Calvià, a film set by the seashore
Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Marisol, Peter Ustinov, Anne Hathaway and Gigi Hadid are some of the names that have passed through the municipality, which recovers more than six decades of filming with a route through the settings that have appeared on the big screen
PalmaIn the summer of 1967, Michael Caine arrived in Portals Vells to shoot a film set in Greece. It was not the initial plan. The Magus, the film adaptation of John Fowles's novel, was to bring to the screen a story set on a remote Greek island, but the political instability caused by the coup of the colonels forced the production to look for an alternative. They found it in Mallorca.
Director Guy Green saw in the transparent waters and cliffs of Portals Vells the landscape he needed to recreate the atmosphere of the Aegean.
Caine did not arrive alone. He was accompanied by Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, and Anna Karina, in a cast that, during that summer, turned a corner of the Calvià coastline into an international film set. The mark of the filming went far beyond the movie, which was released in 1968. A part of the group of coves in Portals Vells would end up being known by the name it still keeps today: the beach of El Mago.
That filming is just one scene in a much longer story. For more than six decades, Calvià has been a large open-air set. From Santa Ponça to Portals Vells, from Caló d'en Monjo to Cala Comtessa, passing through Magaluf, Port Portals, and the public estate of Galatzó, the municipality offers a succession of very different landscapes in just a few kilometers.
The coastline, the Mediterranean light, the coves, the cliffs, the ports, and the large tourist centers have served as a setting and attraction for film and television productions, but also for documentaries, music videos, and major international fashion and advertising campaigns. Calvià continues to be an active film set today.
Now, Calvià has recovered this cinematic memory and made it visible on the very territory where it was born. The Calvià, Film Set project proposes a route through the settings of some of the most emblematic shootings that have taken place in the municipality.
In these locations, commemorative plaques with QR codes have been installed that allow access to information about each production, its historical context, and trivia about the filming. The proposal invites, in short, to return to the same landscapes, but to look at them in a different way: through the camera.
This recovery of audiovisual memory also has a digital dimension. Calviaescine.com becomes the project's meeting point on the internet, a space from which to discover Calvià's connection with cinema, the film shoots, and the locations that have turned the municipality into a setting for national and international productions. The website will be available soon and will allow the experience to be extended beyond the route itself.
From Santa Ponça to Agatha Christie
To take this journey, one must go back even further than The Magus. Santa Ponça was already a film set in 1962, when Juan Bosch filmed Bahía de Palma there, starring Arturo Fernández and the German actress Elke Sommer. The beach became one of the main settings of a film closely linked to that Mallorca of the sixties that was beginning to open up massively to international tourism.
And cinema returned very soon. Only two years later, in 1964, Marisol and the Dúo Dinámico walked on the same sand during the filming of Búsqueme a esa chica, directed by Fernando Palacios. Two very different films thus left the beach of Santa Ponça incorporated into the history of popular Spanish cinema.
Two decades later, another corner of Calvià was transformed to give life to a very different story. El Caló d’en Monjo, in Cala Fornells, hosted the exteriors of the hotel for Evil Under the Sun in 1982, the adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel directed by Guy Hamilton. This time it was Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, and Jane Birkin, among other cast members, who brought the world of Hercule Poirot to the coast of Calvià.
These are three of the historic settings that shape the new route: Santa Ponça, the beach of El Mago, and El Caló d’en Monjo. But the project does not turn cinema into a black and white photograph. Because Calvià continues to be a film set.
The locations, productions, and stories linked to this cinematic memory can also be discovered through calviaescine.com, the new digital gateway to cinematic Calvià.
From Hollywood to Netflix and BTS
Productions have changed and so have cameras, but the landscape continues to do its job. In much more recent times, Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson filmed The Hustle at the Hotel Hospes Maricel and Port Portals. The Mallorca Files used Portals Vells and Caló d’en Monjo, while the latter landscape also appeared in White Lines, the Netflix series set in the Balearic Islands.
The concept of a film set, moreover, has long since transcended the borders of cinema. Cala Comtessa became the setting for an H&M campaign, directed by Bardia Zeinali and starring, among others, supermodel Gigi Hadid. And Portals Vells went even further thanks to Slow Dancing, the music video by Kim Tae-hyung, V, a member of BTS, one of the global phenomena of South Korean pop.
The route also incorporates production made from Mallorca. The Galatzó public estate is the setting for Maria Enganxa, directed by Luis Ortas, which brings to the screen one of the legends most deeply rooted in the popular imagination of the Islands.
In this way, the ten shoots selected for Calvià, Film Set allow you to go from Juan Bosch to Netflix, from Marisol to BTS, and from Michael Caine to Anne Hathaway. It is not just about remembering who passed through here, but about discovering to what extent the daily landscapes of the municipality have been part of an audiovisual imaginary that has traveled far beyond Mallorca.
Cinema, also off-screen
But Calvià is Cinema does not only look at the filming that has left its mark on the municipality. The goal is to make the audiovisual sector a part of Calvià's cultural life and one more reason to visit it throughout the year. A philosophy that in 2026 has already translated into a program linked to cinema, photography, and new forms of creation.
The municipality has hosted AIMA, the first Short Film Festival made with artificial intelligence developed in the Balearic Islands, and Calvià PhotoFilm, dedicated to photography and cinema. Conecta has also been held there, a meeting dedicated to the audiovisual sector that has also served as a showcase for productions such as Mallorca Confidencial.
Joining this program is the Atlàntida Mallorca Film Fest, which has brought cinema to a setting as iconic as the beach.
And this commitment continues with the Evolution Mallorca International Film Festival, which incorporates Calvià into its programming with a new initiative that will be announced soon.
Calvià thus strengthens an audiovisual program that is not limited to filming, but turns cinema into a cultural experience linked to the territory. Calviaescine.com was born precisely with the desire to bring together and give visibility to this universe: the cinematographic settings, the route, the productions, and the activities that keep the relationship between Calvià and the audiovisual sector alive.
And it is here that Magaluf also fully enters this cinematic history: it is the space where Calvià today brings audiovisual culture to the citizens and links it to the transformation of the destination.
Cinema thus becomes a piece of a broader strategy. Culture, gastronomy, sport, and events complement the traditional sun and beach offer to generate reasons to visit Calvià throughout the year. The goal is to attract new visitor profiles, generate activity outside the high season, and consolidate a vibrant municipality all twelve months of the year.
The Calvià, Film Set route proposes exactly that: to look at a familiar place and discover another story within it. Arriving in Santa Ponça and imagining the cameras of 1962. Walking through Caló d’en Monjo in the footsteps of Hercule Poirot. And swimming in Portals Vells knowing that, for a few weeks in the summer of 1967, that corner of Mallorca had to be a Greek island.
Now this story also has a space from which to continue discovering it: calviaescine.com, the portal that brings together the memory and the cinematographic present of the municipality.
More than half a century later, the landscape is still there. Michael Caine's Greece was Calvià. And now Calvià has recovered this story to tell its own film.