Pleta de Mar
Hotel · Canyamel, Spain
9.6
Exceptional
118 reviews
Live pricespick your dates
2026-08-12 · 6 min read
A pine wood, a dry-stone wall, and the sea at the end of the garden
Mallorca has two reputations and only one of them is deserved. On the east coast, above the bay of Canyamel, the island goes quiet: pine wood down to the rocks, dry-stone walls, olive trees that were old before the airport existed. Pleta de Mar sits inside its own piece of that wood, takes adults only, and is built so low and so pale into the ground that from the coast path you would struggle to say where the hotel starts.
A pine wood with the sea at the bottom of it
The property runs down through its own trees to the water, with no neighbour in the frame and the loudest thing on site usually the wind in the pines. At the far end of the bay a cliff drops into the sea, and at sunset that headland is the whole view from the western edge of the garden.
There is more to walk to than the beach. The thirteenth-century Torre de Canyamel stands a couple of kilometres inland, and the Coves d'Artà — sea caves in the cliff at the end of the bay, with chambers over forty metres high — are a short drive along the coast. Behind the resort, the Parc Natural de la Península de Llevant opens into hiking country away from the coast road, and the hotel rents bicycles and runs tours into it.
Pleta means a walled enclosure
A pleta is a Mallorcan sheepfold — a low wall around a piece of ground — and the hotel keeps the idea in its plan. There is no repeated corridor. The suites are separate single-storey buildings arranged around courtyards and gardens, which is why the place reads as a hamlet rather than a hotel with a lobby at one end.
The rooms are Mallorcan in structure and modern in everything else: heavy timber beams overhead, woven headboards, pebble-shaped lights, floors of pale oak. Each opens to its own courtyard or straight into the scrub. The palette almost never leaves cream, oak and stone, and the restraint is the reason the trees outside look as good as they do.
Bathrooms the size of the bedrooms
The bathrooms here are not an afterthought behind a door; they are the same room, or nearly. A freestanding tub, twin stone basins, louvred shutters laying stripes of light across the floor by mid-morning.
It is a small structural decision with a large effect on how a couple actually uses a room. Nobody is queuing for anything, and the part of the day that usually happens fastest is the part the architecture slows down.
The pool with no chlorine in it
The main pool is built as a natural, plant-filtered pond set into the pine wood above the bay. No chlorine, no blue tile, no smell — just water held clean by the planting around it, cut into the trees so that the sun goes down over the headland at the far end of it.
From there a path drops through the pines to the rocks and the sea below. Which means the swimming here comes in two forms, and neither of them is the one that stings your eyes.
A pond in a pine wood, kept clean by its own planting. Then a path down to the sea.
Sa Pleta, behind a bank of lavender
The kitchen runs under Marc Fosh, the first British chef in Spain to hold a Michelin star, and the dining room opens straight onto the lawn behind a bank of lavender — so dinner starts outdoors whether or not you sit outside. The evening menu is a tasting menu of Mediterranean cooking.
The plating is precise without being fussy: a dessert of chocolate, peanut and mandarin with a quenelle of ice cream is about as ornamental as it gets. For the hours either side there is a second, more informal table, and a table laid above the garden with the pool and the sea in the gap between the umbrellas.
A bamboo bar, and a morning inside the kitchen
The bar is built of bamboo with the bottles ranked on oak shelves, and it is where the property spends the hour before dinner — the reed pergola on the lounge terrace doing the same job earlier in the afternoon.
The kitchen is also something you can get into rather than only order from: the hotel runs cooking classes alongside its restaurants. And for the other kind of morning there is an outdoor gym on a timber deck among the pines, which is a more appealing proposition than any room with mirrors in it.
Why it works
Pleta de Mar takes no guests under eighteen — HUSH read the property's own house rules — and the house calls itself adults-only in the title of its own website. On Mallorca that separates it from most of what the island is known for, which is a large part of the point.
What the rule leaves is a hotel where the plan does the work: single-storey buildings around courtyards, a pond instead of a pool deck, one tasting menu, one bar, a headland going red at the end of the garden. It suits couples, and it suits anyone whose picture of Mallorca has been put off by the other Mallorca.
Questions
Is Pleta de Mar adults only?
Yes. It takes no guests under eighteen — HUSH read the property's own house rules — and the hotel describes itself as adults-only in the title of its own website.
Where is Pleta de Mar?
Above the bay of Canyamel on the quiet east coast of Mallorca, inside its own pine wood running down to the sea, with the Parc Natural de la Península de Llevant behind it.
What is the natural pool?
The main pool is a plant-filtered pond rather than a chlorinated pool, cut into the pine wood above the bay. A path leads down through the trees to the rocks and the sea below.
Who cooks at the restaurant?
Sa Pleta runs under Marc Fosh, the first British chef in Spain to hold a Michelin star. Dinner is a Mediterranean tasting menu, with a second, more informal table and a bamboo bar alongside it.
What is there to see nearby?
The thirteenth-century Torre de Canyamel a couple of kilometres inland, and the Coves d'Artà — sea caves with chambers over forty metres high — a short drive along the coast. There is also a golf course minutes away and bicycles for the Llevant hills.
The places in this story
Pleta de Mar
Hotel · Canyamel, Spain