Calvià, a film set by the seaside

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 the novel by John Fowles, was supposed 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 seek an alternative. It 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, released in 1968. A part of the group of coves of Portals Vells would end up being known by the name it still preserves today: the beach of El Mago.

That filming is just one scene in a much longer history. 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 within a few kilometers.

The coastline, the Mediterranean light, the coves, the cliffs, the ports, and the large tourist hubs have served as a stage 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 set today.

Now, Calvià has recovered this cinematic memory and made it visible on the very territory where it was born. The project Calvià, Film Set proposes a route through the settings of some of the most iconic shoots that have passed through the municipality.

Commemorative plaques with QR codes have been installed in these locations, allowing access to information about each production, its historical context, and the curiosities of 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 link with cinema, the filming, 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 make this journey, one must go even further back than The Magus. Santa Ponça was already a cinematic stage 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 for a film closely linked to that Mallorca of the sixties that was beginning to open up massively to international tourism.

And the cinema returned there very soon. Only two years later, in 1964, Marisol and the Dúo Dinámico stepped 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 names in the cast, who brought the world of Hercule Poirot to the coast of Calvià.

These are three of the historic stages that structure the new route: Santa Ponça, the Mago beach, 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 backdrop 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 public estate of Galatzó 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 shoots that have left their mark on the municipality. The aim 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 this 2026 has already translated into a programme linked to cinema, photography and new forms of creation.

The municipality has hosted AIMA, the first Festival of Short Films 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.

Added to this programme 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 programme with a new initiative that will be announced soon.

Calvià thus reinforces an audiovisual programme that is not limited to shoots, 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 where Magaluf also fully enters this cinematographic story: 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 objective is to attract new visitor profiles, generate activity outside the high season and consolidate a living municipality for all twelve months.

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 following 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 history to tell its own film.

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