'How I organised a multi-generational holiday for 10 people to Mallorca'

The Germans have a word for it, of course. We Brits call it “that feeling when you’ve been locked down by a pandemic for blinking ages and are desperate to pack your bags and head off somewhere far away”. In Dusseldorf they simply say “fernweh”.

I have had fernweh symptoms for weeks: uncontrollable twitches at breakfast when the morning mail brings a postcard depicting an exotic beach; spasmodic blinking when discovering a passport at the bottom of the desk drawer; incoherent burbling when a bottle of an unidentifiable sticky liquid is found at the back of the drinks cabinet.

I am all for staycations, naturally. As the BBC’s Home Editor, my day job is to patrol the domestic beat, and I spend immoderate time working in those places to which others go for pleasure. There is barely a British sea-front arcade that hasn’t featured as the backdrop to an Easton piece-to-camera. But, as in all things, balance is required. As well as home fixtures, I believe there must also be away games. And so, like a racing driver on the starting grid, every sinew in my ageing frame was poised for the moment when the lights would go green, and the race to exit our shores would begin.

There were false starts – Israel and Portugal beckoned until events required an emergency stop. Then the official list of acceptable resorts was updated again and “Operation Balearics” swung into action.

The mission was ambitious: to transport myself, my wife, our four children, three partners and a baby, to a villa in Mallorca, without breaking rules, ignoring guidance or needing to quarantine. The missing partner, a captain in the British army, had been due to come until duties in Iraq intervened. We could have done with his logistical expertise. The success of Operation Balearics depended upon completing a bureaucratic assault course.

I can best describe the exercise as a cross between a fiendish sudoku and a cryptic crossword. One wrong number, one letter out of place, and the entire venture would fail. Apps needed downloading, vaccine certificates needed uploading, negative PCR tests needed registering, QR codes needed generating, a matrix of data for each member of the party had to be assembled and inserted. Even baby Ben, not yet old enough to know a world without social distancing, required two Spanish residency forms for our week in Palma. To add to the jeopardy, everything had to be completed and verified within a fixed time window ahead of departure.

There was, I must admit, a pang of pride as all 10 of us successfully crossed the Spanish border to the happy sound of a Mallorcan stamp being banged into our passports. A young family ahead of us were not so fortunate, escorted to the back of the terminal after an error was spotted in their homework.

Emerging from the airport into the golden hour of the Mediterranean evening, I remembered what I thought had forgotten. Only by going away and viewing the world in a different light can we get proper perspective and understanding. Home only makes sense in the context of away.

Where the outskirts of northern Palma give way to olive groves and goats is Palma Rainbow, a villa large enough to accommodate us all and, fortuitously, available. The owner, Jaime Sureda, welcomed us with a fist-bump and a tour of the premises: the fully equipped Arnold Schwarzenegger-themed gym; the massage room with its unexpected display of fearsome bicycle tools; a fabulous salt-water pool on a large terrace with views to the mountains of the Serra de Tramuntana; 12 bedrooms, each given the name of a male gay icon. My wife and I opted for George Michael while the children selected Freddie Mercury, Rupert Everett, Rock Hudson and Giorgio Armani. It was decided that grandson Ben should be livin’ la vida loca in Ricky Martin.

“The villa is popular with sportspeople and musicians,” Jaime told me. “We have had teams of cyclists staying, as well as German rappers and footballers, but increasingly we have welcomed family groups.” He had reminded me that almost twice as many Germans as Brits take flights to Mallorca in a normal summer. Perhaps, like me, it was fernweh that had brought them to the Rainbow.

I had found the villa with the help of the UK travel firm Oliver’s Travels, and sitting in the shade of a pine tree on Santa Ponsa beach I chatted on the phone to Oliver himself. “European villa holidays are going to come back like a train,” Oli Bell advised me from his offices back in a grey London. “It is already hard to find the best villas for next year because so many have been booked up by people deferring holidays first planned back in 2019.”

Although last summer was “brutal” and this summer remained “incredibly difficult”, Oli expressed confidence that, as Europe stutters out of its Covid restrictions, the larger villa market will boom. “Grandparents, parents and children are looking to reunite after 18 months of lockdown,” he explained.

I wandered back to our camp of sunbeds to discover baby Ben learning the hard way that sand wasn’t good to eat. This trip had first been proposed back in 2019, before he was even a twinkle in an eye, I realised. How the world had changed.

Next morning, we assembled early for an adventure. The wooden train that connects Palma with Sóller in the north has been running since 1912, through city streets, past lemon orchards, along deep gorges, until the little engine chugs deep under the Tramuntana mountains. I can report that there was indeed light at the end of the tunnel, a perfect Mallorcan lunch at Ca’n Boqueta in Sóller, featuring ensaimadita cooked with camaiot sausage and a bottle of amber ale from Alcúdia.

A vintage tram snaked its way between restaurant tables of German tourists in the town square on its way to the port, a rumbling and squealing metaphor for another word of Germanic origin, wanderlust. Literally “the desire to go hiking” – though my definition is “the freedom to go wherever curiosity and serendipity contrive to take me”, a purposeful aimlessness that has been a sad casualty of Covid.

Back at Rainbow, the wanderlust of the knight errant overwhelmed me, a need to roam the countryside and prove my chivalric virtues. Like a 21st-century Don Quixote, I grabbed the bags of recycling and headed down the road to the communal bins, resisting the temptation to tilt at the beautiful old windmill (now a restaurant) that I passed on my way. I bravely ignored the snarling of hounds behind garden gates until I reached a café that had clearly not brewed coffee for some considerable time.

“Many hospitality businesses had to close down and have not been able to open again,” Nuala Brennan explained. A Mallorcan resident who acts as overseas contracts manager for Oliver’s Travels, Nuala has observed the island’s response to the pandemic. “Unemployment has skyrocketed, and some locals have been using food banks,” she told me. “But there is also a window for change because people have experienced their island without tourists for the first time. There has been no water shortage this year. Marine life has flourished. Red-knobbed coots and squacco herons have returned to the wetlands, and ordinary Mallorcans have been able to access the best beaches again.”

She told me of growing support for plans to knock down the strip at Magaluf and replace it with a marina, luxury apartments and a five-star hotel. “People have just seen the island in a different way and would prefer to have fewer tourists paying a bit more.”

Operation Balearics was not yet accomplished. A newsflash illuminated my mobile as I turned sausages on the barbecue by the pool. “Mallorca added to England’s amber list”, it read. Heart rates soared, but soon settled as we realised the change would happen two days after our return. But even on the green list, our last evening in the Balearics involved synchronised nostril twizzling as the entire party dutifully completed lateral flow tests – mercifully, each one negative.

The level of complexity and anxiety Covid had succeeded in adding to the holiday was far greater than we had imagined – but a year from now, I suspect we will not remember the agony of the forms or the tests. Instead, we will talk of just how lucky we had been to break free from the pandemic’s grip and indulge our inner fernweh.

How to do it

Palma Rainbow sleeps 14-24 guests, with 7 nights for 14 people costing £10,341 in August, and £8,804 in September with Oliver’s Travels (0800 133 7999; oliverstravels.com). Each additional guest costs an extra £60 per person per night. For more inspiration and ideas on where to stay, see Telegraph Travel's guide to the best hotels in Mallorca.