Can Ordines d'Almadrà

Can Ordines d'Almadrà is a historic mansion in Palma, standing four storeys high among the old town’s courtyard houses. Its Gothic and Renaissance details show how elite homes changed across several centuries.

Berenguer Vivot built the house in the early sixteenth century, and marriage later linked it to the Ariany estate and the Vivot family. After several seventeenth-century ownership changes, Angela Prohens’s marriage to Joan Ordines d’Almadrà brought the property to landowners from Alaró in the early nineteenth century. Two ground-floor windows frame a Renaissance shield with wild men, while a Gothic window rises between the main-floor balconies. Renovations between 1941 and 1943 added a reproduced window, a loggia and a staircase.

Inside, a late Gothic portal shows two women pressing their fingers to their lips beside the Vivot-Santjoan shield. The inscription “Tu nube atque tace” offers a striking glimpse of the household’s values and wit. Under the courtyard staircase, the Roman funerary stone Ara Manlia recalls a necropolis once located nearby, connecting this aristocratic home with Palma’s Roman past.