Inca
Thursday morning, the streets around Plaça d'Espanya fill with stalls selling leather belts, carved olive wood and lace, and for a few hours Inca looks like the market town it has been for centuries. The rest of the week it belongs to the Mallorcans who actually live here — a proper working city in the island's interior, connected to Palma by a train that runs every twenty minutes and takes thirty-six.
Inca is where the island makes things. The old wine cellars, the *cellers*, have been turned into restaurants serving sopes mallorquines and gató d'ametlles, and the leather industry that replaced a collapsed viticulture eventually produced Camper. The centre is largely pedestrianised, the squares are palm-lined, and the pace is nothing like the coast.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to time it around Dijous Bo — the third Thursday of November, when the largest market on the island takes over the town. Beyond that, they eat in one of the old cellers on a weekday, when the tables are full of locals rather than visitors, and they walk up to Puig de Santa Magdalena for the view across the whole island.
Deals in Inca
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How Inca came to be
People have lived in this part of Mallorca for more than three thousand years. The Romans arrived in 123 BC under Quintus Caecilius Metellus, absorbing existing Talaiotic settlements that persisted well into the 5th century. Under Islamic rule the town was called Inkàn, and the Arabic engineering of that period — underground water channels known as *ganats* — still marks the landscape. By the time of the Catalan conquest in the early 13th century, Inca held the second largest population on the island.
The bubonic plague of 1652 cut that population from roughly five thousand to under two thousand. The town rebuilt itself on wine production, then lost that industry to phylloxera in the late 19th century and turned to leather. In 1900 the Queen Regent formally granted Inca the title of City. Lorenzo Fluxà founded Camper here in 1975, drawing on a family shoemaking tradition that stretched back to 1877.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Inca shares Mallorca's Mediterranean pattern: hot, dry summers and mild winters. Spring and autumn bring the most comfortable temperatures for walking the town, and November — despite being late in the year — draws visitors specifically for Dijous Bo.
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.