The fruit with many spellings comes to Porreres

A celebrated Mallorcan chef, Miquel Calent, has explained that the microclimate in southern parts of Mallorca is particularly favourable to the growing of apricots.

And Porreres is the most favourable of all, the importance of apricots to the local economy having developed over the course of the last century. The Porreres Cooperative can now shift up to 80 tonnes of apricot, which helps to explain why there has been a Porreres apricot fair since 2013.

Back in the late fourteenth century, there was a poem in which various trees in the Mallorcan fruit garden were identified. Apricot was one of them, and it has a curious claim to fame in apparently having had more different spellings than any other fruit - 25 in all. Nowadays, and fortunately, they’ve settled on one (in Catalan anyway) and that is ‘albercoc’.