“The white town of Soller lying in the lap of the hills, framed by converging mountain slopes ...”
(page [92])
“Many of the houses at Fornalutx are extremely old, with quaint staircases and old stone archways.”
(page [91])
Of the shorter excursions one well worth making is to the hill village of Fornalutx; the road runs up the valley of the Torriente, a bubbling hill stream with banks of blue and white periwinkle and a masonry bed overhung with thousands of orange and lemon trees, beneath which lie oranges in golden mounds, like cider apples in a Somerset orchard. In spite of the scale disease, which in latter years has wrought havoc in many groves—blackening the fruit and destroying the foliage—the oranges of Sollér are still famous, and fetch market prices ranging from a penny to fivepence a dozen, according to quality, while a dozen of the best lemons are here sold for twopence.
The streets of Fornalutx are principally flights of broad cobbled steps, and many of the houses are extremely ancient and fascinating, with quaint wooden balustrades, carved window frames, and old stone archways. One of those we visited had an oil mill on the premises, and we were shown the stone bins into which the panniers of olives are first emptied, and the great trough in which they are subsequently crushed with a millstone turned by a mule; the olive pulp is then placed in flat, circular baskets, and when these are piled up in layers to a considerable height, boiling water is poured over them and they are crushed flat by an immense baulk of timber that descends upon them from above. The exuding liquid flows into a tank below, where by the happy provision of Nature the oil is able to be drawn off by a surface pipe while the water is carried away by one at the bottom. The olive harvest takes place in October and November; the oil is much used in Majorcan cookery—though not to any unpleasant extent—and children are often seen eating slices of bread spread with oil in place of the jam or dripping with which it would be flavoured in our own country.