Ever found a destination’s journey from secret idyll to place-of-the-moment irritating? Take Majorca. For several years now, with every other summer Instagram story apparently filmed from a clifftop in Deia, those who've quietly loved it for decades might feel rather like they’ve been gazumped on our own secret.
Sandra Bullock has a house there. So do Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas, who've been visiting since it was simply where people who knew what they were doing went, rather than where people who'd seen it on someone else's Instagram went. Michelle Obama, Oprah, Kate Moss, Lady Beckham. The island has somehow managed the impossible trick of being both endlessly chic and entirely unbothered about it — which, if you think about it, is the most Majorcan attitude of all.
Most people see this version of Majorca from a sunlounger, or possibly a yacht deck, holding a glass of something cold and looking vaguely nautical without doing anything that could be classified as actual sailing. Which is, frankly, a wasted opportunity. Because the real flex isn't being on a boat. It's knowing how to sail the thing yourself.
This is precisely the gap Club Avandra's sailing holiday is meant to fill. Six nights, beginning in Palma and working along the most dramatic stretch of the island's coastline — the cliffs of Tramuntana, the harbour at Soller, the headland at Cape Formentor (yes, the one from The Night Manager, should you fancy imagining yourself as a slightly more competent Olivia Colman) — and ending in the historic port of Alcudia.
You'll learn to steer. You'll learn to tack and gybe, properly, not in the vague gesturing way most of us nod along to when someone else explains it. You'll anchor in coves so turquoise they look digitally enhanced, eat lobster stew at harbourside tables you reached yourself, and swim off the back of the boat at dawn, which is one of those experiences that sounds like a brochure cliché until you've actually done it, at which point you become insufferable about it for weeks.
It's not a spa day. Nobody's doing the work for you. But by Thursday, you'll be the woman confidently bringing the boat into a marina berth while everyone else holds their breath, and there is no Euro-jetset flex quite like that.
Add to that a week of all-female company — no one explaining the boom to you unprompted, no one assuming you'd rather be on the sunlounger — and you have travel without compromise in its purest form. You came for Majorca. You'll leave with a skill, a tan, and almost certainly a WhatsApp group that outlasts the trip by several years.
Grab the tiller. You've got this.
Places are limited. Book your spot on All At Sea with Karen Gill, 15–21 August 2026, at Club Avandra.
