Chilled Ibiza: Experience the Ultimate Sunset Mix

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Finally, the island gets the avant-garde coctelería it’s been wanting for years, set in the foodie hub of Santa Gertrudis. On a hot day it bustles with beautiful people who come for chef Rafa Zafra’s impeccably prepared fish and shellfish. Watching the sunset from the clifftop terraza at Hostal La Torre – a key spot for frustrated dance-music lovers during the lockdown period – I smiled to remember a party here during the naughty 1990s, when sleeping pills were distributed under another guise and the sun rose to reveal a landscape littered with snoring bodies. Another example of this is Petunia, where I stopped one evening for dinner on a terrace with mesmeric views of the rocky islet Es Vedrà. From a hardscrabble peasant economy to one of the world’s wealthiest enclaves in the space of 60 years.

Though it looks fresh, Oku is in fact based on the footings of a former three-star stay, a humble bucket-and-spader dating from the package-tour boom of the 1970s.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). The original fixer for anything you want organised while in Ibiza, from villas to chefs, drivers to yoga teachers. Of course, this is a high-end hideaway that pulls out all the stops, but we’re a long way from Ushuaïa.

As an indication of just how far it is from blaring techno around the pool, there are plans to host a classical music event here next year. Further round the west coast, I stopped for a dip at the pretty cove of Cala Moli, just down the road from the splashy private community Sabina Estates. Everything was still in post-Covid recovery mode and a strange, faintly dazed feeling was detectable.Parts of my mental geography were virtually unrecognisable: Santa Gertrudis, in my day a one-horse hamlet with a couple of bars and a tobacconist, was now a fully grown town of done-up villas with a world-class cocktail bar, Overall, and Bottega il Buco, an outpost of New York restaurateur Donna Lennard’s Il Buco, also found in NoHo and the Hamptons. And that was where I headed next, drawn by the single-track roads winding among almond fields and the secret calas (creeks) of the coast. Moving 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.