The Balearic Islands have attracted free spirits since earliest times. Perhaps it’s because something about islands that attracts sailors who don’t have time to put down roots and love to let of steam when ashore or perhaps it’s the pleasant weather, but many have seen the Balearics as a place to live an enjoyable life. One of the best known recent settlers was the British poet, Robert Graves who lived on Majorca from the 1920 until his death in 1985.

Robert Graves made his name as a war poet during the First World War, his poetry stood alongside that of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen as some of the most acclaimed of the war. Indeed, Graves was to become friends with both poets. After the war he lived in Oxfordshire in England for a few years then moved to Cairo, before settling in Deià, ten miles north of Valldemossa, in 1926.

Although Majorca was a popular destination for artists and writers during the 20s and 30s, this was still before our age of electricity, broadband, Partypoker, and even running water. Island life back then was characterised by the kind of simplicity that cannot have been very different from when Frederic Chopin visited with his lover, George Sand (a female George, incidentally) in the late 1830s.

Robert Graves’s son William has written a book about his life with his father on the island Wild Olives: Life in Majorca With Robert Graves recounts how William was moved from England in 1944 aged only five to join his father on the island. The story is interesting for its insight into the existence of the villagers whose ways of life had not changed very much in hundreds of years, as well as his father and the retinue that surrounded him.

From the 1960 onwards William Graves recounts how tourism started to change the island. So if you’re wondering what life used to be like on Majorca, this book is a great introduction. When you’ve finished it you will be ready for a trip to Deià to see Graves’s house.