Alcúdia

Alcúdia anchors the north of Mallorca, where the bays of Pollença and Alcúdia meet. Its oldest layer is Pollentia, founded in 123 BC and the leading Roman city in the Balearics, with a forum, a theatre that held around 2,000 people, and a residential quarter you can walk through; finds sit in the town's Monographic Museum. Centuries later the medieval town was walled with stones lifted straight from the Roman ruins, so columns and ashlars turn up embedded in the 14th-century walls of the compact old town. The third draw is Platja d'Alcúdia, the longest beach on the island — roughly seven kilometres of shallow, sandy bay that keeps going toward Can Picafort. It's an easy place to combine a morning of ruins and old streets with an afternoon on the sand.