DANCE TO A DIFFERENT BEAT

Moving on from its party-hard peak, Ibiza has gone through an introspective shift, with a desire to slow life down so it can hit its rhythm again. Savvy and considered escapes energise tired old haunts while low-key hangouts quietly replace all-nighters. Paul Richardson returns to the White Isle, which he called home for a decade, to find that it has grown new shoots.

- Paul Richardso

From a hardscrabble peasant economy to one of the world’s wealthiest enclaves in the space of 60 years… Few places on the planet have undergone changes as sweeping, as transformative, both for good and ill, as Ibiza.

Some of these shifts I have witnessed myself. It’s a story I’ve told before: for 10 years I lived in an old casa payesa in Sant Vicent de sa Cala in the 1990s when rent was as cheap as chips, smartphones and the internet hadn’t happened yet, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a good hotel on the island. When I returned earlier this summer I was celebrating a double anniversary: 30 years since I first set up home here, and 20 since I finally fled the madding crowds for a distant corner of the Iberian peninsula.

From the airport, I swung past Ibiza town on its hill beside the sea. Everything was still in post-Covid recovery mode and a strange, faintly dazed feeling was detectable. Along the road, sun-faded nightclub billboards advertising the closing parties of October 2019 seemed like messages from another world. The great dome of Privilege up on the heights of San Rafael looked forlorn and unkempt, the encroaching vegetation making it appear like a Mayan ruin in the early stages of being reclaimed by the jungle.