Before I’d even laid eyes on a cala, the word conjured mystical visions. Formed by ancient rivers, calas are delightfully protected coves of turquoise water and white sand beaches framed by precipitous cliffs, and Mallorca, where we were spending a week chartering, has an embarrassment of calas. My partner, Michaela, and I figured a cala would be the perfect place to introduce our 1-year-old daughter, Sarah (sailing on her very first charter, if you don’t count our trip in Sweden when Michaela was pregnant) to the Mediterranean Sea. And when we arrived at our first cala, Cala Màrmols, on our first full day of sailing about 30 miles from the Navigare Yachting charter base in Palma, we were awestruck.
Sailing the island’s southeastern coast, we had left the high-rise hotels and busy beaches of Palma behind, watching the landscape become more rustic and wild. While skirting along a rather inhospitable-looking rocky coastline around the southern tip of the island, we suddenly caught a glimpse of a crack in the cliffs that opened up to reveal Cala Màrmols.
Màrmol is the Spanish word for marble. This particular cala got its name from the 60-foot-high marble cliffs that cradled a pristine bay of powdery white sand and water so ethereally blue, I didn’t have words to really describe it. To reach this place without a boat would require a long, circuitous car ride on narrow roads from Palma, followed by a 3-mile trek on foot. But
