Mondrago Natural Park is a beautiful area of beaches, forested coastal and cliff-side walks very close to the popular resorts of Santanyi and Cala D’Or in the south-east of Mallorca.
We were looking for somewhere to visit a bit different to the main tourist beaches – and Mondrago Natural Park’s description of having natural beaches accessed through woodland walks sounded ideal – and it really was.
We drove to Mondrago Natural Park from our villa in Porto Cristo and were pleased to find a large, well-organised car park with plenty of space, which you pay at the gate to enter.
There’s a small tourist information hut at the car park with some maps, but the maps didn’t make a huge amount of sense to us – so we followed the direction most people were walking in, which was down a tarmac road that appeared to head towards the sea.
After about 5-minutes walking down the hill, we arrived at the first place of interest, which is the Cala Mondrago beach – a reasonably large sandy beach with lifeguard and a restaurant next to it, with the kind of unbelievably clear, blue water we’d come to expect by now of these beautiful natural ‘cala’ beaches.
We sat here for a while to get our bearings and work out how to get around the park.
This was the height of summer and the temperatures were high. With the three children, all of us carrying some kind of supplies for lunch or the beach, we weren’t in the mode of wanting a long hike across the countryside – but we also wanted to do something a bit more varied than just sit down on the beach for the day, and it turned out Mondrago Natural Park provided the perfect opportunity for this.
There are several, relatively short (perhaps a couple of kilometres) marked woodland trails that take you to various different sightseeing points in the park.
Right next to the road by Cala Mondrago was route number 2, which we decided to follow up into the woods.
Route 2 at Mondrago Natural Park takes you towards Calo des Borgit – a small sandy cove beach surrounded by a rocky ledge that’s shaded by pine trees.
The route takes you through woodland with constant glimpses of the sea from the shaded cliff-side viewing points and, eventually, of Calo des Borgit beach, which looked like an extremely inviting destination to head to.
It took us about 15-minutes of walking from Cala Mondrago, around the number 2 route, to get to Calo des Borgit, which was a much smaller, quieter beach than the main Mondrago beach we started at.
Absolutely crystal clear water with golden sand and plenty of places to sit in the shade whilst we had our lunch and enjoyed the views of this stunning cove.
After we’d refuelled with our lunch and cooled off again in the stunning water, we followed the clearly marked trail back through the woods to where we first arrived at Cala Mondrago.
From here, you can see another beach across the bay, which is called Cala S’Amarador – so we decided to head over there to see what that beach had to offer.
We got distracted on the path over to S’Amarador by the rocky ledge that runs alongside the path, with many places to stop and sit and to jump or dive into the sea.
The sea at this part of the park is deep but perfectly clear – you can see all the way to the bottom as if you’re looking through glass and the rocky ledge attracts tons of fish, making it an amazing spot for snorkelling and swimming and jumping and diving for the more adventurous.
We spent a good hour at this spot, swimming and jumping in and enjoying the more natural features than the larger beach areas offer.
Once we’d had enough fun at this point, we carried on along the path to the Cala S’Amarador beach.
This one was a more tourist-friendly beach, again with lifeguards and facilities – not as ‘wild’ and natural as the Calo des Borgit beach in the other direction – but more easily accessible for those not keen on the longer walk.
From here, there are other marked trails heading up into the woods and across dunes.
We followed another – this time to the ‘S’Amarador view point’ (or ‘Mirador de S’Amarador’), which was only 5 minutes or so up a staircase into the woods, with more stunning views at the top over more of the unbelievably blue seas and sandy beaches of this part of the island.
On another day, we might have stayed longer and walked more of the trails – they all seemed to end up at beautiful natural beaches – but it was incredibly hot and our appetite for doing much more walking was disappearing fast.
Mondrago Natural Park gave us exactly what we were hoping for – a change from the more mainstream tourist beaches of the island, with more natural beaches and the chance to see some incredible views, but without having to put in too much effort with excessively long walks in very hot temperatures.
It was a perfect place to visit in every way and a great way to enjoy the stunning natural beauty of Mallorca in an easily accessible way.
Useful information
- If you’re coming by car, use this Google Maps link to the Mondrago Natural Park car park
- Then when you’ve parked, head by foot down the hill towards Cala Mondrago beach [Google Maps link here].
- Once you’re at Cala Mondrago beach, look for the signs for trail number 2 if you want to walk around to Calo des Borgit.