Menorca travel tips — Ubiquitous.

If you are looking for a guide to the island of Menorca that will introduce you to remote beaches, luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants, hidden coves, and bays reached where, after an hour's walk, you can enjoy the solitude and the sound of the sea undisturbed, this is not the resource for you.

But if, on the other hand, you are looking for a way to explore the island with family and children, without giving up white sandy beaches with crystal clear waters, discovering typical restaurants and visiting lovely villages, then you are in the right place.

We explored the island of Menorca with two adults, a 2-year-old and a baby bump, certainly in a less viveur and exclusive way, but no less enjoyable. Menorca has the quality of offering easily accessible beaches with family-friendly features, moderate distances between locations, and quiet accommodations within walking distance of the sea.

Unlike the other Balearic islands, Menorca lives at a quieter pace: you will rarely find rowdy vacation groups or DJ music on the beach, and with the exception of a few rare hotel chains that have managed to colonize the coast, the coastal resorts look more like fishing ports than tourist centers. Moreover, it has a distinctly rural vocation, to the point that it has been declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, precisely for preserving the naturalistic part from urbanization.

It immediately jumps out, in fact, the uninterrupted succession of fields and pastures, interspersed only by some trees and dry-stone walls that separate properties and reach a few scattered white fincas that stand out in the sunlight. From one urban center to the next you will see nothing but nature, and on your way to the beach you will travel long roads shaded by dense rows of trees accompanied by red walls, which hide the view of the sea but offer pleasant views of the hinterland.

You arrive on the island at Mahòn Airport, the island's main center at its eastern end. From here, a single road cuts through the island from east to west, crossing it to Ciutadella, Menorca's most distinctive town, at its western end. On this central artery, roads to the other villages and coastal resorts converge.

When planning your stay, keep in mind that there is no one road that runs along the coast connecting the various beaches, but you will always have to return to the central road before detouring back to the coast. Moving from one beach to another therefore can be time-consuming: it will be good to choose the location of your accommodation according to the beaches you intend to visit, to minimize travel.

If you are not going for the beach-front hotel life, it will be good to rent a car (which is not cheap in Menorca). We stayed two days in Ciutadella, so that we had a chance to explore the city and more conveniently reach some of the beaches to the west of the island, and then we moved to Son Parc, a resort town close to the sea, from which the beaches and the villages we planned to visit were a 5- to 25-minute drive away.

Getting around Menorca by car is quite easy, especially since we never had any problems finding free parking either in town or near the beaches. We have read that in the very high season it is impossible to find a spot even in the early morning hours, but our experience in early July was more than positive.

The family-friendly beaches all have a large parking lot no more than 5 minutes away, which is great with a walking toddler. It is strangely easier to find parking in the middle hours of the day (10 a.m.-4 p.m.) rather than very early or very late, as at some point turnover becomes constant and a few spots continually become free during the day.

The busiest beaches have the advantage of having an electronic billboard that indicates the space left in the parking lots already miles away, so that if it was already full, you wouldn't have to go all the way to the beach to find out. On a couple of occasions, we have tried even with a full parking lot and gotten a spot vacated within seconds.

The parking lots close to the beach are also free.