La Calatrava is Palma's oldest surviving quarter, occupying the hillside between the cathedral and the former Jewish district to the east. The name comes from the military order that held the area after the Christian reconquest of 1229, but the streets themselves follow the plan of the Moorish city they replaced. This is where to find the Arab Baths, the Museu de Mallorca, and a concentration of Baroque merchant palaces whose carved stone facades and shaded courtyards speak to the wealth Mallorca accumulated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Walking through La Calatrava means accepting that navigation is largely improvised — the streets are narrow, irregular, and often unmarked, but getting lost is rewarding. The neighbourhood remains genuinely residential rather than wholly touristic: laundry on balconies, corner shops, old men playing cards in doorways. The architecture is layered across a thousand years, Roman, Moorish, Gothic, Baroque, and occasionally modern, all compressed into a few dense blocks on the hillside above the sea.