Alcúdia: medieval ramparts and Roman Pollentia: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Pollentia to the medieval ramparts
Alcúdia grew up behind walls that King Jaume II ordered in 1298 and that a second ring of bastions later added to, yet the ground beneath it is far older: the Roman city of Pollentia, whose houses, forum and theatre lie just outside the gates.
The stops
King Jaume II ordered Alcúdia's walls built in 1298, to give residents a safe place to live in a town that pirates kept plundering. Three gates were built, and two still stand; this one, the Porta des Moll or Porta de Xara, sits at the end of the axis that divides the town and opens toward the harbour. Its two towers are joined by a guardhouse, and behind the arched doorway a covered space still shows the track of the portcullis.
Photo: Malopez 21 — CC BY-SA 4.0 The old towers and walls could not hold out against medium-calibre artillery, so a second ring of low, star-shaped bastions was built around them, finished in 1660. Sant Ferran is the main surviving bastion, and in 1892 a bullring was built inside it; a sentry box is still visible. A local heritage guide says that would make it the oldest bullring in Mallorca, and it held two big bullfights a year, on 25 July and 15 August.
Photo: Olaf Meister — CC BY-SA 4.0 This old manor house is now a public library. It opened in 1990 as a partnership between the town council and the Bertelsmann Foundation, launched at the initiative of the German publisher Reinhard Mohn, who had discovered this corner of the Mediterranean, and with the city library of his hometown Gütersloh as its model. It was later joined to the neighbouring Can Fondo, which one local guide calls a 14th-century landmark, and the two courtyards have been connected.
Photo: Antonio De Lorenzo -> Kufoleto — CC BY 2.5 The town hall, popularly called La Sala, was inaugurated in 1929 on the site of the houses of the University of the Villa. Guillem Reynés Font drew up the project but died suddenly, and Carlos Garau finished the building and changed some of the original plan. Look for the central tower with its clock, its roof laid with tiles, and a dragon-shaped weathervane on top.
Photo: Wistula — CC BY-SA 4.0 Alcúdia's second surviving gate is the Porta de Mallorca, also called the Porta de Sant Sebastià, which linked Alcúdia to the royal road to Palma. It still has its moat, took its present look from a restoration by G. Alomar in 1963, and carries a coat of arms from the 16th century. The wall it belongs to runs about 1.5 kilometres around the town and has 26 towers.
Photo: Malopez 21 — CC BY-SA 4.0 This small museum opened in 1987 in the Hospitalet, a former municipal hospital, as a branch of the Museu de Mallorca. It holds finds from the Roman city of Pollentia, mainly from the first and second centuries: coins, jewellery, tableware, inscriptions, amphorae, glass and mosaic fragments. Highlights are three marble sculptures from the forum area, a female bronze head and the inscription of Cornelius Atticus.
Photo: Olaf Meister — CC BY-SA 4.0 The church stands on the site of a 14th-century church that looked like a fortress and formed part of the town wall. Part of its roof collapsed in 1870, and it was rebuilt in neo-Gothic style, with the work lasting until 1893. Beside it is the baroque Chapel of Sant Crist, begun in 1675 and finished in 1697 for a 15th-century carved Christ that, according to tradition, sweated water and blood in 1507 during a drought.
Photo: Mike Lehmann, Mike Switzerland 15:49, 5 November 2006 (UTC) — CC BY-SA 3.0 Pollentia was a Roman city founded, allegedly in 123 BC, by Quintus Caecilius Metellus Balearicus, and its first documented remains belong to the first half of the 1st century BC. A devastating fire hit it in the 3rd century AD, yet the city lived on, and a fortification went up in the forum in the 5th century. Later people settled a little further north, where Alcúdia stands now. Digs, begun in the 16th century and busiest since the early 20th, have concentrated on the houses of Sa Portella, the forum with its shops, and the theatre.
Photo: Olaf Tausch — CC BY-SA 3.0 This small church, dedicated to Saint Anne and Saint Joachim, dates to the 13th century, and the oldest sources call it Santa María de la Torre; it is possibly the work of Diego Español. A partial dig in 2014 showed that it stands on Islamic-period levels and, beneath them, on Roman layers of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, with cultivation ditches from Roman farming. It was declared a cultural-interest asset in 2004.
Photo: Olaf2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 Built at the end of the 1st century AD on the edge of the Roman city, this theatre makes use of a small hill instead of being raised on stacked concrete vaults as Roman architects usually did. It held about 2,500 spectators, and what remains includes six rows of seating, the semicircular orchestra and the stage. Plays were staged here from the 1st to the 3rd century, after which graves were cut into the stage and the seating, and the poet Miquel Costa i Llobera later wrote poems about the ruins, among them one on this theatre.
Photo: Olaf Tausch — CC BY-SA 3.0
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