Menorca

Beyond Es Castell, the main coastal road clips down towards the mouth of Port de Mao before veering right for Sant Lluis Keeping straight, you'll come to a narrow country lane that leads past the turning to Sant Esteve (see opposite) and then reaches in about 300m more a dead end at the zona military. This restricted mili¬tary area sprawls over the inlet's final headland, where the Emperor Charles V built an imposing star shaped fortress in the 1550s, naming it Fort Sant Felip after his son, later Philip I.

Once Menorca's greatest strong¬hold, the fort was adopted and adapted by the British, who controlled the seaway from here. This irritated the Spanish no end and so, when Menorca was returned to them in 1782, at the end of the second British occupation, they promptly destroyed it which, in retrospect, seems more than a little defeatist.

After all, although it's true that no colonial power could use it again, neither could the Spanish and a few years later the British captured the island with the greatest of ease. Today, nothing survives except the most fragmentary of ruins, though rumors persist of secret tunnels.
Doubling back from Fort Sant Felip, you've a short hop to SANT ESTEVE, an extraordinarily picturesque little village, whose old whitewashed houses are strung out along a slender cove with a turquoise sea lapping against crumbly dark cliffs.

On the far side of the cove, near the end of the village, a tunnel burrows into the hillside to enter what was once Fort Marlborough June-Sept Tues-Sat 10amlpm & 58pm, Sun 10am-lpm; Oct-May Tues-Sun 10am-lpm, an intri¬cate, largely subterranean stronghold built to guard the southern approach to Fort Sant Felip by the British between 1710 and 1726. The fort, which was named after one of Britain's most talented generals, Sir John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, is a complicated affair, begin¬ning with a long gallery dug into the soft rock with counter-galleries cut at right angles to detect enemy attempts to mine into the fortress.

In addition, the main gallery encircles an interior moat dry now, but once filled with water and comes complete with gun slits that would have been used to fire on the moat from every angle. In turn, the moat encircles a small fortified hillock, the most protected part of the fortress and once the site of an artillery battery that had rhis stretch of the coast in its sights. Fort Marlborough was besieged twice once by the French in 1756 and once by the Spanish in 1781 -and on both occasions it was captured, but only after a prolonged siege. Indeed, one of the advantages of this rype of fortress was that it could tie up a large enemy force for weeks and yet require a minuscule garrison the British put just sixty men here.

Beyond Port de Mao, the southeast corner of Menorca, delineated by the road between Mao and Cala en Porter, consists of a low-lying limestone plateau fringed by a rocky shoreline with a string of craggy coves. [n recent years, this stretch of coast has been extensively developed and today thousands of villas cover what was once empty scrubland. The result is not pretty and, although many prefer this low-rise architecture to the high-rise hotels of the 1960s, it's difficult to be enthusiastic, especially in Cala en Porter, the biggest and perhaps the ugliest urbanitzaci6 of the Jot. That said, the coast itself can be beautiful, and the resort of Cala d' Alcaufar, one of the earliest develop¬ments, fringes a particularly picturesque cove. Inland, lies an agricultural landscape crisscrossed by country lanes and dotted with tiny villages, plus one town mildly diverting Sant Lluis.

Most of the district is devoted to villa style accommodation and package tour operators rule the local roost, so it's lean pickings for the independent traveler. That said, there's a reasonable chance of finding a room here and there amongst the southeast's scattering of hotels and hostels’, with Cala d' Alcaufar being the best bet.

From May to October, getting around by bus is fairly straightforward. There are hourly buses from Mao to Sant Lluis and Punta Prima, as well as regular services to Cala en Porter and Cala d'Alcaufar; in winter, there's a good bus service from Mao to Sant Lluis and Cala en Porter, but nothing at all to Punta Prima and Cala d' Alcaufar. Bear in mind, however, that, with the exception of compact Cala d' Alcaufar, all of these resorts spread for miles, and if you've rented a villa you could be facing a very long, hot and confusing trek from the nearest bus stop. To avoid exhaustion, ring for a taxi from

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Adrian vultur writes for things to do in spain