Formentor is a peninsula of knife-edge ridges and plunging drops, and its highest point, Fumat, rises 384 meters straight from the water. Wind is the constant here. It can turn vicious without warning, and the viewing points along the headland are not for anyone unsettled by heights, since the cliffs fall away hundreds of meters to a sea that never seems to rest. Yet the place is beautiful precisely because it is severe. Pale limestone catches the light, small hidden bays like Cala Figuera, Cala Murta, and Cala Pi de la Posada notch the coastline, and the whole peninsula feels like the bow of a ship pointed at open water.

Reaching the tip used to mean a boat or a long walk. That changed in 1925, when the Mallorcan engineer Antonio Parietti threaded a 13.5 kilometer road from Port de Pollença out to the cape. Where the slope grew too steep, the road simply refused to give up, running oblique across the face and doubling back in switchbacks that hang over the drop. Parietti had a gift for this kind of impossible ribbon of tarmac; he also built the famous snake road down to Sa Calobra elsewhere on the island. Along the Formentor route, lookouts like the Mirador d'es Colomer, named for the small island of Colomer offshore, reward drivers who dare to glance away from the wheel.

For a time the whole of Formentor belonged to a poet. Miquel Costa i Llobera, one of Mallorca's most revered writers, owned the peninsula and immortalized it in his famous poem The Pine of Formentor, casting a lone wind-bent tree as an emblem of endurance. After his death the land was divided into lots and sold, and in 1928 an Argentinian art lover named Adan Diehl bought in and built the Hotel Formentor. The grand hotel drew a glamorous crowd to this remote corner and helped turn a poet's private wilderness into one of the Mediterranean's storied addresses, though the wind and the cliffs never lost their edge.

At the very tip stands the Formentor Lighthouse, lit in 1863. Building it was an ordeal. The location was so remote and rugged that materials could arrive only by sea or up a long mule track, and every stone had to be hauled to the end of the world and set against the wind. The reward is a panorama that few lighthouses can match. On a clear day the view sweeps to Menorca in the east, to Cala Figuera in the west, and south to Alcudia with its long sandy beach, the whole northern sea laid out from what Mallorcans call the island's Finisterre, its land's end.

The drama is not only above the waterline. On the southeastern flank, near a spot called Racó de Xot, a sea cave opens into the rock with two mouths set about eight meters above the surface. Inside, the passage runs some 90 meters long and 8 meters high, a cathedral of shadow and echo carved by the sea. It is more than a curiosity for kayakers. The cave has proven to be one of the most important sources of information about the prehistoric talaiot culture that shaped these islands, a reminder that people were reading the moods of this headland thousands of years before any road or lighthouse arrived.