Cala d'Or Holidays

Around two and a half hours from most airports across the UK & Ireland, though the flight is to Palma de Mallorca rather than to Cala d'Or itself. There is no Cala d'Or airport and there never has been, which catches a few people out when they search for one.

From Palma it is about 60km across the island to the resort, which is roughly an hour by transfer, taxi or hire car. It is one of the longer transfers on Majorca, and it is the price of the resort being on the quiet south-east coast rather than the busy south-west one.

Cala D’or is one hour ahead of the UK.

The official currency used in Cala D Or is the Euro.

The official languages in Cala d’Or are Spanish and Catalan.

By Majorcan standards, yes, a bit, and it is worth going in with your eyes open. This is a marina resort with a Michelin-listed restaurant in it, so it's not crazy expensive but it's not cheap either, as a guide, a beer runs €4 to €6 and a restaurant main €14 to €25.

The way people manage it is simple: eat on the marina once or twice because the setting is worth it, and eat in the streets behind it the rest of the week, where the same meal costs a third less. Supermarkets are normal Spanish prices, the beaches and the clifftop walks are free, and the road train costs almost nothing. It is not a budget resort and does not pretend to be, but it is fabulous and it is nowhere near Puerto Portals money either.

You can, but it is not what this resort is built around, and that is worth understanding before you book. Most hotels here run on bed and breakfast or half board, and a couple are self-catering, because Cala d'Or is a resort where eating out is the evening rather than a thing you do instead of the hotel buffet.

There are all-inclusive options if you want the budget settled, and BLUESEA Club Marthas and the adults-only Cabot Cala Ferrera are the two that do it properly. If you want a bigger range of all-inclusive options you might be better off looking at another resort.

Because one man designed it that way. In the 1930s the Ibizan painter Josep Costa Ferrer bought land on this stretch of coast and laid out a resort in the architecture of his home island: whitewashed walls, flat roofs, low buildings, no height. Planning rules have protected it ever since, which is why you will not find a single tower block here while plenty of Majorca's other resorts went up and up through the sixties and seventies. It is the reason Cala d'Or reads as Ibizan rather than Majorcan, and it is why the resort has aged considerably better than most.

It is roughly "cah-lah DOR", with the stress on the second half and the apostrophe doing nothing audible whatsoever, which is precisely why the spelling wanders about. The name is Catalan: cala means cove and d'Or means of gold, so the whole thing is golden cove, which is a fair description of what you get six times over.

Although the proper Spanish spelling is Cala d'Or, the apostrophe is the bit that actually catches people out, mostly when they are searching. Plenty of people look for cala dor holidays without the apostrophe, plenty more type calador holidays as a single word, and you will see Cala d'Or, Cala D'Or and Cala Dor used interchangeably by hotels, airlines and transfer companies.

They are all the same resort on the same stretch of Majorca's south-east coast. So if your booking confirmation spells it one way, your transfer voucher another and the sign at the hotel a third, nothing has gone wrong and you are in the right place.