In the Balearics there is an island with more than two prehistoric sites per square kilometre

The Balearics have such a fixed image that it is hard to associate them with anything else. And yet, on the most discreet of the four main islands there is a figure that throws anyone reading it for the first time.

Menorca measures 702 square kilometres, slightly less than the city of Madrid with its municipal district. On that surface more than 1,500 sites of the Talayotic culture survive. That is more than two per square kilometre.

01 The figure that does not fit the size

It is worth pausing on what that density means. We are not talking about one important site surrounded by empty countryside, which is the usual pattern of European prehistoric archaeology. We are talking about an island where, wherever you walk, there is one nearby.

In fact, the island's 702 square kilometres contain one of the world's highest densities of prehistoric archaeological sites in an inhabited territory. That last qualifier matters: this is not a desert or a depopulated area where nobody has built on top. It is an island with roads, villages and farming.

And that coexistence is exactly what makes the Menorcan landscape different. The monuments are not isolated inside a fenced enclosure: they stand in the middle of farms, beside tracks, inside grazing land. They are part of the countryside, not of the catalogue.

02 What each thing is

To read that landscape you need four words. The first is talayot: a large dry-stone tower, circular or square in plan and shaped like a truncated cone. It is the structure that gives the whole culture its name and the one you see from a distance.

The second is taula: two enormous stone blocks, one vertical and one horizontal on top, forming a T. The word means table in Catalan, and it describes exactly what it is. They never stand alone: always inside an enclosure.

The third is naveta: an elongated funerary structure, its dry-stone walls closing in towards the top, whose profile recalls an upturned boat hull. Hence the name. And the fourth is the habitation circle, the dwelling of these settlements.

03 Two forms that exist nowhere else

Here is the fact that lifts the island above simple abundance. Two of those four structures are found nowhere else in the world: the naveta and the taula enclosure.

The naveta is a funerary type found only on Menorca. Not on Mallorca, forty kilometres away and sharing the Talayotic culture; not in the rest of the Mediterranean. Only here.

That makes the island more than a place with a lot of remains. It makes it the only place where you can see a complete kind of architecture, with its form, its technique and its function, that has no equivalent anywhere else on the planet.

04 Why they are still there

The reasonable question is how that much prehistoric stone survives on a small island inhabited continuously ever since. And the answer has to do with the material and with land use.

Everything is built in dry stone, without mortar, with large blocks quarried from the island's own rock. That technique is the same one that has gone on being used here for centuries to raise the walls dividing the farms, so it never stopped being an ordinary way of building.

The other factor is that much of the island's interior has gone on being agricultural. A talayot in the middle of a pasture is less in the way than one in the middle of a development plot, and that is why it has reached us with its stone in place.

05 September 2023

Formal recognition arrived late and all at once. On 18 September 2023, at the 45th session of the World Heritage Committee held in Riyadh, the ensemble was inscribed under the name Talayotic Menorca.

It was also Spain's fiftieth inscription on that list, the figure that put the country in first place worldwide by number of listed properties. A fact that says a good deal about the weight of the Menorcan ensemble.

The listing does not cover all 1,500 sites: it takes in a selection of the most representative, spread across the island. The rest are still there, on private farms and grazing land, forming the background of the landscape.

06 How to travel an island like this

The first practical consequence is that you do not need an archaeological itinerary. At that density, the sites turn up on their own: beside the roads, at the edge of tracks, visible from the car.

The second is that it is worth learning to tell the four forms apart before setting out. A talayot and a naveta are completely different things — one is a tower, the other a tomb — and without that distinction everything turns into similar piles of stone.

And the third is the one that changes the trip. Looking at Menorca through its stone rather than its coast reorders the whole island: it stops being a beach destination with a few scattered remains and becomes a territory built three thousand years ago that can still be read whole. The strange thing is not that 1,500 sites survive. The strange thing is that they are still part of the countryside.