUR INFO placard with a QR code clipped to its handlebar column. Dark green shutters and pale render fill the upper facade.

A five-story Palma modernista building on a street corner, shot from below against a cloudless blue sky. The upper facade is encrusted with pale mosaic and floral relief work; green-shuttered windows and slender wrought-iron balconies wrap the rounded corner, and a broad glazed gallery of green-framed windows fills the center, lettered CLINICA DENTAL across the glass. A carved grotesque face with flanking sea creatures sits above the second-floor balcony, which runs the width of the building on ornate ironwork. At street level, a cream awning marked St. Cristo shades a shopfront where a life-size chef figure stands beside the door, with a jewelry shop under a pale green awning to the right. A crowd of summer pedestrians in shorts, sundresses, and caps crosses the zebra-striped street in the foreground; a pink-washed building adjoins at the left.

Eight black Segways parked in a cluster on the granite paving of a shaded Palma square, their handlebar columns leaning together and 2wheelspalma.com printed on the footboards. A huge plane tree arches over the top of the frame, its branches framing the honey-stone Gothic church beyond -- a tall openwork bell tower with a slender spire rising above a gabled nave with lancet windows and a pointed doorway where a few people stand. A white Correos Express delivery van and a white and blue police car are parked along the far side of the square, with a red car at the right and tall shuttered apartment buildings enclosing the space. Bright blue sky above the tree canopy.

The entrance wall of Es Baluard, shot at an angle from the paved forecourt. A tall white concrete slab carries the museum's name in large black cut-out letters -- ESBALUARD MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE PALMA -- with a black arrow at the lower right pointing down toward the entrance. Behind and above it rises the massive dark stone rampart of the old city bastion, with a rounded arch tunnel cut through it at the left. In the shade beside the tunnel, several people from the Segway tour stand talking in white safety helmets, their Segways parked along the wall. Bright sun rakes across the pale stone paving in the foreground, with a manhole cover and a steel bollard at the bottom of the frame.

After the tour I talked everyone into tapas at Maura, which was OK, and then we taxi’d back to the ship. Twice now I’ve tried to treat the family to tapas in hopes of building a tradition, and both times the food has been just OK – nowhere near tapas I’ve had in other countries, like a place my Dad and I found in Basel, Switzerland, or just The Columbia in Celebration. I’ll make a few more attempts.

Footnotes:

  1. I may write about this at length some day but the tl;dr is: we lived in California for 7 years and raised the kids there during their elementary school days. We moved to North Carolina in 2020. I play a lot of “what if we had stayed in CA?” thought experiments, mostly to torture myself. ↩

  2. Affiliate link. If you book or buy through it, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only link to things I’d actually use myself. ↩

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