Fjord fiesta - Scanorama

SUITE LIFE
The most beautiful places are
often the hardest to reach. About
an hour’s drive north of Palma’s
airport, you come to a massif that
seems to climb out of nothing, a bit
like the rock of Gibraltar at Spain’s southernmost
tip.
Here, away from Majorca’s sun-bleached
plains and the clusters of honey-and-saffron
houses that make up its sleepy villages, is the
island’s northernmost point, the dramatic Cap de
Formentor.
As we navigate the cape’s cartoonish hairpin
bends, with only a flimsy rail to stop us sailing
off the cliff into the sea, we snatch glimpses of
the white-flecked rocks stood sentry in the bay
below. After what seems like an eternity (but is
really only 10 minutes), the palatial Hotel Formentor
appears cocooned among the pine trees
like a brilliant white pearl, with its tennis courts,
stables, gardens, restaurants, cocktail bars, and
one of Majorca’s best sandy beaches.
By the terrace restaurant El Colomer a pianist
plays a slow version of Over the Rainbow for
guests arriving to dinner. There are photographs
of the celebrities who have checked into the hotel
over the years: Winston Churchill, the Dalai
Lama, members of the Spanish and Monacan
royal families – Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly
honeymooned here – Julio Iglesias…
The only character missing among the vacationing
white-haired Charlie Chaplins, uniformed
Francos and chic Jane Birkins is the man
who made everywhere from Chicago and Toronto
to Paris, Pamplona, Key West and Kenya his own:
Ernest Hemingway.
I ask a waiter if the author ever stayed here.
“One moment,” he replies, and goes off to find
the hotel manager, Tomeu Palau.
Hemingway was never a guest of the hotel,
says Palau, who has worked here for more than
20 years, but he’d probably heard of it given the
circles in which he moved. “I just don’t think it
appealed to him. Hemingway was too restless, too
adventurous. This has always been somewhere
remote, a place with a life of its own, whatever’s
happening on the rest of Majorca. People even
think we speak in slow motion up here.”
THE HOTEL FORMENTOR opened in 1929. Its founder,
Adán Diehl, an Argentine millionaire and intellectual,
was both a dreamer and a risk taker. One
story tells how en route to Jamaica for his honeymoon
with his first wife, Delia Del Carril, he decided
to tempt fate. As their train passed through
Chile the newlyweds played spin the globe. Diehl
put a blindfold on his bride who was to stop the
ball with her quill; wherever she pointed to on
the map would be their final destination. They
ended up in Alaska, spending in Carril’s words a
few months in complete nothingness.
The couple later moved to Paris, where they
fell in with the artistic beau monde – Carril
would study painting under Fernand Léger –
before eventually going their separate ways.
It was then that Diehl was invited to Majorca.
During the 1920s, Palma had grown into a playground
for the rich thanks to a handful of new
luxury hotels. Inspired by what he saw, Diehl decided
to become a hotelier. However, not wanting
to compete with his newfound friends in Palma
he instead bought the entire Cap de Formentor
peninsula, which until then had been inhabited
by pirates, farmers who forlornly pulled Roman
plows through the unfertile soil, and a lighthouse
keeper out on the cape.
The first thing Diehl did was to build a house
for himself and his second wife, Maria Elena
Popolicio. Still standing, modernized and with its
own private swimming pool and tennis court, it
is now called the Villa Jardin and costs upward of
€14,900 a week. When we visit, The Who’s Pete
Townshend is staying there with his girlfriend,
Rachel Fuller.
Diehl’s wife thought that Cap de Formentor
would be their private paradise, but sitting on the
beach one day Diehl is said to have declared the
place “too lovely” not to share with the world.
“What would you think if I built a grand hotel,
On call: Receptionist
Javier Guerra
36 FEBRUARY 2013 SCANORAMA