Balearic Islands
The Balearic Islands are an archipelago in the western Mediterranean Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The archipelago forms a province and autonomous community of Spain. Palma de Mallorca is its capital and largest city.
Formerly part of the Kingdom of Majorca, the islands were made a province in the 19th century provincial division, which in 1983 received a Statute of Autonomy. In its 2007 reform, the Statute designated the Balearic Islands as one of Spain's nationalities. The Balearic Islands' official languages are Catalan and Spanish.
The islands are grouped into the western Pityuses and the eastern Gymnesians. Many of the minor islands and islets are close to the larger islands, including Cabrera, Dragonera, and S'Espalmador. It is the second-largest and most populous archipelago in Spain, after the Canary Islands.
The islands have a Mediterranean climate, and the four major islands are all popular tourist destinations. Ibiza, in particular, is known as an international party destination, attracting many of the world's most popular DJs to its nightclubs. The islands' culture and cuisine are similar to those of the rest of Spain but have their own distinctive features.
Etymology
The official name of the Balearic Islands in Catalan is Illes Balears, while in Spanish, they are known as the Islas Baleares.The ancient Greeks usually adopted local names into their own language, but they called the islands Γυμνησίαι/Gymnesiai, unlike either the native inhabitants of the islands, the Carthaginians, or the Romans, who called them Βαλεαρεῖς, with the Romans also calling them the Baleares.
The term Balearic may derive from Greek. In Latin, it was Baleares.
Of the various theories on the origins of the two ancient Greek and Latin names for the islands—Gymnasiae and Baleares—classical sources provide two.
According to Lycophron's Alexandra verses, the islands were called Γυμνησίαι/Gymnesiae because its inhabitants were often nude, probably because of the mostly balmy year-round climate. But Strabo thought that Gymnesiai probably referred to the light equipment used by the Balearic troops γυμνῆται/gymnetae.
Most of the ancient Greek and Roman writers thought the name of the people,, was based on their skill as slingers, but Strabo thought the name was of Phoenician origin. He observed that it was the Phoenician word for lightly armoured soldiers, which the ancient Greeks called γυμνῆτας/gymnetas. The root bal arguably suggests a Phoenician origin; in Volume III, Book XIV of his Geography, Strabo suggests that the name comes from the Phoenician balearides.
Geography
The autonomous community's main islands are Mallorca/Majorca, Menorca/Minorca, Ibiza, and Formentera, all popular tourist destinations. Amongst the minor islands is Cabrera, the location of the Cabrera Archipelago Maritime-Terrestrial National Park. The Balearic Islands are neighboured by Algeria to the south, Spain's Catalonia and Valencian Community to the west, France's South to the north, and France's Corsica as well as Italy's Sardinia to the east. The Balearic Islands province has the longest coastline of any province in Spain, at 1,428 kilometres.The Balearic Islands are on a raised platform called the Balearic Promontory, and were formed by uplift. They are cut by a network of northwest to southeast faults.
The islands can be further grouped with Mallorca, Menorca, and Cabrera as the Gymnesian Islands, and Ibiza and Formentera as the Pityusic Islands, also called the Pityuses. Many minor islands or islets are close to the biggest islands, such as Es Conills, Es Vedrà, Sa Conillera, Dragonera, S'Espalmador, S'Espardell, Ses Bledes, Santa Eulària, Plana, Foradada, Tagomago, Na Redona, Colom, and L'Aire.
The Balearic Front is a sea density regime north of the Balearic Islands on their shelf slope that is responsible for some of the surface-flow characteristics of the Balearic Sea.
Climate
Located in the western Mediterranean Sea, the Balearic Islands have mostly typical hot-summer Mediterranean climates with some high-altitude areas having a Warm-summer Mediterranean climate on Mallorca. The semi-arid climate is also found in the Balearic Islands, mostly on Ibiza and Formentera but also in southern Mallorca.History
Ancient history
The earliest known evidence of habitation of the Balearic Islands dates to the 3rd millennium BC from the Iberian Peninsula or southern France, by people associated with the Bell Beaker culture.Little is recorded about the inhabitants of the islands during classical antiquity, though many legends exist. The story, preserved by Lycophron, that certain shipwrecked Greek Boeotians were cast nude on the islands, was evidently invented to account for the name Gymnesiae. In addition, Diodorus Siculus writes that the Greeks called the islands Gymnesiae because the inhabitants were naked during the summer time. Also, a tradition holds that the islands were colonized by Rhodes after the Trojan War.
The islands had a very mixed population. Several stories describe them as having unusual habits. Some have it that they went naked year-round, some say they went naked only in the summer, some that they wore only sheepskins—until the Phoenicians arrived and provided them with broad-bordered tunics.
Other stories have it that the inhabitants lived in hollow rocks and artificial caves, that their men were remarkable for their love of women and would trade three or four men to ransom one woman, that they had no gold or silver coin, and forbade the importation of the precious metals—so that those of them who served as mercenaries took their pay in wine and women instead of money. The Roman Diodorus Siculus described their marriage and funeral customs, noting that Roman observers found those customs peculiar.
In ancient times, the islanders of the Gymnesian Islands constructed talayots, and were famous for their skill with the sling. As slingers, they served as mercenaries, first under the Carthaginians, and afterwards under the Romans. They went into battle ungirt, with only a small buckler, and a javelin burnt at the end, and in some cases tipped with a small iron point; but their effective weapons were their slings, of which each man carried three, wound round his head, or, as seen in other sources, one round the head, one round the body, and one in the hand. The three slings were of different lengths, for stones of different sizes; the largest they hurled with as much force as if it were flung from a catapult; and they seldom missed their mark. To this exercise, they were trained from infancy, in order to earn their livelihood as mercenary soldiers. It is said that the mothers allowed their children to eat bread only when they had struck it off a post with the sling.
The Phoenicians took possession of the islands in very early times; a remarkable trace of their colonisation is preserved in the town of Mago. After the fall of Carthage in 146 BC, the islands seem to have been virtually independent. Notwithstanding their celebrity in war, the people were generally very quiet and inoffensive. The Romans, however, easily found a pretext for charging them with complicity with the Mediterranean pirates, and they were conquered by Q. Caecilius Metellus, thence surnamed Balearicus, in 123 BC. Metellus settled 3,000 Roman and Spanish colonists on the larger island, and founded the cities of Palma and Pollentia. The islands belonged, under the Roman Empire, to the conventus of Carthago Nova, in the province of Hispania Tarraconensis, of which province they formed the fourth district, under the government of a praefectus pro legato. An inscription of the time of Nero mentions the PRAEF. PRAE LEGATO INSULAR. BALIARUM. They were afterwards made a separate province, called Hispania Balearica, probably in the division of the empire under Constantine.
The two largest islands had numerous excellent harbours, though rocky at their mouth, and requiring care in entering them. Both were extremely fertile in all produce, except wine and olive oil. They were celebrated for their cattle, especially for the mules of the lesser island; they had an immense number of rabbits, and were free from all venomous reptiles. Amongst the snails valued by the Romans as a diet was a species from the Balearic Isles called cavaticae because they were bred in caves. Their chief mineral product was the red earth, called sinope, which was used by painters. Their resin and pitch are mentioned by Dioscorides. The population of the two islands is stated by Diodorus at 30,000.
The part of the Mediterranean east of Spain, around the Balearic Isles, was called Mare Balearicum, or Sinus Balearicus.
Medieval period
Late Roman and early Islamic eras
The Vandals under Genseric conquered the Islands sometime between 461 and 468 during their war on the Roman Empire. However, in late 533 or early 534, following the Battle of Ad Decimum, the troops of Belisarius reestablished control of the islands for the Romans. Imperial power receded precipitately in the western Mediterranean after the fall of Carthage and the Exarchate of Africa to the Umayyad Caliphate in 698, and in 707 the islands submitted to the terms of an Umayyad fleet, which allowed the residents to maintain their traditions and religion as well as a high degree of autonomy. Now nominally both Byzantine and Umayyad, the de facto independent islands occupied a strategic and profitable grey area between the competing religions and kingdoms of the western Mediterranean. The prosperous islands were thoroughly sacked by the Swedish Viking King Björn Ironside and his brother Hastein during their Mediterranean raid of 859–862.In 902, the heavy use of the islands as a pirate base provoked the Emirate of Córdoba, nominally the island's overlords, to invade and incorporate the islands into their state. However, the Cordoban emirate disintegrated in civil war and partition in the early eleventh century, breaking into smaller states called taifas. In 903, the Muslims under the Arab Commander Issam al-Khawlani defeated the Franks and captured the Balearic Islands.
Mujahid al-Siqlabi, the ruler of the Taifa of Dénia, sent a fleet and seized control of the islands in 1015, using it as the base for subsequent expeditions to Sardinia and Pisa. In 1050, the island's governor Abd Allah ibn Aglab rebelled and established the independent Taifa of Mallorca.