2 castles, (almost)

A must see in Mallorca is the 14th century Bellver Castle situated just to the west of Palma.

We parked at the entrance gates and walked up the 2 km gradual slope to the top not realising that we could actually have driven up.

At the top the castle looked superb...

...and in extremely good condition.

However, the most important thing on the agenda was a cup of coffee and then we found that on Mondays the castle closed for the afternoon and we were too late to go in - so we headed off in the direction of...

...Alaro Castle. When you leave the small town of Alaro you drive up a very long, winding, bumpy road as far as you are able and then you walk the remaining 1½ hours to the castle. We decided to stop for lunch first at the barn like building which declared itself to be the restaurant Es Verger.

The restaurant is highly rated and Rick Stein, the British TV celebrity chef, praised it for the shoulder of lamb - however we didn't see any lamb on offer, presumably out of season. 

In the restaurant you sit at bench tables and there are various other smaller rooms to accommodate other diners - we didn't like the look of the room next to the toilets so we sat on a table in the main room with other diners.

Although there is a wood fire and oven at one end most of the food comes from the kitchen - maybe some food is finished off on the fire and served out there to give it some authenticity but there wasn't much happening when we were there.

The service was fair but I had a job getting the password for the Wi-Fi. Our "waiter" said he didn't know it and told me to see his colleague whose eye I was unable to catch even though he knew I wanted to attract his attention. I eventually cornered him near the fire and he begrudgingly mumbled something in Spanish which I successfully translated.

I ordered a fry-up, (loose translation), which consisted of pieces of meat with some bits of vegetables and potato sliced as if they were going to be chips but cooked in olive oil so they were soft which did not seem very good value for 10€. There's not a lot of competition near the top of this mountain!

Margaret had a salad. The idea was that we could then share our 2 dishes but Margaret didn't like the look of my fry-up and the salad wasn't going to work in the sea of olive oil which was lurking under the soggy "chips". We felt this was a tourist rip-off and certainly would not return in the future even if the lamb was on offer.

When we emerged from our lunch we could see the ruins of the castle...

...but the weather appeared to be closing in...

...so we decided to call it a day and take the scenic route back...

...along the winding but reasonably wide and very beautiful coast road...

...with a stop for an afternoon coffee at a lovely hotel - much more to our taste.

Finally, we arrived at our hotel after only a moderately successful day...

...but enjoyable nevertheless.

One thing about Es Verger is that it makes us appreciate our own hotel and lovely food - we don't do rustic especially at 4* prices!