Our new column, Punto 1445, looks at big trends shaping the Mediterranean — climate, ecology, movement, return. Not the kind that unfold over a season or a news cycle, but the ones that take decades, sometimes centuries, to become visible.
I am standing at 1,445 metres — or rather, where 1,445 metres used to be. Before the summit of Puig Major was levelled to make way for a radar station, this was the highest point on Mallorca. Today it is a restricted zone, a place that exists more on maps and in memory than as a destination.
That absence is precisely the point. A vanished peak is an unstable place to stand — and therefore a useful one. It reminds us that even the most solid landmarks are provisional, and that permanence is often an illusion. From somewhere that no longer quite exists, longer patterns come into focus.
From this imagined height, I look down across the island and out beyond the shoreline — and I think of the loggerhead sea turtles.
They were here long before us, long before Roman galleys or medieval ports. Then, for reasons we still only partly understand, they stopped nesting on Mallorca’s beaches. It may not have been human interference alone; shifts in climate, currents and sand composition all play their part. For centuries, they chose other shores in the eastern Mediterranean.
And now, after a long and quiet absence, they are coming back.
In recent years, loggerhead turtles have once again been nesting on Mallorca’s beaches, burying their eggs in the sand. Is it warming water? Subtle changes in currents? Or has the island simply become “right” for them again?
As someone who has lived here for four years, I find their return quietly symbolic. Punto 1445 is about looking at Mallorca through this kind of lens — not from the urgency of a single summer or tourist season, but from a perspective shaped by deep time. A view that takes in climate, geography and forces far older than our own plans and projects.
From this vanished summit, I invite you to look at the island not just as a network of roads, properties and investments, but as part of a much longer story — one in which some of the island’s oldest travellers, the sea turtles, are slowly deciding that it is time to return.
