Castell de Bellver
The name gives it away: Castell de Bellver means 'the castle with a lovely view', and the hill above Palma delivers exactly that — a panorama of pine woods, the old city, the Badia de Palma and open sea beyond. What the name doesn't prepare you for is the shape: circular, with a round courtyard at its heart, it is the only castle of its kind in Spain.
Built as a royal residence, it served that purpose for barely a generation before becoming, for two centuries, a prison. You can still read the graffiti prisoners scratched into the stone on the upper terrace — a quiet, unsettling detail that the views alone would never give you.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to time it for a weekday morning, when the courtyard is quieter. The Torre de l'Homenatge — the detached Homage Tower — is easy to overlook; don't. And the dungeon chamber known as 'the Pot' (Olla) makes the castle's long history as a prison feel very immediate, very fast.
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How Castell de Bellver came to be
Construction began in 1300 on the orders of Jaume II, King of Majorca, and was largely complete by 1311. The architect Pere Salvà — who also worked on the Palau de l'Almudaina nearby — designed the castle's distinctive circular plan, a form almost without precedent in Spain. Despite its ambitions as a royal seat, only King Sanç in 1314 and Aragon's Joan I in 1395 ever lived here for any meaningful stretch.
From 1717 the lower levels became a prison, a function that persisted through the Wars of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars and, finally, the Spanish Civil War, when 800 republicans were held here and forced to build the road that still connects Palma to the castle gates. The most celebrated prisoner was the Enlightenment writer Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, who spent six years here from 1802 and produced the first detailed description of the building. It became a museum in 1932, restored in 1976 to house the city's history collection.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
The hill is exposed and the walk up from the bus stop is open to the sun; in July and August that ten minutes can be genuinely hot, so go early or late in the day. Spring and autumn are the most comfortable seasons for the outdoor terraces and the moat walk.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.