In Manyoc de fruita mallorquina, Joan Rosselló de Son Fortesa ecalls his childhood experiences in this country estate.

You ask me, dear friend, to talk to you of rural Majorcan life, since you know that it has been my life for a good few years, away from the city, in the heart of the mountain, on the estate with old olive groves and orchards, in the old reddish house, where I was born and where I hope to die peacefully when the time comes, amongst my own. [...] The ancestral home where I was born, an old estate, surrounded by stables, vines, olive groves, carob trees, almond trees, kitchen gardens and fields of wheat, is close to the town of Alaró, in the bottom of the Socarrada valley, in the shade of the green and airy laurels and fruits trees where nightingales sing in the spring, and from the great windows you can see the grey gable of the front of the building where the pigs, mares and sheep graze...

Manyoc de fruita mallorquina (A Handful of Mallorcan Fruit), 1903

Translated by Richard Mansell. Performed by Joan Vicenç Lillo.

(Alaró, 1854 – Palma, 1935). Joan Rosselló, the son of important rural landowners, was one of the generation of writers educated by Josep Lluís Pons i Gallarza at the Institut Balear, with Joan Alcover and Miquel Costa i Llobera as fellow students. He combined his work as a lawyer and judge with a keen enthusiasm for literature and he was a regular member of the discussion group run by Joan Alcover. His first writings were for “La Roqueta”, a publication founded by Miquel dels Sants Oliver, and later he wrote for numerous publications in Mallorca and Catalonia. He mainly wrote short stories, considered to herald the beginning of the Mallorcan ruralist narrative movement, which broke away from the Costumbrista prose of the 1800s focused on local customs and manners. The life of the rural peasant class was not just the main theme of his written work, but also one of his primary concerns. In Ruralisme (Ruralism), an essay published in 1908, he outlines his preoccupation with the problems of Mallorca’s peasants. Some of his prose work was compiled and published posthumously in a book entitled Tardanies (1949). A person proficient in French and Italian, he translated work by Maupassant, Ibsen, and Goethe, although many of his translations were never published.

Manyoc de fruita mallorquina (A Handful of Mallorcan Fruit) is a collection of short stories where he recalls his childhood, describes tasks, places and characters, and recreates popular folk tales, conveying the idea of a world with which he closely identified.

At the start of the 16th century. Gabriel Ribes brought together all of the land he had acquired in a single estate. The daughter and heiress of Gabriel Ribes, Elionor Ribes, married Ramon Safortesa i Cerdà, a member of a secondary branch of the important Safortesa nobles. He and his family gave the name Son Fortesa to Ribes's old estate, a name that has continued to the present day, four centuries later, despite the many different owners the estate has had. Throughout the 17th century the estate was divided up and it contributed to the growth of the town of Alaró. At the start of the 19th century it became the property of the Rosselló family. The houses are traditionally Majorca, with both rooms organised around a large internal courtyard.

Son Fortesa, thanks to the figure of Joan Rosselló Crespí, who used the name 'Rosselló de son Fortesa', was visited by the most important figures in Catalan letters: Jaume Bofill i Mates, Eugeni d’Ors, Joaquim Ruyra, Antoni Rubió i Lluch, Josep Carner, Joan Alcover, Miquel Costa, Llorenç Riber and more.