Those were hard times and one could jump from a ministry to prison. This is what happened to the Asturian Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos (1744-1811), a politician, scholar, writer, and one of the most prominent figures of the State between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Now 225 years ago, on April 18, 1801, Jovellanos arrived in a Mallorca that was not then a tourist destination, but a peripheral territory where people who wanted to disappear were sent, and where he was confined for seven years.