Mallorca - Day One

We had a long day of sailing and ended the day in the Porto de Palma at Club Nautico marina. We chose this marina because it is located in the heart of Palma de Mallorca. We wanted to have Gwinn end his vacation in a nice place. As we were entering the Port, there was an architectural jewel on the horizon...it was the Catedral de Mallorca which is one of the most magnificent Gothic Cathedrals I've ever seen. Construction work started in 1230 but wasn't completed until 1600.

For dinner, I had decided we should have the famous Spanish dish "Paella". The security guard in the Club Nautico directed us to downtown but as we started walking there was a huge old City Wall that I wanted to explore. As we explored we found another jewel, the Santa Catalina district. This is a very old neighborhood where the streets are narrow and apparently is mostly for the locals...our kind of place. Gwinn suggested we do the tapas thing first so we stopped at place called "Wineing". We sat down and ordered Calamari, Cheese and Jamon (ham). Also came out the bread and olives which is automatically brought to the table and charged a per person rate of $1 Euro or so. If you don't want it, you just send it back. The waiter then brought us a card which looked like a credit card but he showed us how you insert it into a machine with many bottles of wine...you choose the wine you want and the quantity. You can choose a wine tasting portion for about $1 Euro or a quarter glass for about $2 Euro, etc. It was really fun because we could each pick a wine of our liking and the bill wasn't any more than if we had shared a whole bottle. Then off to dinner. We found a very intimate restaurant that had Paella (apparently it is normally a lunch item so it was hard to find). We ordered Sangria and Paella for three. The Paella was delicious (mostly rice, veggies, mussels, shrimp). Sangria is a red wine with oranges, apples, and lemon slices in it. There was a musician playing the guitar for the small crowd. Gwinn gave him a few Euros and he gave Gwinn one of his CD's. It is a great Spanish souvenir that we love listening to.

As we walked back to the marina, we passed several well lit buildings from the past.