It’s easy to miss S’Hort d’en Guiem. Located in Santa Maria behind a traditional Mallorcan home, the only clue is the hand-painted sign directing you down a side street. There you find a small bodega bookended by farm equipment and smelling of vegetables fresh from the soil. Though it’s an ordinary Wednesday evening, customers are swarming the shelves of produce and a line has formed at the counter where Guiem himself tallies up kilograms on a piece of scrap paper.

Soon, you understand why this business, which really leans into the small and local categorizations, is so popular. Want a head of lettuce? Guiem hands you a pair of shears and you go out to the garden and pick your favorite. And the fresh bread and cocarrois are as delicious as they smell.

S’Hort d’en Guiem, which literally means “Guiem’s Garden,” sells produce either grown right on site or sourced from local vendors. This may seem limiting, but Guiem has become one of Mallorca‘s most successful grocers. In the process, he’s both revitalized the Mallorcan agricultural tradition and reaffirmed the home-grown quality customers are looking for.

Love What you do

Guiem Colomar opened his market in 2019, but the operation dates to nearly two decades prior. Originally a truck driver, Guiem and his wife struggled to make ends meet and began complementing their income by selling vegetables from their garden at local markets in 2000. Guiem decided to cultivate his father’s property as well, doubling his production area to nearly an acre, around 3,600 square meters.

Two decades may seem like a long time to grow a business, but if there was one thing I took away from my time talking with Guiem it was that patience is as essential a part of organic farming as soil and sun. When I visited his finca, it was the calçot growing season, and 15,000 of them were springing up from the soil.

If you haven’t tried them, the calçot is a type of green onion popular in the Catalan countries, grilled over open flame and then eaten with an almond dipping sauce known as salvitxada. Yet these seemingly simple plants have a two-year grow cycle that requires dedication and quite a bit of physicality, kneeling down in mounds of dirt from which the onions draw their name.

Similarly, Guiem showed me where he makes his own compost. That takes two years as well, and it’s not just waiting for the plants to decay. It must be watered and transitioned between different receptacles.

As a result, S’Hort d’en Guiem has pretty limited hours. It’s only open on Wednesday evening, Thursday and Friday, and Saturday and Sunday mornings. The rest of the time, Guiem’s digging in the dirt. He told me it’s more than worth it just to be making a living doing something he loves, but is it worth it financially?

The Mallorcan Organic Farming Revolution

Guiem told me that Mallorcans don’t have a long culture of organic farming and most people aren’t aware of its presence or benefits. It is true that as I gather my week’s vegetables, I don’t hear Mallorquín around me but French, German and English, customers that Guiem says buy a lot of kale, arguably his best-selling crop.

Yet even if other places got a jumpstart on the organic produce movement, Mallorca is determined to catch up. Even at a time when Spanish businesses were struggling and closing, Mallorca saw 71 new organic producers open in 2022, an 11% increase on the year for a total of 888, according to the Mallorca Preservation Foundation.

Moreover, the acreage devoted to organic farming increased 10 percent from 2020 to 2022, resulting in 33,629 hectares, 17.5 percent of the island’s usable agricultural area, far above the EU average of 9.9 percent.

Get a Cookie!

S’Hort d’en Guiem is a great place to do your grocery shopping, but it’s more than that. It’s a whole experience and a way to support and immerse oneself in one of Mallorca’s growing communities. Guiem sells more than his own produce, including fruit, eggs, dairy products, wine from Can Majoral, and even ice cream from Gelat Sóller. But if I had to make a recommendation, aside from going out back and picking your own head of lettuce, it would be to get a fresh cookie.

You can hit up S’Hort d’en Guiem on Sunday morning after visiting the famous Santa Maria market. He’s located just a few blocks from Plaça Nova. If you can’t make it, though, don’t worry. Guiem sells his products online, too.

More Information about S’hort d’en Guiem

Address: C/ Joan Mesquida 73, 07320, Santa Maria del Camí

Phone Number: +34 630 804 028

Email: shortdenguiem@gmail.com

Instagram: @shortdenguiem