Es Princep is a new building on old ground. A Mallorcan family, the Mairatas, bought the plot in La Calatrava, Palma's old tanners' quarter, at auction in 2012 and opened the hotel in February 2018 with 68 rooms. It stands just inside the city's sea walls, above the Baluard del Príncep, and shares the bastion's name. Digging the foundations turned up an old tannery's pits, which are kept on show, and the family still runs the place. The MICHELIN Guide gives it one Key.
The rooms borrow the stone, wood and leather of the island's country houses, and what separates the seven categories is where the windows point. The 22-square-metre Standard is on the lower floors facing a narrow lane, and the Superior, at 25, looks over the city. The Deluxe Lateral Sea View has a side view of the sea; the Premium Sea View, at 30 square metres, is the first room sold on a full view of the sea. The Junior Suite looks over the old town or the walls from the first two floors, its Sea View twin faces the sea from the top floors, and the 55-square-metre Signature Palma Sea View Suite adds a sitting room. Every room comes with the spa downstairs: an 18-metre pool, a sauna, a Turkish bath and a hot tub.
The view is the reason to choose it. The sea-facing rooms look out across the bastion, a belt of pines and the coast road to the water, about 200 metres off. The roof is better still: a top-floor terrace above the pines, with the open bay in front, the cathedral over the old-town roofs to the west, and an infinity-edge pool kept for hotel guests. A late breakfast is served up there from 10.30 on sunny mornings, and towards dusk the music rises and Palma comes up for sunset. Downstairs, Fernando Pérez Arellano cooks long tasting menus at Zaranda, which holds one MICHELIN star, and a glass floor there shows the old tanning pits.
The trade is that the view is not in every room. The Standard faces a lane and the Superior the city, so Es Princep starts to make sense at the Premium Sea View, which on a Tuesday in May cost about 290 euros a night more. The rooftop pool is small and the bar around it is open to non-residents, so do not expect the roof to yourself at sunset. Zaranda publishes hours only for March to October, four to six nights a week, and takes no one under 16. Book it for a city stay with the bay in the window and the cathedral along the walls, and pay for the sea.
