Quitting Santagný we drove on to Felanitx, a pretty little town surrounded by low hills whose crests are occupied by many windmills frantically waving their arms on the sky line. Windmills are everywhere. Some stand singly upon barrow-like mounds crowned with cactus tangles, others are massed upon ridges in the gregarious manner characteristic of Majorcan corn mills. All have either six or eight sails, which gives them a very full-bodied appearance; and some are furnished with tail feathers, and resemble large dragon-flies that have interrupted their whirring flight to settle for an instant with outspread gauzy wings upon a little tower of dazzling whiteness. An old miller leans out of a little upper window in one of the mills, filling it up so completely that we wonder if he will ever get back again.
“Buena vista!” we call up to him as he watches us from his lofty perch.
“Ah, yes!” he replies, looking far out over the sunny landscape, “from here one sees all the world!”
It is in truth a very lovely world upon which he looks down this bright March morning. The almond orchards are streaming down the hill slopes and invading the town in torrents of young spring verdure; the houses are screwing up their eyes in the sunshine, even the tiniest windows being half built up with slabs of freestone, while many are closed entirely. Old women sit at their doorways plaiting and spinning, and greet us cheerfully as we pass, and leaving the town we take a pretty road through pine and heath, almond and olive, arbutus and carob, and set out to visit the old castle of Santuíri. Within half an hour of our destination the carriage halts, and a rocky goat-path leads us to the summit of the crag upon which the ruins stand.
Santuíri was one of the great mediæval burgs of Majorca, and is in far better preservation than either of its fellows of Alaró or Pollensa. In the fifteenth century its walls were strengthened against an expected attack of the Moors, and much of these defences still remains.
Proud, and most desolate, is this old sentinel of the southern coast. Buzzards hang in mid-air beneath the battlements—brown specks against the dim blue plain below; sheep graze amongst spurge and St. John’s wort on the grassy knolls within the fortress. The old gray walls are trimmed with golden patches of coronilla and crowned with a chevaux-de-frise of bristling aloe spikes. A narrow path cut in the face of the crag, and unprotected by any parapet, leads to the machicolated gate tower; above your head there are slits for boiling oil, and at your back is sudden death in the shape of a precipice, with nothing to break your fall but the fixed bayonets of some huge aloes rooted in the crevices of the cliff below. Assuredly it was well to be on good terms with its lord when craving admittance to the Castle of Santuíri.
“All the windmills have either six or eight sails, and some are furnished with tail-feathers.”
(page [51])