Mallorcan Finca

Explore the island of Mallorca out of season to avoid the blistering heat. The temperature hovers around 27° C (80° F) throughout autumn.
Received wisdom has it that to get to know the "real Mallorca", you must point your car due north at Palma airport and not spare the horsepower until you are safely up in the Sierra de Tramuntana mountain range, whose foothills act as a cordon sanitaire separating you, the authenticity seeker, from the great stonewashed down in Magaluf.

The key is to stay in a finca - a farmhouse - of which there are scores dotting the arable landscape. These establishments are testament to the island's agricultural history and evidence of its growing rejection of toxic, 20th-century-style tourism.
The Finca Son Rito is just a few minutes' drive outside Felanitx. (Campos, a dusty, normal sort of town noted for an incongruously handsome art nouveau-style cake shop is also nearby.) The building, rented out by the family business Mallorca Farmhouses, is a splendid conversion that sleeps up to 16 and stands amid 200 acres of cornfields and almond groves. The oldest, central part was built in the 17th century and is wonderfully solid, with everything made of marble and wood. Yet it is also ultramodern, as the two main bedrooms illustrate perfectly: in one, the ensuite bathroom has a clawfooted, rolltop bath looking out over a pool shaped like a cartoon speech bubble and on to a wall crawling with purple bougainvillea; the other is so modern and masculine it is like being inside a granite tennis court.
Outside is a small orchard of orange and apple trees; also a beautifully gnarled specimen whose Tolkeinesque arms shelter a dining table: a perfect place to breakfast on ensaimada, the local pastry.
On Sunday morning in Felanitx there is a weekly market. This winds on for street after street and is reassuringly mundane, the goods on offer include live birds of many kinds, pots and pans and an awful lot of towels. In the covered food section, people are selling large, orangey mushrooms, gathered from under pine trees and are around for one month of the year only.
Besides the market, Felanitx is also worth visiting for its handsome church, Sant Miquel. This was the scene of Mallorca's worst historical disaster when, in 1844, one of the building's side walls collapsed on the townspeople as they processed outside, killing 414 of them. A side chapel commemorates the event, and houses the statue of the virgin the victims were holding aloft when tragedy struck.
The market is the place to buy everything required for a paella - including the paellera, the special wide, flat, two-handled pan.

Getting there
Mallorca Farmouses (0845 800 8080) has a selection of villas, country retreats and rustic farmhouses, all with private pools, maid service and complimentary car hire.
Prices for hiring Finca Son Rito start from £1,495 a week in 2007. Smaller properties are available from £425 per week, for a two-bedroom farmhouse.
More information: Spanish Tourist Board: Mallorca