Archipiélago de Cabrera
Nineteen uninhabited islands off Mallorca — a castle, a Napoleonic tragedy and the western Mediterranean's largest marine national park.
Cabrera sits an hour's boat ride south of Mallorca: a main island, a smaller Conejera, and seventeen islets of grey limestone covered in wild olive and rosemary, guarding a harbour so sheltered that everyone from Romans to Barbary corsairs used it — which is why a fourteenth-century castle still crouches on the headland above the anchorage. The archipelago was declared a maritime-terrestrial national park in 1991, and a 2019 enlargement pushed the boundary far out to sea, to about 90,000 hectares — the largest marine national park in the western Mediterranean, most of it open water over seagrass, coral bottoms and seamounts.
The island's darkest chapter is its most instructive. Between 1809 and 1814 Spain abandoned some nine thousand French prisoners from the Battle of Bailén on this waterless island with irregular deliveries of bread; perhaps a third of them died, and a small monument among the pines above the harbour remembers what is arguably the site's founding act of neglect. Cabrera then spent the twentieth century as a military zone — garrisoned, off-limits, accidentally preserved — the same enforced emptiness that saved Italy's prison islands, delivering an intact Posidonia meadow system whose underwater prairies are the clearest measure of what the rest of the Balearic coast has lost.
What lives here now is a seabird and reptile stronghold: Eleonora's falcons hunting migrant songbirds off the cliffs in autumn, Balearic shearwaters — Europe's most endangered seabird — rafting offshore, Audouin's gulls, ospreys, and on the islets a swarm of Lilford's wall lizards, the tame black-and-blue endemic that meets every boat. The water itself is the park's real exhibit: grouper and barracuda under the harbour buoys, and visibility that makes the twenty-minute snorkel off Sa Platgeta feel like the honest version of an aquarium.
What's worth knowing before you go
Day boats run from Colònia de Sant Jordi (and some from Porto Petro) roughly April to October; the landing quota is small, so book days ahead in summer. Yachts need a mooring-buoy permit issued by the park — anchoring on the Posidonia is banned and enforced. On the island you can walk freely only around the port and castle; the lighthouse and ridge routes are guided. There is a small museum in the old wine cellar (Es Celler), a cantina, and a fourteen-bed refuge for the one way of sleeping in the park. Most day boats finish inside the Cova Blava, a sea cave where the afternoon light turns the water electric blue, and let you swim it.
The connoisseur's booking is a September weekday: falcons still hunting, the sea at its warmest and emptiest, and the castle terrace to yourself while the boat crew waits below.