The Sun has been to Mallorca Rocks, and report:

YOU’RE chilling on your hotel balcony, watching the sun set after a day of sizzling pool action.

And the best is yet to come - you grab a cocktail and prepare to enjoy top seats at one of the hottest gigs of the summer as the best bands around play just below your room!

Welcome to Mallorca Rocks - the coolest way to enjoy music and more this season at bargain prices.

The original, Ibiza Rocks, has been a favourite with celebs and now creator Andy McKay has opened a new budget hotel, bar and concert venue in Magaluf to offer young Brits another option for a music-soaked sunshine break from less than £112 a week. Over the summer, acts headlining at Mallorca Rocks include Dizzee Rascal, The Courteeners and Pendulum and all will be free for hotel guests.

I was invited to the sunny isle for the opening and was pleasantly surprised.

I had my doubts about going back to Magaluf ten years after my original visit as a wide-eyed, binge-drinking teenager.

But the planners have done a great job with the hotel, creating a clean and simple near-replica of the Ibiza Rocks resort. An enormous pool sits in the middle of a square of 12 apartment blocks, with a huge permanent stage for the gigs.

Rooms are basic-but-modern cool, with whitewashed walls and pop art prints. Most sleep four with a twin bedroom and sofa bed in the lounge. There’s also a kitchenette, maid service three times a week and either balcony or terrace.

The resort is a holiday destination in its own right, with three new bars, a restaurant and fashion store.

At the opening weekend gig some fans had to be turned away as the 2,000 capacity crowd, spanning 18 to 50, crammed in to see The Kooks.

Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe and indie band Bombay Bicycle Club warmed things up before The Kooks’ Luke Pritchard launched into an energetic two-hour set.

Later Luke said: “I was chuffed to bits to be asked to open Mallorca Rocks. I’ve really enjoyed playing in Ibiza over the years but this feels like we’re on holiday.”

Mallorca Rocks is right in the centre of Magaluf and just 300 metres from the nearest beach, but there is plenty more on the doorstep if you fancy venturing out.

After a morning of sun worshipping by the pool, we caught a taxi to Camp De Mar Beach, a 20-minute ride away, for a paella and wine feast overlooking the Med at Resturante Illeta.

From there we headed to the capital, Palma, a further 15 minutes in a taxi, to catch a sunset harbour cruise. Back on dry land, we made straight for Palma institution Abaco.

This bar in the heart of the old town is part of a beautiful old mansion and features an eclectic interior as well as serving cocktails to die for.

Feeling slightly light-headed, we soaked up the view of glorious Palma Cathedral before stumbling upon a lovely tapas restaurant called Tast.

The next day we woke up bright and early to catch a two-hour ferry to Ibiza and a date with headliners Biffy Clyro - the first of 15 weekly gigs - at the original Ibiza Rocks hotel in San Antonio.

For photographs and to read the full article click here

For a Majorca map visit yourmajorca.net

The Daily Mail discover the magic that is Majorca…

Climbing mountain paths to the high peaks of the granite Tramuntana mountains guided by donkeys wasn’t what I had in mind when I boarded a cheap flight to Majorca. Isabella was the leader of the pack, followed a tail’s length by her young daughters Luna and Alba, with our breathless party in the distance. Donkeys have an advantage when climbing vertically in the rarefied mountain air of this lush Spanish island.

Luckily, lunch had been prepared by our hotel halfway up at a scenic spot by an old stonewalled shepherd’s hut, where we could see the Mediterranean glimmering hundreds of feet below. A large table, spread with a snow-white tablecloth, groaned under the weight of local cheeses, ham, fruit and wines. Oxygen might have been more appropriate.

Our lunch had been carried in panniers strapped to saddles across the backs of Isabella, Luna and Alba, so when we caught up with them, they were made a great fuss of. In the intoxicating high altitude of the Tramuntana, exhilarated by the climb (or perhaps the wine), life felt good. I’d imagined a holiday comprising mainly of sand, sea and sangria, but in the end it was all about the donkeys. What a clever idea by La Residencia, our hotel in Deia, to offer this service as an unexpected alternative to more hedonistic pleasures.

La Residencia, or La Res as it’s known to returning guests, was once four separate mansions, all grand fincas, which lorded it over Deia when the village was a remote peasant outpost on the island’s western coast, almost a day’s journey from Palma.

Today the hotel Mercedes glides guests from the airport past the bell towers and lemon groves to Deia in 50 minutes.

Richard Branson turned La Residencia into a luxury hotel and sold it to Orient Express. It’s a sumptuous retreat for celebrities, and I’ve seen many a famous face sinking into the hotel’s heavy Spanish sofas in cool oak-beamed lounges.

Princess Diana famously took refuge at La Res when her marriage broke up, and Andrew Lloyd Webber hired the whole hotel to celebrate his 60th birthday.

With separate villas linked by secretive stone passageways, Spanish arches and tumbling olive terraces, La Res gives up its secrets slowly. It has a private beach, a great spa, three pools, complimentary yoga and tennis courts.

Deia perches precariously high above the seashore clinging to the Serra de Tramuntana, flanked by pine and cedar forests, olive groves and lemon orchards.

Labyrinthine alleys of stone houses curl up to the 14th century church with its panorama of the coast tumbling down a stream-fed valley to Cala Deia, the town’s shingle beach.

It was here that Deia’s most famous resident, British poet Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, swam every night. Graves attracted bohemian followers and movie stars to his villa Ca N’Alluny (The Far House). Ava Gardner gave him the black matador’s hat he’s often seen wearing in photographs.

Graves’s son William has created a museum out of the family home. The desk on which Graves wrote I, Claudius, with all his artefacts of creation - ink, pens, reading glasses, and even the little flint arrowhead he twisted in the palm of his hand when seeking inspiration are all here.

Received opinion is that Majorca has stopped the unchecked concreting of the coast, though if you’re after the lobster-red package holiday of Magaluf, turn right when you come out of the airport at Palma.

The island has a six- mile seafront cycle path and beaches as beautiful as the Caribbean, fertile plains and charming fishing ports. It also boasts an awesome Carthusian monastery at Valldemossa, which celebrates Chopin, who wrote the Raindrop Prelude while wintering in one of the monk’s cells. This is the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth, and throughout the summer the monastery is presenting concerts and film shows to record the visit of the consumptive genius who came to the island to recover from TB.

The island was not kind to him. It rained constantly throughout his two-month sojourn at Valldemossa and locals were scandalised by his bohemian, nocturnal lifestyle with the cross-dressing, cigar- smoking French author George Sand.

They eventually made life so intolerable - even refusing to provide him with food - that he was forced to leave in a handcart with pigs.

This is long-forgotten. Today, the tourist board parades a series of Chopin concerts at Valdemosa and other towns he visited on the island. On this coast stand many grand houses, one owned by the eccentric Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, who bought up large areas of land for wildlife preservation and built a Moorish castle known as S’Estaca. It’s now owned by the Hollywood actor Michael Douglas.

Away from the holiday honey spots, Majorca is all sea-green olive groves, perfumed pine forests and further groves full of blood-red oranges, where you’ll have only the goats for company.

Good news for those who like 80’s music - China Crisis are coming to the island!

Here’s an announcement from the Liverpool band we saw on our facebook page:

The Legendary Liverpool Band CHINA CRISIS are to perform their first ever concert in Mallorca. The venue is Zhan Lounge at Golf Pollensa, which is situated just outside the village of Pollensa on the road to Palma.

There are two Ticket Options. (Booking Fees may apply)

General Admission Tickets are 20 Euros each. This gives admission to a Standing Only area to the rear of the VIP Reserved Section

VIP Tickets are 40 Euros each and include admission plus a 3 course dinner menu with wine,water and coffee.
All Seating will be reserved and table numbers will be forwarded to customers nearer the event The Band will be performing on the terrace directly in front of the VIP Section.
A support act will be announced closer to the event.

We advise you to book early as admission is by ticket only and there are only a limited number available

Buy and Print Out Your Tickets Now via our secure booking link at http://rspromo.co.uk/#/crisis-in-pollensa-mallorca/4536980298

Tickets can be purchased in Mallorca by contacting Peter at digamemallorca.com by phoning (34) 696 229 923

For any flight,accommodation and transportation enquiries please contact via website www.rspromo.co.uk

There are a limited number of rooms left at Hotel Paris in Puerto Pollensa
where the band will be staying. To book a room now please click the following link. http://rspromo.co.uk/#/pollenca-accommodation/4538915072

Band Members:
Gary Daly
Eddie Lundon
Aided by a solid four-piece band comprising:
John Legit (drums)
Eddie Robinson (bass)
Glyn Williams (keyboard)
and Colin Hinds (guitar).

For flights and Majorca hotels visit yourmajorca.net

With Mallorca Rocks due to open its doors in May, The Independent recently ran an article about the new hotel:

For years it was known as the “Gomorrah of the Med” – a paradise island of unparalleled hedonism where clubbers could behave as badly as they liked on the streets of San Antonio.

But Ibiza’s reputation rapidly improved when indie music invaded, bringing an altogether more calm clientele to the sun-kissed shores of the White Island. Now the promoter who helped cement Ibiza’s reputation as one of the summer’s best live music venues with “Ibiza Rocks” is hoping to do the same for nearby Mallorca.

Andy McKay, an Ibiza mainstay who has pioneered guitar music in his venues over the past five years, is currently putting the finishing touches to a major “Mallorca Rocks” hotel complex in Magaluf which will host many of the indie bands playing in Ibiza this year.

The opening of the hotel now means that bands and artists such as The Kooks, Calvin Harris, Dizzee Rascal and Pendulum will play sets in both Ibiza and Mallorca this summer. Other acts that have also been confirmed for Ibiza include The Prodigy, who were announced yesterday as the headline act, and Florence and the Machine.

Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke will also play his first ever live solo set in Ibiza this summer after the group split to follow their own individual projects.

Whether the 18-25 crowd heading to Mallorca this summer will be as enamoured of indie music as Ibiza’s regulars remains to be seen, but McKay is confident that guitar music will catch on.

“The tickets for Mallorca Rocks have only been on sale for a month and they’ve already overtaken Ibiza,” he said. “And Ibiza’s up 59 per cent on last year so far.”

McKay also hopes that an influx of indie fans will help provide Magaluf with a balance to the more drunken revellers that often crowd into the resort bars each summer.

“Magaluf has a lot of the problems that San Antonio had a few years back,” he said. “Ibiza Rocks has helped to change the nature of youth culture out there. Perhaps the same could happen in Mallorca?”

For more information about the island, including flights to Majorca visit yourmajorca.net

Reviews from the first guests at the Mallorca Rocks will be able to be read instantly on twitter

An interesting article appeared in the UK in the Daily Mail recently:

It’s hard to explain why visiting a writer’s home is exciting, but literary pilgrimages are very much my thing and I’ve made many a detour to pay homage. Mind you, thousands get excited following the Hollywood star trail, while a visit to Graceland is a must, both for true lovers of Elvis and the merely curious. Even sports-lovers gain a thrill rubber-necking at the tall gates of the homes of football stars.

So perhaps it’s not so strange that I should travel to the jewel-like island of Majorca for the first time, on the trail of not one writer, but two. Oh, and a genius of a composer as well.

While the new Mallorca Rocks is making the press before its opening in May, the island has a famous music history that goes back to when Chopin lived in Majorca.

The Daily Telegraph recently wrote about it in their travel section:

In 1838, the 28-year-old Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin arrived on the Spanish island of Majorca hoping for an exotic interlude of rest and work that would revive his tired spirits and failing health. With him was his lover, the radical-thinking, cigar-smoking, trouser-wearing French author Aurore Dupin, who published under the nom de plume George Sand. Just like us, they wanted to swap grey northern skies for warmth, romance and stimulating sights.

“Sun all day, and hot; everyone in summer clothing,” Chopin wrote home gleefully on November 19. His letters read like a brochure for the genteel station d’hiver that Majorca would become just 70 years later. “A sky like turquoise, a sea like lapis lazuli, mountains like emerald, air like heaven.” Accompanied by Sand’s two children, the couple settled into dreamy days of country walks and sightseeing while waiting for his beloved Pleyel piano to be shipped from Paris.

Sadly, the idyll didn’t last. The weather changed, Chopin was diagnosed with tuberculosis and the locals took against this unorthodox pair who didn’t go to church. Evicted from their palatial villa near the island capital, Palma, the family retreated inland to an abandoned Carthusian monastery in the hilltop town of Valldemossa, where they lived amid its sturdy cells for the next eight weeks. According to Robert Graves, who translated Sand’s spirited account of the holiday, Un hiver à Majorque, this scenic spot has “the worst weather of any village in the island”. “As the winter continued,” Sand duly noted, “every attempt at cheerfulness and calm was frozen in my breast by the gloom.”

Despite all this, it was a famously creative sojourn. While Sand’s description of the Majorcans as “monkeys” won her no favours, her book is both an enjoyable portrait of the island and an engaging meditation on why we travel. Chopin, meanwhile, wrote or completed some of his most loved works, including his Prelude in D flat major, appropriately known as the “Raindrop”. “His first days here were ones of great happiness,” explains the distinguished Majorcan pianist Joan Moll, who has studied this celebrated winter of discontent in depth. “They produced works that are intimate, contemplative and as luminous as the landscape. Then he realised his sickness was incurable …”

In 2010, as the world celebrates the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth, Valldemossa will be a key stop for fans touring the island. Once reviled, the two travellers are now miraculously rehabilitated in a whirl of commemorative events and souvenirs.

Every summer the monastery stages an acclaimed Chopin Festival, and visitors can tour the cells where the outrageous couple resided.

With three rooms and a garden terrace, a winter here doesn’t appear quite so bad. Star exhibits include a jar-filled pharmacy dating from the 1720s, an original manuscript from Chopin’s final works, and that long-awaited piano, which arrived three weeks before the party left.

So should we follow Chopin and Sand to Majorca? They were pioneers in what is now a well-established annual quest for winter sun, and their experience proves you can still have a fruitful time even if the weather is foul – but then, after three successive barbecue-less summers, we all know about that.

On the other hand, Majorca remains a choice spot for a winter weekend abroad. Easily reached and with more than 200 four or five-star hotels to choose from, the island is perfect for a few days of touring and tapas – come rain or shine.   To read the full article and see the photographs click here

For holidays in Majorca visit yourmajorca.net

Majorca is set to host an international film festival next year - here’s what the Daily Mail wrote about it:

On your next beach holiday to Mallorca, keep your eyes peeled, you could be rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s top film stars.

The popular holiday island announced today that it is planning to attract celebrities and film buffs from all over the world with an international film festival which will launch in 2011.

The organisers hope the event will provide a new cultural attraction to tourists and put Mallorca on the map in the arts world.

The Balearic Islands already attract many celebrities to their shores. Both Catherine Zeta Jones and Anna Friel own property in Mallorca and the likes of Rod Stewart, Claudia Schiffer and Jack Nicholson have strutted their stuff on its beaches.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1226687/Mallorca-bids-A-list-visitors-new-international-film-festival.html#ixzz0ehJxVerq

For more information about the island, including the latest Majorca weather and deals for holiday villas in Majorca visit http://www.yourmajorca.net

Alcudia Pollensa

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