Visit Son Marroig, the Archduke Ludwig Salvator's estate, and look down on Sa Foradada

The English poet and novelist Robert Graves was one of the first foreigners to settle in Deià, on the Tramuntana coast of Mallorca, where he and Laura Riding ran the Seizin Press. His house is now a museum. Since the 1960s and 70s artists have followed him to the village. Along the coast is Son Marroig, the great estate of the Archduke Ludwig Salvator, with the headland of Sa Foradada below it.

Deià: Robert Graves's Village

Walk a stretch of the GR 221, the Ruta de Pedra en Sec, on the mule paths and stone steps the terracing was built with

Look at a terrace wall closely and work out that there is no mortar anywhere in it

Find the cisterns, water channels and charcoal-burning platforms that made a vertical mountain farmable

Go into the Real Cartuja at Valldemossa and find the cells where Chopin and George Sand spent the winter of 8 November 1838 to 13 February 1839

Read what George Sand wrote about the Mallorcans in A Winter in Majorca, and work out why the island has mixed feelings about her

Work out the rainfall difference: up to 1,507mm a year here against under 400mm in parts of southern Mallorca

The Tramuntana runs ninety kilometres along the north-west of Mallorca and it was listed by UNESCO on 27 June 2011 not for the rock but for what people did to it — a thousand years of dry-stone terracing, water channels, cisterns, charcoal platforms and mule paths, built without mortar to make a near-vertical limestone range produce olives and oranges. The technique has its own name, pedra en sec, and it is still practised. This is also the wet side of the island: up to 1,507 millimetres of rain a year against under 400 in parts of the south.

The Serra de Tramuntana: A Mountain Range Built by Hand

Ride the Ferrocarril de Sóller from Palma through thirteen tunnels in the original wooden carriages

Take the open-sided tram of 1913 from Sóller down through the streets to Port de Sóller

Work out why the line exists: the orange growers built it themselves to get their fruit off an island valley with no road worth using

Drink a fresh orange juice in the Plaça and find the Modernista bank and church front by a pupil of Gaudí

Walk up to the Mirador de Ses Barques above the port for the view back down the valley

Sóller sits in a bowl in the Tramuntana that was effectively cut off from the rest of Mallorca until 1912, when the orange growers paid for their own railway and drove thirteen tunnels through the mountain to reach Palma. It is still running, on the original wooden rolling stock, and it is one of the great short train journeys in Europe. At the other end an open-sided tram of 1913 rattles down through the town to the port. The valley is still full of orange and lemon groves, which is what the railway was built to move.

The Sóller Railway and the Orange Valley

Drive the road down to Sa Calobra and through the Nus de sa Corbata

Walk from Sa Calobra into the mouth of the Torrent de Pareis

Find out why the Torrent de Pareis produces a quarter of Mallorca's rescues

Look for the plants found only in the Balearics on the gorge walls

The road down to Sa Calobra, a cove in Escorca on the north coast of Mallorca, has more than eight hundred bends counted from Palma, and at the Nus de sa Corbata, the tie knot, it loops round and passes under itself. At the bottom the Torrent de Pareis reaches the sea: a gorge that starts at S'Entreforc, where the Gorg Blau and the torrent of Lluc meet, and holds more than 300 plant species, a tenth of them found only in the Balearics. It has been a natural monument since 2003. Walkers descend it from Escorca to Sa Calobra — and it accounts for a quarter of all mountain rescues on Mallorca.

Sa Calobra and the Torrent de Pareis

Work out what it is standing on — Roman and Renaissance sea walls, which no other Gothic cathedral does

Look at the rose window: thirteen metres across, the largest original one in the Gothic world

Come on a morning in early February or November when the light through the rose window lands under the one opposite

Find Gaudí's interventions in the interior and work out which parts are his and which are medieval

Find out where the stone came from — sea caves quarried into a cliff at Portals Vells and shipped round the bay

Palma cathedral is Levantine Gothic built on the edge of the bay, standing on the Roman and Renaissance walls that defended the city — the only Gothic cathedral anywhere that does. It holds the largest original rose window in the Gothic world at thirteen metres across; there are bigger ones, but they are neo-Gothic. Its nave is among the tallest in European Gothic. Some of the stone came from sea caves cut into the cliff at Portals Vells and shipped round to Palma. Gaudí was brought in at the start of the 20th century to rework the interior, and left before finishing.

La Seu: The Cathedral That Stands on the Sea Wall

Hear Els Blauets sing, the boys' choir named for the blue cassocks they wear

Find La Moreneta, and find the torrent behind the sacristy where a shepherd and a monk are said to have found her

Walk part of the Camí Vell from the coast up to the sanctuary, which is how people used to arrive

Do the Marxa des Güell a Lluc a Peu in August if you want to walk from Palma overnight with everyone else

Walk into the Tramuntana around it, which is the roughest ground in the Balearics

Lluc sits high in the Serra de Tramuntana and is the spiritual centre of Mallorca — the sanctuary of the Virgin of Lluc, known as La Moreneta, which legend says a shepherd and a monk found on a rock outcrop beside the torrent that still runs behind the sacristy. Spain has other black Virgins called moreneta — Montserrat and Candelaria among them. Its choir school, Els Blauets, is named for the blue cassocks the boys wear and sings the office in the basilica. Pilgrims walk up from Palma overnight every August in the Marxa des Güell a Lluc a Peu. The mountains round it are the roughest country in the Balearics.

Lluc: The Monastery in the Middle of the Tramuntana

Walk the canal paths into the reed bed at first light, which is when the marsh is actually working

Work out what the canals are: a 19th-century drainage scheme that the park now uses to manage water levels

Get to a hide on the lagoon and work out which birds are resident and which are simply passing through

Walk the complete medieval circuit of walls round Alcúdia old town

Find the Roman town of Pollentia outside the walls, with its forum and theatre

S'Albufera de Mallorca is the largest wetland in the Balearics — reed bed, canal and lagoon behind the bay of Alcúdia, and a natural park protecting 1,687 species across its marshes and dunes. The canals through it are a 19th-century drainage scheme, now used in reverse to manage water levels for conservation, and the marsh is a major stopover for birds crossing the western Mediterranean. Behind it Alcúdia still has its complete medieval walls, and the Roman town of Pollentia sits just outside them.

Alcúdia and S'Albufera

Walk out onto Omaha Beach at Les Moulins and find Anilore Banon's three stainless-steel sculptures standing in the sand — the wings of brotherhood, rise freedom, the wings of hope — then turn to the signal monument behind them and pick out the two frescoes to the US 1st Infantry Division and the 116th Regimental Combat Team

In the Normandy American Cemetery, walk the ten grave blocks of the 9,388 buried here, 307 of them unknown, and find block F, row 15, graves 11 and 12 — the brothers Preston and Robert Niland, whose story gave Spielberg the idea for Saving Private Ryan

At the Pointe du Hoc, look over the 25 to 30 m cliff the Rangers climbed, then walk the cratered clifftop to the gun emplacements and work out how many of the six held only wooden poles when the Rangers reached them — the real 155 mm guns had been moved 1,300 m inland

Visit the Musée Mémorial d'Omaha Beach at Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, a few hundred metres up from the Les Moulins draw, and compare the German gunner's view from the WN 62 position east of it with the beach the landing craft came in on

On 6 June 1944 American troops landed under heavy fire on the eight kilometres of Omaha Beach between Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes and Vierville-sur-Mer, and above it the Normandy American Cemetery holds the graves of 9,388 people, 307 of them unknown. A few kilometres west, US Army Rangers scaled the 25 to 30 m cliff of the Pointe du Hoc to silence a battery of six 155 mm guns — and found wooden poles in the emplacements, the real guns having been moved 1,300 m inland. Bomb craters and casemates still pock the clifftop.