The Last Rice Farmer of Sa Pobla: Inside Mallorca's Forgotten Grain

How a cursed marshland, an ancient rice variety, and one stubborn farmer are keeping the island's most authentic dish alive.

There is a moment, standing in a rice field in northern Mallorca, when the island you think you know disappears. No coastline, no cathedral, no beach clubs. Just a flat green sea of young rice plants shivering in the July heat, a restored windmill on the horizon, and a Golden Retriever named Duna weaving between the irrigation channels ahead of her owner, Llorenç.

Most visitors will never see this Mallorca. Which is strange, because what grows here is a rare, ancient grain called arròs bombeta, the quiet foundation of the island's greatest dishes and one of the last living links to a landscape that Mallorcans spent centuries trying to destroy.

A Marshland They Called Cursed

To understand the rice, you have to understand the land. Sa Pobla sits on the edge of s'Albufera, the largest wetland in the Balearic Islands, and for most of its history nobody wanted to be anywhere near it. The standing water bred mosquitoes, the mosquitoes carried malaria, and the marshes earned a reputation as cursed ground. In the 19th century, British engineers arrived with grand plans to drain the whole thing and convert it into farmland. The project swallowed fortunes and mostly failed. The water always came back.

But something remarkable happened at the edges. Where the wetland met the dry land, generations of farmers built the marjal: a hand-made agricultural landscape of raised plots, drainage canals, and stone-lined water reservoirs, sitting on centuries of dark, spongy, organic sediment. The women who worked these marshes, known as the marjaleres, became local legends, and rice thrived in ground that was too wet for almost anything else.

Then, almost silently, it nearly vanished. By the mid-1970s, rice cultivation in Sa Pobla had all but died out, pushed aside by cheaper imports and the export potato boom. It took until the 1990s for a handful of locals to bring the crop back, less as a business than as an act of memory. Today Sa Pobla celebrates that revival every autumn at the Fira de l'Arròs, where the harvest is honoured with xeremiers (Mallorcan bagpipers), parading gegants, and tributes to the marjaleres who kept the fields alive. Meanwhile, s'Albufera itself, abandoned by industry and finally left in peace, became the Balearics' first Natural Park, a Ramsar-protected wetland where more than 300 bird species now live, minutes from resorts full of tourists who have no idea it exists.

Llorenç, Duna, and 6,000 Kilos of Resistance

At Es Marjal de Can Serra, on the fertile plain outside Sa Pobla, Llorenç farms what is essentially the last publicly available harvest of authentic arròs bombeta. His entire annual production never exceeds 6,000 kg. The only other bombeta growers left are elderly neighbours tending small plots for their own families.

Rice runs in his blood: a Mallorcan father, a mother from Valencia, Spain's undisputed kingdom of rice. Standing in the field, he cracked open a raw grain to show us its anatomy: the husk, the bran layer that makes brown rice brown, the pearly heart that emerges after traditional milling. He does nearly all of this work alone, and it is brutal. When we visited in midsummer, the plants were just beginning to head, knee-high and brilliantly green. By late August they will stand over a metre tall; then Llorenç cuts the water and lets the Mediterranean sun dry the fields before the September harvest.

He also took us inside the windmill on his estate. And here I have a confession: I come from Sant Jordi, a village defined by its windmills, and I had never actually stepped inside one. Llorenç's is different from the square towers of my childhood: a beautifully restored circular tower with a deep cistern at its centre, storing fresh water pumped from the aquifer below. From the top, the land splits in two: rice fields on one side, and on the other a summer orchard heavy with tomatoes, peppers, watermelons and cantaloupes, because a 6,000-kilo rice harvest alone cannot sustain a farm, even in soil this generous.

Below us sat the great stone safareig, the traditional irrigation reservoir. I grinned at Llorenç: "How many times have you jumped in there for a swim?" He answered with the smile of anyone who grew up in the Mallorcan countryside.

Why This Grain Refuses to Die

Bombeta survives for one reason: the food demands it. It is an ancient strain, famously resistant to overcooking, and local cooks swear each grain drinks up to 30% more broth than ordinary rice while staying firm and separate. Chefs across the island insist on it for traditional dishes, and that demand is what stops the variety from disappearing, a process agronomists call genetic erosion, prevented in this case by nothing more sophisticated than Mallorcans refusing to make arròs brut with anything else.

The scale is genuinely small. In November 2021, the Balearic Islands' Traditional Foods Commission formally added arròs bombeta to its Catàleg d'Aliments Tradicionals, official recognition for a crop grown today by barely a dozen registered producers across roughly 30 hectares of Sa Pobla and Muro, a fraction of the nearly 1,800 hectares the marjal once carried before the 20th-century decline.

Set it beside its famous Mediterranean cousins and the differences are clear. Valencia's bomba is the gold standard for paella: it expands like an accordion and keeps the rice loose and dry across a wide, thin pan. Italy's carnaroli is the opposite creature entirely, engineered by nature for risotto, releasing amylopectin creaminess with every stir. Bombeta belongs to a third tradition: it is the king of clay, built for the slow, lingering heat of Mallorcan earthenware, where it absorbs saffron, cuttlefish ink and rich meat broths like a sponge while keeping a clean, firm bite.

Forget Paella: Mallorca Cooks in Clay

This is the part that surprises guests most in our traditional cooking classes in Mallorca: the island's great rice dishes were never made in a paella pan. Mallorcan dry rice, known as arròs sec, is cooked in a greixonera, a shallow, flat-bottomed clay dish that holds heat deeply and gently, letting local ingredients release their flavour into the grain slowly. Visitors arrive looking for paella and discover something older.

Three dishes define the tradition. Arròs brut, literally "dirty rice," is the island's ultimate comfort food, a soupy winter rice named for its dark, cloudy broth, spiced with a paste of poultry liver, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and black pepper, and loaded with pork, rabbit and chicken. Arròs sec de peix is the closest cousin to seafood paella, built on cuttlefish, rockfish broth and a properly made sofregit, the tomato-and-onion base whose secrets we teach in the kitchen. And arròs pobler, Sa Pobla's own fiery version, packs pork loin, rabbit, snails and winter greens with local pebre de cirereta cayenne, a dish farmers ate to fight off the marsh cold.

Several of these rice dishes lean on another native ingredient fighting its own quiet battle for survival: Tap de Cortí, Mallorca's native paprika, grown a short drive away in Sant Jordi.

Taste It, Cook It, Take It Home

Llorenç sells nothing through supermarkets. Everything at Es Marjal de Can Serra is harvested on demand (a bag of bombeta, a basket of summer tomatoes) and ordered through his online shop, for pickup at the farm in Sa Pobla (go: the circular windmill alone is worth the drive) or at his collection point in Cala Ratjada. Every kilo sold keeps the last guardian of Sa Pobla's rice heritage in the field.

And if you want to understand what this grain can really do, come cook with it. At Soqueta Experiences, our hands-on Mallorcan cooking classes near Palma are built around ingredients like Llorenç's rice, because we believe the best way to know an island is to cook it, in clay, with the people who grow it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is arròs bombeta? Arròs bombeta is a rare, round, short-grain rice variety grown almost exclusively around Sa Pobla and Muro in Mallorca, on land reclaimed from the s'Albufera wetland. In November 2021 it was formally added to the Balearic Islands' Catàleg d'Aliments Tradicionals as an officially recognised traditional food.

What's the difference between arròs bombeta and paella rice? Valencia's bomba, the classic paella rice, is bred to expand and stay loose and dry across a wide, shallow pan. Arròs bombeta is built for the opposite job: slow, clay-pot cooking in a greixonera, where it absorbs broth deeply while staying firm, which is why it's used for soupy dishes like arròs brut rather than dry paella.

What is arròs brut? Arròs brut, literally "dirty rice," is Mallorca's signature soupy winter rice dish, made with arròs bombeta, a dark spiced broth, and pork, rabbit or chicken, traditionally cooked in a clay greixonera rather than a paella pan.

Where can I buy arròs bombeta rice? Directly from the few remaining growers in Sa Pobla, including Llorenç at Es Marjal de Can Serra, who sells through his online shop with pickup at the farm or a collection point in Cala Ratjada. It's rarely stocked in supermarkets.

Can I cook with arròs bombeta on a trip to Mallorca? Yes. Soqueta Experiences runs hands-on cooking classes near Palma that use local, seasonal ingredients like arròs bombeta, cooked the traditional way in a clay greixonera.

Want to cook authentic island rice in a traditional greixonera? Join our next cooking experience in Mallorca, or start with the Mercado Olivar market tour and shop like a local first.