Menorca, beautiful and wild

Ask a friend who has visited and he will tell you that Menorca is beautiful and wild. Try it: stop reading, pick up the phone, call him and see what he says. I'll wait here.

Done? What did I tell you? "Ah, look, Menorca is beautiful and wild!"

True: Menorca is a very beautiful island, with a ruggedly man-made coastline.

The northern side is mostly made up of sheer cliffs; it is the wildest side of the island. It contains a handful of beaches that can be reached by a combination of driving (to the car parks) and walking (from the car parks down to the sea) through even breathtaking views. You carry your lunch in your rucksack, along with bottles of water to survive the heat: no beach bars, at most a restaurant near the car park. The menu, incidentally, is the same almost everywhere, and if you are a lover of local dishes, be prepared for a continuous treasure hunt with rare revelations.

The south, south-east and south-west coasts are littered with urbanisations: soulless villages, I would say. They are neighbourhoods, even large ones, of villas and cottages, more or less leaning against each other, more or less large, more or less lived-in. And, usually, every urbanisation brings with it a few hotels. Sometimes these are hotels with vertical development, eight or ten floors of concrete at the edge of the sea, in other cases they are holiday villages with horizontal development occupying rather large portions of coastline.

Where, then, does the beach in the middle of nowhere in the photo come from? It is called Cala Tortuga and it is one of the beaches I liked best.

The other beaches I have been to, more or less in order of preference:

• Cala Tortuga, not to be missed, three quarters of an hour's walk from the car park near the Favàritx lighthouse
• Cala Pilar, red earth beach
• Cala Mesquida, with its charm and ice-cream van
• Cala Pregonda and Cala Viola, near Cap Cavalleria
• Cova des Pardals, to pretend to be Captain Hook
• Cala Parejals, a beach that is not a beach
• Cala Macarelleta
• Cala d'Algaiarens in La Valls
• Es Talaier
• San Tomas
• Son Bou
• Cala Blanca, which you can safely leave out