01
The fortress gate
The arrival is half the property's voice. A castellated wall, a single arched gate, a row of olive topiaries — and beyond it, no road. Cars stop here; the rest is walked.
Bay of Palma · Mallorca
Cap Rocat
A nineteenth-century coastal fortress on the south side of the Bay of Palma, restored as a thirty-room hotel — battlements, sentry rooms cut into the cliff, two restaurants and a…
The verdict
A military fortress turned thirty-room hotel, kept as a fortress in everything but the kitchen. The view is the bay; the silence is the rule. Mallorca seen from a place few of its visitors ever reach.
From the editors · Vedere House
The particulars
- Style
- Nineteenth-century coastal fortress, converted by Antonio Obrador
- Setting
- A private cape on the southern arm of the Bay of Palma, fifteen minutes from the airport
- Rooms
- Thirty in all — Sentinelles cut into the cliff, Doble Fortaleza in the old guardhouses, suites with private terraces and plunge pools
- Tables
- La Fortaleza for the formal evening; Sea Club for lunch above the cove
- Spa
- A long lap pool in a stone-walled gallery, treatments in the lower bastion
- Best for
- A long quiet week, no car needed once the gate closes behind you
- Season
- April through October; the hotel sleeps from November to March
Cap Rocat sits on a rocky headland on the southern side of the Bay of Palma, fifteen minutes from the airport and a world away from the rest of it. The buildings began as a coastal fortress in 1875 — sentry posts cut into the cliff, a powder magazine, a guardhouse, a battery wall — designed to watch the bay and never quite called on. The Mallorcan architect Antonio Obrador took the site over in the 2000s and spent years turning the forms back to themselves, room by room, without softening what they were.
There are thirty rooms in all. The Sentinelles, the most particular of them, were cut from the rock where the artillerymen once stood; each has its own stone terrace and a small plunge pool above the water. The Doble Fortaleza rooms occupy the old guardhouses, vaulted in stone and kept restrained. The largest suites have gardens, gazebos and a length of wall to themselves.
Two kitchens carry the day. La Fortaleza takes the formal evening inside the old powder magazine, ochre curtains around bare stone; the Sea Club, lower down, runs lunch above the cove with the bay in front. The spa is a stone-walled gallery cut for a single long pool. Beyond the gate the cape is private — twelve hectares of garrigue, a path to the small beach, and the kind of silence that only a fortress can keep.
Signature moments
02
A Sentinella above the sea
The cliff-edge rooms are cut from the rock the artillerymen once stood in. A stone terrace, a small plunge pool over the water, the bay turning gold at eight. There is nowhere else on the island that feels quite like this.
03
Dinner at La Fortaleza
The fine table sits inside the old powder magazine, ochre curtains hung floor to ceiling and the stone left bare around them. Mallorcan produce, served slowly, in a room built for far rougher work.
Inside the house
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