The island where painters applaud the sunset

In the winter of 1838 a French novelist and a consumptive Polish composer took rooms in an abandoned charterhouse at Valldemossa. George Sand and Frédéric Chopin were miserable there, and Sand's book about the stay was sharp-tongued. But the book existed, and with it Mallorca entered the European imagination as a place a serious artist might go.

Others followed who loved it more. The Austrian Archduke Ludwig Salvator bought up the Tramuntana coast and catalogued every cove and custom in his great survey Die Balearen. Then, at the new century, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío wintered in Palma and gave the island the name that stuck.

The island of gold.Rubén Darío, “la isla de oro”

What the writers began, the painters finished. Drawn by a quality of light that flattened the distance between sea and mountain — the very light Tito Cittadini spent his life chasing across the bay of Cala Sant Vicenç — a generation arrived to treat the Mallorcan landscape as the whole subject. Over a century the island gathered painters, poets, a composer, patrons and an architect into one of the Mediterranean's most remarkable artistic colonies.

Before the people, the shape of the thing: when each figure came, how long they stayed, and how far they had travelled. The map sets the whole colony at dusk over the Bay of Pollença — drag the slider and watch a hundred years of arrivals wash in.

From 1893 the Catalan painter Santiago Rusiñol made the island his refuge, calling it l'illa de la calma. He came with Joaquim Mir, whose canvases of the ravines pushed colour almost to abstraction, and was joined by the marine painter Eliseu Meifrén. In 1899 the Belgian symbolist Degouve de Nuncques crossed their path and marked Mir's vision.

At the Valldemossa charterhouse, Joan Sureda and the painter Pilar Montaner kept open house — the rooms that received Rusiñol also hosted Darío. The renewal took local root in the Mallorcan painters Antoni Gelabert and Joan Fuster Bonnín.

A colony is a mix of crafts: painters above all, but also poets and novelists, a famous composer, the patrons who made the rest possible, an architect. Sorted by approach, you can watch the island's manner change — from Romantic reverie, through plein-air light, to the vibrant chromatism of the Pollença School, and on to the moderns. That second lens is where technique lives: the bold colour, the loose brushwork, the eye that studied the seabed through a glass visor, the painter who, wounded, taught himself to work with his left hand.

The colony found its centre in 1914, when Hermen Anglada-Camarasa — one of the most celebrated painters in Europe — left Paris for Port de Pollença, on the urging of his pupil Francisco Bernareggi. Where the maestro went, his Paris atelier followed: Tito Cittadini, who made the island his life; the Argentines López Naguil and Ramaugé; the Mexican Montenegro. An entire international studio relocated to one bay.

It drew patrons too. The Argentine poet Adán Diehl, smitten by an Anglada seascape, bought Formentor from the family of Costa i Llobera and opened his hotel in 1929.

Where every evening, as the sun goes down, the painters put down their brushes to applaud. Anglada-Camarasa, of the bay

And it produced a native heir: Dionís Bennàssar, born in Pollença, who absorbed the school's colour and bent it to something fiercely his own.

Every figure in the colony has their own page — a fuller life, their selected works and where to see them, and the threads that bound them to the others. Filter by wave, then choose a name.

The colony was a web of mentors and pupils, friends, marriages, and the hosts who received everyone. Tap any figure to follow their ties; what emerges is a structure, not a crowd.

Now lay the web onto the map. Every figure is pinned by when they were on the island and where they came from, the connection threads draped across the grid. A line that runs long and steep is a friendship that reached back across years and over an ocean.

In July 1936 the Civil War broke out, and Mallorca fell at once to Franco's Nationalists. The colony shattered along its fault lines. Anglada-Camarasa, stranded in Barcelona, spent nine years exiled in France before coming home in 1948. Robert Graves was taken off Deià by warship in 1936 and did not return for a decade.

Others left for good: Adán Diehl, ruined, died in Buenos Aires; the poet Gabriel Alomar died a refugee in Cairo. Those who stayed — Bennàssar, Cittadini, Pilar Montaner — kept the thread unbroken until the others, and a young Joan Miró, could return.

The colony never reassembled as it had been, but the island kept its pull. In Deià, Robert Graves built a second, literary world around his house Ca n'Alluny — drawn there, originally, on a one-line recommendation.

It's paradise — if you can stand it.Gertrude Stein, to Robert Graves

And the greatest name came last. Joan Miró, whose mother and wife were both Mallorcan, came home to Palma in 1956 and built, with the architect Josep Lluís Sert, the vast studio he had always dreamed of. Down the coast, the hotel that had ruined Adán Diehl was revived, and through the Formentor Prize, founded with Camilo José Cela, it gathered the writers of the world back to the bay.

A French novelist's miserable winter; an archduke's forty years; a Paris atelier on a fishing quay; a poet's ruined hotel; a painter's left hand; a Nobel laureate's late homecoming. The Golden Island held them all.