IBIZA in the off-season. The big resort hotels are shuttered for deep cleaning, the beach bars sealed up, the superclubs powered down until their showy reopening parties get the summer started again in late April. By July, the ratio will be back to 20 holidaymakers per every one resident, but for now the island is as empty as it gets.
The sun is shining though, the air bright and warm, the sky a salted Balearic blue. And crowds still gather, here and there. At the Trotting Races, for example, in Sant Rafel hippodrome. A peculiar island tradition that supposedly began with charioteers during Ibiza’s ancient Roman occuptation, the sport requires jockies to ride on little wheeled carts harnessed to horses that keep a briskish, semi-hurried pace, as if only slightly late for an appointment. Kids and old boys seem to love it, the latter laying small bets and dropping shots of brandy in their coffee. My chosen horse, Maldiva des Puig, comes a distant third.
In the same weekend, I also visit the Mercadillo de Sant Jordi, a busy flea market in a cycling velodrome where mood and music are unexpectedly banging. Resident DJ Nik Smol, aka Coniktion, plays a judicious early-afternoon set of trance and disco that fills a racing pit with daytime dancers beside the main track.
Then there is the Sunday “hippy” market in tiny northern village Sant Joan de Labritja. Morning mass has just ended at the parish church of the same name, the congregation merging with shoppers and peddlers around the main square. Actual hippies too – a live band is playing Bob Marley covers, and a few wizened flower people are smiling and swaying like it’s 1969. Jean Michel Feuter, an elder statesman of the island’s creative community, has been standing in for that band’s regular guitarist.
“I first came to Ibiza in 1970 as one of those long-hairs,” says Feuter when they take a break. “LSD and all that. I later realised that what I loved about the place was not just the people or culture, it was the energy of the land itself. It’s tellurgical, magical, peaceful, and feminine, and if you’re sensitive you can tune into it.”
In summer, Feuter helps people do this at his long-running, mind-expanding club night Namaste, held in Ibiza’s other landmark hippie market, Las Dalias. But winter might be a better time to pick up the signal he’s talking about, when there is frankly less interference.
“People always ask about hidden gems of Ibiza,” says Boris Buono, who makes it his business to feed the Sunday multitudes with plant-based pizzas and the like at his garden restaurant Bistro Mondo up the street. “To me the real hidden gem is the winter.”
Unlike most chefs and owners, Buono stays open all year. “I live here, I work here, the kids are in school, what else am I going to do?”
“I prefer the winter,” agrees Behzad Behpour, an Iranian-born painter who works out of a second-floor studio overlooking the market. “You can clear your mind a bit, and make time to create.” Around us hang Behpour’s big signature canvases, rendering Ibizan icons (club owners, big-name DJs, regular celebrity visitors) as writhing servants of the island’s presiding deities – principally the ancient Phoenician moon goddess, Tanit. “I certainly think it’s an island for artists, and hanging out when it’s quiet is part of the process.”
His Kurdish friend Bahram Pourmand, better known as Bahramji, is also a painter, a New Age musician, and another veteran of the Ibizan scene. “You don’t get a winter like this anywhere else,” says Bahramji. He agrees too on the magnetic pull of the place, but reminds me that magnets also repel. “If the island doesn’t want you she will push you away,” he says, the kohl around his eyes making his gaze that bit more intense.
Market forces are not the same thing, and rent hikes have been squeezing artists off Ibiza too. “Two thousand euros a month is very difficult,” he admits. “But I’m going to stay here, playing music, until I die on stage.” The summer glamour of the island, the recent upscaling of its club culture, the building and buying of luxe villas and condos, all have knock-on effects that linger when the VIP crowd clears out.
“Even the cost of toast and coffee,” says Martina Greef, on her sailboat off the eastern port of Santa Eulària des Riu. “Locals end up paying tourist prices for everything.” Greef is a lifelong islander whose German parents came to Ibiza with that original influx of hippies. She owns a share in this vessel, which is named the Al Mar, and covers the exorbitant mooring fees with charter services in peak season.
Most clients just want to sail across to nearby Formentera, she says, “because that’s what they’ve seen on Instagram.” The strait between islands is like a highway for yachts and ferries in summer, the short voyage not very inspiring for a mariner. “But in winter we can go where we want,” she yells, turning us 60 degrees to the wind before giving me the wheel.
Sailing lessons provide her livelihood for this part of the year, and even as a lubberly novice I can see the appeal. Get the angles right and the boat just takes off. For a short spell I feel like I’m flying this thing over open water, while the low sun drops behind an ancient altar to Tanit above Cap des Llibrell.
Back inland, Lucas Prats puts me up at one of the villas on what used to be his grandfather’s property, looking out to sea from a hillside of orchards and olive groves. Agriturismo, as they call it, is a competitive business these days, drawing visitors away from coastal hotels to converted farmsteads. To Prats, there’s no reason why Ibiza can’t build up its off-peak profile, like Mallorca has. “We have better weather than they do at this time of year,” he says.
“Visitors who come in winter love it, we just need more promotion.” Next morning I descend on foot through steep cliffside forests with Manuel Ehrensperger of Ibiza Hike Station. A Swiss-born former CEO of luxury fashion brands, he now leads “holistic” hikes in the wildest parts of the island, where pines grow over long-abandoned stone terraces once used for growing and drying figs. “People say I changed my life, but this is luxury too,” he tells me.
A true believer in the healing power of nature, and silence, Ehrensperger invites me to spend seven minutes in hushed contemplation above the Cave of Light, where the water glows a deep, cosmic blue. It’s too dangerous to jump here, he says, but I can drop into the sea from the rocks at the other side, and have the whole cove to myself – another pleasure of winter.
Well, not quite to myself. While I’m thinking about it, two dolphins breach the surface below. It’s a little chilly up here to be honest, and a bit higher than I’d like. I’m not one for mysticism either, for talk of energies or vibrations. But I feel like those dolphins are telling me to jump. The goddess Tanit wants me to – the spirit of the island herself. So I jump.
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