In the Calle de la Almudaina we come upon an ancient machicolated archway spanning the street. This once formed part of the wall that encircled the very kernel of the old Moorish city, and is the only survival of the five gateways that afforded entrance to the Citadel.
Not far from here is the equally ancient Moorish Bath, a small building some twenty feet square standing in an orange garden. It is in the Byzantine style, and is built of small bricks scarcely thicker than the intervening layers of mortar. The circular basin which no doubt occupied the floor of the building has disappeared, and the interior contains nothing but twelve much-worn pillars standing in a square, the eight centre ones supporting the cupola of the roof, while the four corner columns are by an ingenious—and I believe very unusual—arrangement omitted from the circle and left standing back in the angles of the building.
An air of incredible age pervades this blackened and cobwebbed relic of Islamism that lingers, unaltered and half forgotten, in the very heart of the Christian city. It forms—with the Almudaina arch and the signal tower of Porto Pi—the only authentic memorial of the race which occupied Majorca for a period of five hundred years.
The churches of Palma are many. One of the oldest is that of Monte Sion, which is said to have adopted both the site and the name of a still older Jewish synagogue: as one skirts its walls, huge, blank, and dungeon-like, one is quite unprepared for its exquisite doorway—one of the richest pieces of sculpture in Palma. It is a fine specimen of rococo, dating from 1683, and constituting in its delicacy of detail and beauty of proportion one of the finest of the many beautiful church doors for which Palma is famed.
Scarcely less magnificent is the west front of the great church of San Francisco, with its immense doorway in late Rénaissance style, surmounted by an exquisite rose window. This church contains the tomb of a scion of a noble Catalonian house—the famous Rámon Lull, warrior, scholar, and saint—who in the reign of Jaime II. founded a college for the instruction of twelve monks in oriental tongues, and was himself martyred in Algeria by the infidels whom he went forth to convert. His body was secured by some Genoese fishermen, who set sail for Italy with their precious burden; but when off the coast of Majorca their boat refused to advance till the martyr’s body was brought on shore, where it was laid to rest in its native soil by the monks of San Francisco.
“An air of incredible age pervades this blackened and cobwebbed relic of Islamism....”
(page [16])