In the gardens stands a tower more than three thousand years old, part of the Poblat Talaiòtic de Binissafullet. Beside it, a taula. We did not put them there. We look after them.
Sant Lluís · Menorca
The tower
What a talaiot is.
A dry-stone tower, truncated cone, raised without mortar: blocks held by their own weight and by craft. Menorca has one of the highest densities of prehistoric monuments in the world, and the talaiot is their most recognisable shape.
What they were for is still argued over: a marker in the landscape, a lookout, a place where the community gathered. Archaeology has not closed the question. The stone, meanwhile, is still standing.
3000+years
BICprotected monument
UNESCOMenorca Talayótica
0minutes from the room
The taula
This exists nowhere else.
Two stones: one upright, one laid across the top, in the shape of a T. The taula is the monument that makes this island singular — it is found nowhere else on earth, not even on Mallorca, forty kilometres away.
It stands inside a horseshoe enclosure, open to the south. The one at Binissafullet is small, and it is the only one on the island with a base under its pillar. It is also the only one that was found lying on the ground and set upright again, in 1990: the others still whole never fell.
The name
Binissafullet arrived a thousand years later.
The prefix “Bini” comes from the Arabic banī: “sons of”, “clan of”. It is the mark of the centuries when the island was Muslim, and it stayed attached to dozens of Menorcan place names.
The stone was already two thousand years old when someone gave the place that name. We arrived much later, and we changed none of it.
Before us
The land changes owner. The stone does not.
Talayotic culture
They build the talaiot and the taula that still stand in the garden.
Rome
Quintus Caecilius Metellus takes the Balearics. The island enters another world; the monuments stay.
Muslim Menorca
The “Bini” place names appear. This place takes a name that is still ours.
UNESCO
Menorca Talayótica enters the World Heritage list.
The finca
Nine rooms around it. The tower is not touched.
The talaiot has stood for some three thousand years: more than a million nights. You will spend seven.
The shadow
A sundial made of two stones.
A stone standing under the sun is a sundial, whether it means to be or not. This one stopped being one for a long time: the taula of Binissafullet is the only one on the island that was found lying on the ground and set upright again, in 1990. Since then its shadow has gone back to turning — towards ponent in the morning, towards tramuntana at true noon, towards llevant in the evening — and at noon it draws a T on the ground. In Menorca directions carry the names of the winds, and the shadow points to them one after another.
The drawing looks from the north towards the south: that is why llevant is on the left and the stone is seen against the light. The proportions are taken from photographs; the thickness of the stones and the exact orientation are not: the taula is drawn facing south, as nearly all those on the island do, and around it there are walls and trees that do not appear here. The direction and length of the shadow, though, are the true ones, because they do not depend on the stone but on the sun: a stick as tall as the taula would cast the same shadow.
When it was first raised, at the same hour by the sun, the shadow fell almost on the same spot: since then the tilt of the Earth’s axis has changed by less than half a degree.
The sky
What can no longer be seen from here
The enclosure opened south, and south is not just any direction: it is where stars reach the highest point of their run. One that cannot make it there is never visible from here at all.
How high depends on two numbers and nothing else: the latitude of the place and the declination of the star. This finca’s latitude has not moved. The declination has — the Earth’s axis traces a cone in twenty-six thousand years, and in three thousand the stars shift by several degrees.
Star
Today
In 1000 BC
Acrux
Today−12.9°below the horizon
In 1000 BC+3.3°above the horizon
Mimosa
Today−9.5°below the horizon
In 1000 BC+6.9°above the horizon
Gacrux
Today−7.0°below the horizon
In 1000 BC+9.3°above the horizon
Hadar
Today−10.2°below the horizon
In 1000 BC+6.0°above the horizon
Rigil Kentaurus
Today−10.7°below the horizon
In 1000 BC+5.1°above the horizon
Canopo
Today−2.5°below the horizon
In 1000 BC−3.2°below the horizon
5 stars that were here and are not any more.
This says those stars were there. It does not say the stone was raised to watch them: that is the most debated hypothesis about the taulas, and a hypothesis is what it remains. Canopus is on the list precisely because it does not work — neither then nor now does it clear this horizon. A calculation that said “everything was visible” would prove nothing.
For the same reason the clock on the front page carries two times: the clock’s and the sun’s. Here the sun peaks as much as a hundred minutes after noon in Madrid — Spain has kept Berlin time since 1940, and the sky was never told.
How to look at it
It is not a tour.
It is outside the room, you walk to it and you look. You do not climb it, you do not move a stone, you do not rest anything on top. It is a protected monument and it is, above all, the only thing here that was here before everyone.
The garden
You sleep beside it. That is all we offer, and it is enough.
