Barcelone - Palma de Mallorca: a winter teen camp between city and island

A supervised winter stay for teenagers aged fourteen to seventeen between Barcelona and Palma de Mallorca, run by the French operator Temps Jeunes. The group travels from France with its leaders and crosses the Mediterranean by boat between the two cities. The working language of the group is French; this is a travel and discovery programme, not a language course, with no lessons and no levels. The stay is run with a small group.

The package covers the accompanied journey by train and ferry, the sea crossing between Barcelona and Palma, accommodation, all meals, the activity programme and the supervising team. The headline price is the package leaving from Paris: travel is part of the package for everyone, and each of the other French departure cities costs a set amount more, listed one by one in Extras. A departure city is only operated with a minimum of three participants, and the stay runs only if the minimum group is reached. An identity card or passport valid for the stay, the European health insurance card and the parental authorisation to leave the territory are the family’s responsibility.

The group stays in youth hostels, in rooms of four to six beds. Young people take part in running the stay, including the shopping and the cooking.

The young people take part in the shopping and the cooking alongside the leaders, and some meals are eaten in local restaurants. Two food moments are part of the programme itself: the stalls of La Boqueria market in Barcelona, with tapas and jamon iberico, and a cookery lesson in Mallorca where a chef teaches the group a local recipe - sobrasada, ensaimadas, frito mallorquin - which they then eat.

Barcelona opens with a treasure hunt written by the leaders: missions, riddles and photo challenges that double as a first tour of the city. From there the group walks up Las Ramblas, gets deliberately lost in the Gothic quarter among its small squares and arcades, follows the water at the port and the Barceloneta, stops at the La Boqueria market and stands in front of the Sagrada Familia. The crossing to Mallorca is made by boat and counts as part of the trip. In Palma a city game runs from the cathedral to Bellver Castle above the sea, with challenges on culture, sport and food, and a digital map turns the city’s street art into a hunt for murals. Away from town the group follows marked coastal paths past villages, beaches and coves, and a chef gives a cookery lesson in a Mallorcan recipe. Every evening ends with group activities.

The stay moves between two cities and is not based in one building.

A loud Catalan city and a quiet Mediterranean island, with a night crossing in between that makes the change of place physical rather than abstract. Most of the discovery is organised as a game - treasure hunt, city game, street art hunt - so the group covers ground by competing rather than by following a guide. The young people run their own domestic life, from the market to the kitchen. Supervision is one adult for every eight participants, with a qualified director and a first-aid trained leader in the team.