Travel tips for classic lovers – Palma de Mallorca / Valdemossa and Frederic Chopin

Chopin and Georges Sand’s stay in Mallorca became one of the most famous episodes of Chopin’s life. It was here that he composed the Raindrop Prélude, which became a symbol for the messed-up stay in the supposed paradise.

Chopin had just fallen in love with George Sand when the two decided to spend the winter of 1838/39 in the supposedly mild Mallorca. The reason was Sand’s son’s health problems and Chopin’s hope for recovery or at least relief from his lung disease. On November 7 they arrived in Palma de Mallorca and the whole thing started well. When they arrived at Villa Son Vent in Establiments on November 15, they began by enjoying the mild temperatures.

Soon the weather turned and an icy wind blew through the unheated house. Possibly the owner of the house expelled them for fear of tuberculosis and forced the couple to pay for the furniture, which he had burned for fear of infection. In any case, the son Maurice and Chopin caught cold and they moved to the monastery of Valldemossa, from which the monks had been expelled in riots three years earlier. They lived in an empty building surrounded by cemeteries, which stimulated their romantic imagination, but they continued to suffer in this stone building from the cold and rainy weather that never let up. Added to this were the hostile reactions of the locals, who were suspicious of the unmarried inhabitants of the sacred place and who feared infection from the coughing Chopin.

On February 13, they left Mallorca unnerved in direction of Marseille and later Paris. Chopin had been violently ill for a long time, and George Sand, to her chagrin, was not only a mother and writer, but also a nurse. She later described this stay in the famous essai “A Winter in Mallorca”.