Santa Catalina or Son Espanyolet? Two Palma neighbourhoods compared

Next-door neighbours with different lives

Both neighbourhoods are official barris of Palma’s Ponent (western) district, and they touch. Santa Catalina lies just west of the old town, with El Jonquet, its oldest corner, on the rise above the port. Son Espanyolet starts directly inland, and most of it is 10 to 20 minutes’ walk from Santa Catalina’s market. Many people treat them as one area. Day to day, they are not.

Santa Catalina: the market and the restaurants

Santa Catalina grew up outside the city walls as a village of fishermen, sailors, rope makers and millers. El Jonquet, with its narrow lanes and old windmills looking over the harbour, was declared a protected historic site in 2009. For decades it was a working-class district, until a slow revival from the 1980s turned it into one of the most sought-after parts of Palma.

Life centres on the Mercat de Santa Catalina, Palma’s oldest municipal market, dating from 1920 and open Monday to Saturday. Around it, and along the wide Carrer de la Fàbrica, the streets are lined with restaurants and bars. There are supermarkets, pharmacies, schools and a public health centre, and the neighbourhood is lived in all year, by long-established Mallorcan families, people from mainland Spain and many foreigners, with Scandinavians the most visible group.

The price of that popularity is noise. On weekend nights crowds come for the bars, and the residents’ association has campaigned for years against late opening hours, large terraces and illegal holiday flats. A few streets back from the busiest corners it is often calmer, so judge any flat on a Friday or Saturday night.

Son Espanyolet: low houses and school runs

Son Espanyolet grew from the 1890s, when a country estate was divided into plots and sold, many of them for modest second homes. The result is a barri of narrow streets and low buildings, many with a patio or garden, and some grand houses with modernist details in the older upper streets. Its own summer fiesta, for Sant Gaietà, is held in early August.

It is mainly residential, with small shops, a lot of nurseries and schools, most of them state-subsidised (concertats), and a quieter rhythm at night. City bus line 7 runs from Plaça d’Espanya through Avinguda Jaume III into the barri. The downside is traffic and parking: residents call parking their main problem, and double parking at school drop-off times blocks streets. To the north, neighbouring Son Cotoner and Son Dameto are mostly flats, and the site of the old Lluís Sitjar football stadium in El Fortí, empty for years, passed fully to the council in 2025.

Property and renovation

Santa Catalina is almost all low-rise: townhouses of one to three storeys with coloured façades, wooden shutters and terraces, many built between the 1860s and the early 20th century, small cottages in the back streets and flats in renovated older buildings. Roof terraces are a big part of the appeal. A protection plan approved in 2021 sets maximum heights and protects a catalogue of buildings, so renovations follow strict rules.

Son Espanyolet offers more houses with outdoor space, from late 19th and early 20th-century homes to a few new builds on single plots. Some façades are listed, but not every old house is protected, and the council has approved demolitions of older single-storey houses. If the character of the street matters to you, ask what is protected on either side.

Which one suits you

• Choose Santa Catalina if you want the market, restaurants and the seafront on your doorstep, don’t need a car, and can live with weekend noise.
• Choose Son Espanyolet if you want a house with a patio, a quieter evening and schools nearby, and don’t mind a longer walk into town.
• In both, a garage space is a real asset, and a visit on a weekend night and a weekday morning tells you more than any listing.

Both are 10 to 15 minutes by car from the Cathedral and 20 to 25 from the airport, and Cala Major’s beach is about 10 minutes’ drive west. For the rest of the city, see our Palma overview.

Areas in this post

Santa Catalina & El Jonquet · Son Espanyolet & Son Dameto