'Vandal,' 'vandalized,' 'vandalism'—these are words that evoke images of damaging, ruining, destroying... But perhaps the Vandals weren't as bad as these terms suggest. Certainly, their first encounter with the Balearic Islands was far from amicable: in 425 AD, 1,600 years ago, they sacked these islands, then under Roman rule, and a few years later incorporated them into their domains. Thus began the darkest and least known period in the archipelago's history, until the destruction of their kingdom by General Belisarius, to whom the adopted Mallorcan Robert Graves dedicated one of his historical novels.

 In 1965, the 70-year-old British writer Robert Graves saw his Mediterranean refuge threatened. He had discovered it in 1929 thanks to his friend, the American poet Gertrude Stein, who had lived in the Palma neighborhood of El Terreno between 1915 and 1916. "If you can stand it, Mallorca is paradise," she had told him. The chosen place was Deià, a small fishing village in the Tramuntana mountains, with about 400 inhabitants. At 36, the famous author of I, Claudius (1934) published Majorca observedwhich in Spanish would be translated as Why do I live in Mallorca? It was a collection of articles with a distinctly elegiac tone. It formed part of a series on the impressions of various English writers living abroad. The Palma-born philologist Eduard Moyà is the Catalan translator of some of the Londoner's poems. "He," he asserts, "was deeply concerned about the consequences of the boom tourist on an island where he had found the happy Arcadia of his admired classics."