Like most old settlements on Mallorca, the original village kept its distance from the water. Corsairs and raiders made the open coast dangerous, so Andratx grew several kilometres inland, tucked into the hills, while a small, defensible port handled what trade there was. The Romans knew the place as Andrachium and left behind a handful of coins and pottery shards — but no temples, no aqueducts, nothing grand. For centuries the living here was thin: subsistence farming on terraced slopes, fishing from the sheltered inlets, and little else. Poor roads and a shortage of good harbours kept the wider world at arm's length, which is more or less how the villagers preferred it.

When Mallorca's tourism boom arrived in the late twentieth century, Andratx had a problem: almost none of its coastline was sandy. The rugged shore that had once deterred pirates now deterred the package-holiday crowd, who wanted a beach to lie on. Only Camp de Mar offered a genuine stretch of sand, so that is where the big hotels rose. Everywhere else took a quieter path. Port d'Andratx and the little resort of Sant Elm filled instead with holiday homes for prosperous mainlanders; yachts crowd the marina's south side by the old harbour, while the larger craft — what one guide cheerfully calls the floating gin palaces — moor to the north. The hills above remain nearly empty.

Just offshore lies Sa Dragonera, an uninhabited sliver of an island four kilometres long and barely half a kilometre wide. Its serrated ridgeline gave it the name — the dragon's back — and today it is a nature reserve, home to thousands of lizards that scatter across the warm stone. It nearly became something else entirely. In 1974 a developer set out to cover it in a tourist resort and spent the next decade fighting for the right to do so. He lost. In hindsight the defeat may have spared him a far worse financial wound, and it certainly spared the island. The little harbour at Sant Elm shelters behind the islet of Pantaleu, and from its waterfront the dragon-island fills the horizon, close enough to reach by kayak or by the small boats that ferry visitors across to walk its single spine of a trail.

The hills around Andratx are stitched with human effort. A windmill built in 1784 still stands on the ridge north of town. On a hilltop above, the Castell de Son Mas dates to the sixteenth century, though its Gothic-and-Arabesque flourishes are a twentieth-century reinvention; it now serves as the town hall. Down in the old town, the church of Santa Maria d'Andratx traces its founding to 1248, though the building you see today is an eighteenth-century successor, while in the port Nuestra Señora del Carmen was consecrated in 1918. Four kilometres north of Sant Elm, the roofless shell of La Trapa remembers a stranger story: Trappist monks settled there in 1810, refugees from the anti-clerical fervour of Revolutionary France, and farmed the steep land until they abandoned it around the middle of the twentieth century. From Port d'Andratx begins the GR 221, the 'Route of the Dry Stone Walls,' which threads nine stages along the coast and through the Tramuntana to Pollença. On 12 August 2026, if the sky cooperates, this coast will also fall under the shadow of a total solar eclipse at sunset.