Celebrate New Year’s Eve in Mallorca

Mallorca’s biggest – and free – New Year’s Eve party is in Palma’s Plaça Cort. There’s usually music and a good atmosphere and the crowd grows as the magical hour approaches.

Prepare yourself for the traditional Spanish New Year custom of ‘las doce uvas de la suerte’ – the 12 lucky grapes. Shops often sell packs or small tins of a dozen grapes for convenience, but it’s a more expensive way to buy them. We recommend seedless – and the smaller, the better.

One grape should be swallowed on each chime leading up to midnight. It’s a race to swallow each grape before the next chime but if you’re successful, it’s said that 12 months of good luck will follow.

If you’re in Palma’s Plaça Cort, you’ll be swallowing your grapes to the chimes of the town hall’s ‘Reloj d´En Figuera’ – on what was one of Spain’s first public towers to have a clock and a bell.

At midnight, fireworks go off by the Cathedral – creating some great photo opportunities.

Something new for this year may appeal to footie fans. Real Mallorca’s newly renovated Estadio de Son Moix is hosting a New Year’s Eve dinner and fiesta in its new restaurant, with a view of the pitch. Unlike the fiesta in Plaça Cort, this one isn’t free of charge.

Wherever you’re celebrating, if you’re hoping for love in 2024, the tradition in Spain on New Year’s Eve is to wear red underwear … which is why you´ll see more of it in shop windows at this time of year.