March Palace

Joan March Ordinas was born in 1880 in Santa Margalida, a village in the Mallorcan interior, and built one of the most extraordinary private fortunes in 20th-century Spanish history by methods that combined legal commerce, smuggling, banking, and political calculation in proportions that varied across his career. The tobacco trade across North Africa — where March exploited a monopoly concession in a way that blurred consistently into smuggling — was the foundation. The Banco March, founded in 1926 and still operating today as one of Spain's private banks, was the formal financial structure. The private fleet of ships, the political leverage accumulated under successive Spanish governments, and the decision in July 1936 to place his financial resources and shipping capacity at Franco's disposal during the military uprising — providing both money and naval support at a moment when the Nationalist faction's logistical situation was critical — these were the choices that defined his relationship to the Spain that would take shape around him.

His son, Bartolomé March Servera, born in 1917, inherited the fortune and chose to spend a significant portion of it on cultural patronage. The Palau March in Palma was his principal architectural commission: a large palace in the historic centre of the city, adjacent to the Almudaina Royal Palace (the medieval royal residence that the Spanish royal family still uses occasionally for state functions) and within five minutes' walk of Palma's Gothic cathedral. Construction began in the 1940s and the building was completed in the late 1960s; the Fundació Bartolomé March opened the palace to the public in 1974 with a programme that has since included regular concerts, temporary exhibitions, and permanent display of the family's sculpture collection.

The outdoor sculpture terrace is the feature that gives Palau March its place in any account of accessible Spanish cultural spaces. The terrace faces the Parc de la Mar and the bay of Palma, with views over the water towards the Tramuntana mountains on clear days, and it contains a collection of 20th-century sculpture that represents a level of private art patronage in a specific medium that is uncommon anywhere in Spain. The works include pieces by Auguste Rodin — among them a version of The Kiss, one of the most reproduced sculptures in Western art — alongside Henry Moore's large-scale bronze forms, Barbara Hepworth's abstracted figures and voids, and Eduardo Chillida's Basque-inflected steel and iron constructions. The combination of these four sculptors on a Mediterranean terrace in Palma is not accidental: Bartolomé March was making a specific statement about the relationship between modern European sculpture and the Mallorcan Mediterranean setting, and the terrace's architecture gives the sculptures enough separation and air to be encountered individually rather than crowded together.

Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth are the two British sculptors whose large-scale outdoor works have become the standard reference points for mid-20th-century public sculpture. Moore's biomorphic bronze forms — the reclining figures, the upright motives, the family groups — respond to outdoor settings in a way that his stated aesthetic programme explicitly intended: he was a maker of forms for landscape, and placing his work on a terrace above a Mediterranean bay is an appropriate way to encounter it. Hepworth's approach was formally more austere — holes and voids in stone and bronze that described the relationship between form and the space it displaces — and the Mediterranean light does things with her surfaces that northern English or London gallery settings do not.

Eduardo Chillida, the Basque sculptor who worked primarily in iron, steel, and stone from the 1950s through the 1990s, is the continental European sculptor whose presence on the terrace most marks the collection as specifically Spanish in its range of reference. Chillida's work draws on Basque iron-working tradition, on the philosophical vocabulary of Heidegger (with whom he had an extended correspondence), and on the specific landscape and light of the Basque Country — but his large-scale pieces function in outdoor settings across Spain with a visual authority that makes them appear to have grown there. His presence alongside Moore and Hepworth gives the Palau March terrace a European scope that purely British or purely Spanish collections tend not to achieve.

The palace's location within Palma's historic centre means the visit naturally extends into the surrounding streets. The Almudaina Royal Palace is immediately adjacent — a Gothic-Moorish royal residence with origins in the Islamic period of Mallorca, still used by the Spanish royal family for state receptions during the summer season. Palma Cathedral (La Seu) is a five-minute walk along the sea front: a 13th-century Gothic building of exceptional visual impact, built on the site of the former main mosque, with a rose window of considerable size over the west door and the distinction of having had part of its interior redesigned by Antoni Gaudí in the early 20th century. The combination of the March family's modern private palace with the medieval royal and ecclesiastical architecture immediately around it gives the central Palma waterfront block a layering of historical and cultural periods that few city blocks in Spain can match.

The GYG entry ticket (t491633, from $9) covers the outdoor sculpture terrace and the publicly accessible areas of the palace. Bellver Castle, approximately 3 kilometres west of the city centre on a wooded hill above Palma bay, is the recommended complement — a circular 14th-century Gothic castle that is among the most unusual medieval structures in Spain, whose position above the bay gives a view of Palma's skyline that includes the cathedral and, in the middle distance, the location of the Palau March terrace.