A friend living in the Balearic Islands was in London recently and we met up. And she said how pleased she was that timesonline uses the Spanish/Catalan version for her adopted island: Mallorca.

She works in the tourism business and believes the L of it best describes her island - and it's a position that is gaining ground in the Balearics.

But don't thank me Dominique: it's the Sunday Times that started it, Mallorca being the paper's preferred style as opposed to the anglicised Majorca - which The Times, among others, believes is the correct way of spelling the island.

What to do? Stuck with two styles but with search demanding only one, we opted to make all of our relevant Spanish content - including The Times - use Mallorca instead of Majorca.

A cycling tour of Mallorca

Mallorca is the perfect island for a two-wheeled adventure. You don’t even need to wear Lycra

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As Dominique points out, Mallorca is a lot more relevant now than when Majorca became the package holiday place to be in the 1970s and Ivor Biggun sang that song that started: "Uno, dos, tres, suzi quattro..."

"It has always been double LL - it is only in Britain that it became Majorca. People say it with a hard 'J' and it conjures up images of drunks in Magaluf," she says.

The resorts still flourish (although are down 15 per cent this summer) - but the 'new' growth in the past 15 years has tended to be away from the beaches.

The island was a pioneer of rural tourism, with farmers given cash incentives to restore barns and outbuildings for self-catering. One of the biggest, Mallorca Farmhouses, last year captured the prize domain www.mallorca.co.uk.

The island has become synonomous for good food, boutique hotels and walking holidays. And now it is gaining a reputation among cyclists, climbers and other sporting visitors - an Olympic-sized pool is being built for off-season training.

As one tourist website put it: "Majorca, with a hard 'j', is a place invented by foreigners, where the sun always shines, the beer flows and the nearest you get to local culture is an argument with a taxi-driver. Mallorca, the local name for the island, is quite different and far more complex. This guide is about Mallorca."

It is not an argument that you'd expect the English-language paper on the island, the Majorca Daily Bulletin, to back.

But until both our papers agree, we'll have to take a position - and Mallorca seems more appropriate. Now, Marrakesh or Marrakech? Sigh....

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