In Search of The Other Ibiza

Beyond the nightclub hype and boilerplate beach luxury, Thomas Rogers set out to discover the other side of the famed Balearic island.

Photography Cristina López

Day 1

The first thing that strikes me is the color. Looking out the window as my plane descends into Ibiza, the reddish brown of the coast vibrates against the grayish green of the island’s parched vegetation. The second, as we drive into the hills, is the surreal procession of nightclub billboards lining the roads: “Privilege,” “Pacha,” words evoking that frothy blend of high-end debauchery and mass tourism that so many people have come to associate with Ibiza, for better or worse. But as we get further from the coast, the city gives way to farmland, the billboards to trees.

Russell, our driver, came here two and a half years ago from Ireland, and like thousands of others before him, never left, drawn in by the island’s unique “energy.” “The first winter is the toughest,” he says, as our van drives up a hill towards La Granja, the 10-hectare farmhouse estate where I’ll be staying. “It’s ok if you have a job but otherwise things get survivalist.” Most of the island’s permanent residents depend on tourism for their livelihood, with lives marked by frantic activity in the summer months, and long, quiet winters. They inhabit a parallel Ibiza defined not by parties and package vacations but by the soft pace of authentic island life, Balearic tradition marked by a colorful, sun-drenched hippie heritage. That’s the Ibiza I came here to find.

Russell turns off the paved road onto an uneven path signposted with a simple letter “G.” As if crossing the threshold to another world, we drive slowly, silently, through a thick forest of gnarled trees and thicket, blanketed in a ghostly layer of chalk-white dust. Finally we break through the trees and the dust clears to reveal La Granja, unfurling before us like a hilltop oasis. Anchored by a century-old stone farmhouse and a terraced garden with a glimmering swimming pool, the estate overlooks a vista of rolling farmland and sloping woods — and beyond that, the sun-basked blue of the Mediterranean Sea. I walk up to my lodgings, a cavern ous room bathed in dark wood and deep shadows, accented by dapples of warm island light. Looking down on the pool from my private terrace at the working farm below, I feel like I’ve traversed decades in the half hour it took to drive from the airport.

As the sun sets, I head down to the terrace for my “farmer’s table” — La Granja’s signature five-course meal that mixes the estate’s produce with other local ingredients, a meal that doubles as a metaphor about bringing together visitors and locals.

José Catrimán, La Granja’s chef, came to Ibiza from Barcelona five years ago, but grew up in Patagonia. A handsome man in his late 30s with cropped black hair and a warm laugh, José stands before an outdoor hearth overlooking the hills. Helpers bring up baskets of fresh vegetables and fruits from the farm below as smoke escapes from the oven.

“My mom taught me to cook, in a tiny village,” José explains. “There are no cities in Patagonia.” When he came to the island, he found a home in the woods, planted a garden with vegetables. Now he presides over a kitchen supplied by several acres of dedicated farmland, with beetroot, squashes, and figs, and a pig named Coco. My meal starts with fresh gazpacho, made with garlic and almonds, a crisp salad made of homegrown La Granja produce, and culminates with a whole fish, which José debones at the table. The meal is exactly what I wanted: I can taste the earth, the sunlight, the island’s very essence. The sun dims, and the only light I see is the gentle twinkling of faraway cars driving from the city.

Day 2

The following day, José leads me back through the center of the island and past a procession of farms, small cafés, and warehouses, to his favorite picnic spot. We climb down a steep cliff at Sa Caleta, a secluded stretch of coast on the southern corner of the island, and clamber over some concrete trenches until we arrive at a set of abandoned fishing shacks. The cliffs are the bright red color I noticed from my airplane windows — a result of the island’s iron-rich soil — but the seaside rocks are grayer, rougher. Other than a small pebbly beach a kilometer away along the cliffs, there’s no sign of other human beings, only the empty shacks with palm-thatched awnings and the sound of the waves crashing against concrete pilings.

José explains that fishermen used to store their boats here, but now locals use them to swim or sunbathe: there’s a nearby sign warning visitors not to start fires; an old tile table in front of one of the shacks, partly eaten away by the sea. In the distance, planes occasionally rise through the sky. The island’s legendary house music scene made it a huge draw in the ‘90s, but it wasn’t until budget airlines arrived a decade later that the island became the destination that it now is. This August, nearly one-and-a-half million people came through Ibiza airport, but La Granja, set among the island’s pastoral inlands, seems far-flung from this globalist hubbub, and I’ve barely seen any signs of other tourists.

José Catrimán, La Granja’s chef, serves up the “farmer’s table.”

Baskets of fresh vegetables and fruits are brought up from the farm below.

The pool terrace at La Granja Ibiza.

Sa Caleta, a secluded stretch of coastline on the southern edge of the island.

A picnic, prepared by José Catrimán, La Granja’s chef.

A view of the cove from “Julia.”

José talks shop.

Later, I head out to meet José just outside San Antonio, the island’s second city. In the last few years, it has become Ibiza’s preferred spot for package tourists, and the center of the city is arranged along a harbor lined with restaurants and people hawking tickets for the island’s big clubs. Driving through the outskirts, I notice the half-finished remnants of Spain’s pre-crisis construction boom and the first signs of the tourist masses: groups of sunburnt men wandering down the street. When I get to the beach, José pulls out several jars of fresh ceviche — including one made with octopus — and together with his friend Manuel, we head out on their retrofitted fishing boat, Julia.

The life of an Ibiza chef, he explains, is built on local connections: “If a chef works for a wealthy client, he’ll recommend a friend when the client needs someone else,” he says. “Gradually, we all just kind of get to know one another.” As Julia bobs in the waves, we point to distant tourists in powerboats. “My life feels very far away from all that,” José says.

That night, José sends me to a restaurant that his friend, former Noma chef Boris Buono, opened in the bottom floor of his apartment 14 months ago: Ibiza Food Studio. Hidden among the winding cobblestone alleyways of Ibiza Old Town, the place is so hard to locate that I only find it when one of the restaurant’s servers sees me wandering aimlessly down the street and points me in the right direction. The atmosphere feels more like a private party than a proper restaurant — I can see Boris and his tattooed and pierced sous-chefs preparing the food in the open kitchen, there’s a washing machine in the bathroom, and the host, a brassy Mancunian with a generous pour, invites me to smoke on Boris’s personal balcony.

Over the next three hours, I experience one of the best meals of my life, an extraordinary six-course odyssey that includes, among many other surprises, a salmon with beetroot and avocado so smooth it slowly dissolves in my mouth and veal tartar smoked with Ibiza pine — as Boris places it in front of me, he lifts up a cloudy glass cloche and the smoke wafts up to the restaurant’s ceiling. As the evening goes on, the vibe becomes more jovial and takes on the air of an intimate island house party. An Indian man tells me that he’s just written a Bollywood movie about a plane hijacking; an Icelandic woman with a pixie cut and feather earrings screams: “Everybody tells me I look like Sharon Stone!”

After dinner, I wander through Ibiza Town’s quiet city center. At this point in the evening, the tourist shops hawking jewelry and flowing white tunics have closed down and the streets are empty aside from a few latenight revelers. Just inside the Old Town’s fortified walls I find La Mezcaleria, the island’s first mezcal bar since it arrived here a couple years ago. The bar is intimate, with chatty groups of Spanish-speakers spread along a few tables and congregating on a small outdoor patio. Mezcal is a Mexican liquor made from various kinds of agave plants — its best-known variant is tequila — but can have many different flavors and textures.

“You could compare it to wine,” says Javier Solórzano, one of the Mezcaleria’s owners. He brings out some shots, each with a slightly different chorus of flavors, and a few cocktails, some sweet, some sour. Because the agave cactus needs to mature before the juice can be extracted, mezcal production is a relatively long process. “People say it’s like ‘liquid sun’ and creates a kind of euphoric lucidity,” he explains. In his view, that makes it a perfect match for Ibiza: “The people who come here like to try new things, and they like to get high.”

Day 3

The first major hippie wave washed up on the island in the 1960s — a natural precursor to the rise of the island’s dance culture. Today it feels like a tangible part of the island’s DNA, and is reflected not only in the sartorial choices of many locals, and their fondness for mezcal, but in the program of rituals that regularly take place at La Granja — like sound baths, designed to maximize introspection; group meditation sessions; and a full moon ritual.

The day after my trip to the Mezcaleria, I overcome my skepticism and sign up for something described to me as a tobacco ritual, a mysterious event that will take place in a forested area on the estate.

That evening I meet Erin at the base of a footpath near the farmhouse, where she greets me with the brightest seemingly unforced smile a stranger has ever given me. I’m here for a healing ritual in which, Erin explains, she will give me a mixture of tobacco and herbs called rapé (mercifully pronounced “hah-pe”). She is dressed in a white smock, and based on her facial expressions seems to be floating a half-inch above the ground. After a short walk through creaking forest, we arrive at a small wooden platform on a hill arrayed with a small altar of flowers, crystals, feathers, candles, and a container of water.

The view of Ibiza Town from Boris’s personal balcony.

Boris Buono works the kitchen at the Ibiza Food Studio.

“People say it’s like liquid sun.” A generous pour at La Mezcaleria.

A ritual altar and citrus trees on the grounds at La Granja Ibiza.

Artists in residence at La Granja.

Preparing for the tobacco ritual.

Erin burns sage.

As the sun approaches the horizon, Erin explains to our circle of six participants that the ceremony is a healing ritual with roots in Brazil — a way of cleansing people’s minds and spirits by inserting pulverized tobacco leaves, mixed with herbs, into their sinuses with a wooden pipe. Before we begin, a tiny hummingbird appears and flits around the flowers on the altar.

Erin sits before me, gazing intensely into my eyes. “Good journey, brother,” she says softly, then shoots the tobacco up my nostril. My eyes water and my head becomes light. Erin’s friend Shamir, an Austrian sound healer, begins chanting and blowing into a pipe that resembles a didgeridoo. The other participants sway lightly, and as I lay down and look up at the stars, I reflect on the island’s curious energy, as various people have described it to me. It would be a cliché to argue that time moves more slowly here, but at the very least, life feels lighter, smoother than on the mainland. I listen to the crickets cricketing amid the trees, and Shamir chanting his chants, and feel the island seeping into my brain.

Still floating from the tobacco, I meet up with another ceremony participant, a Frenchwoman, in the magic triangle, as people call the area between La Granja’s outdoor DJ booth, pool, and its rustic-extravagant bar set among the branches of an old-growth carob tree. As we sip our “mezcal mules,” the impromptu dance floor fills up and begins moving to the layered, psychedelic electronic music played by a young Belgian DJ.

“I love it here,” she tells me, bellying up to the carob bar under a canopy of branches and Balearic stars. She recently moved from Brussels to the island, she says, and La Granja has become a kind of cultural beacon. “It’s totally different than anywhere I’ve ever been,” she says. After a few minutes she hugs me, and bounds back over to the small cluster of revelers dancing and laughing in the cool nighttime air.

Day 4

On my last morning, I take a cab down to Cala Saladeta, a tiny beach about 20 minutes from the farmhouse, nestled under a craggy rockface that I have to climb over for 10 minutes before I reach a corner of the small azure cove. The mostly Spanish-speaking crowd is subdued and beautiful. The water is crystaline and just cool enough, shimmering under the radiant midday sun. Seagulls flash white against a cloudless cobalt sky, calling softly over the swelling sea.

The beach feels like the ultimate symbol of the “other” Ibiza I’ve experienced over the last several days: unpretentious, warm, beautiful — and hidden in plain sight. In the distance, I see a large tourist boat dock on the other side of the cove, but none of its passengers venture over the rocks. The beach remains ours. ■

Thomas Rogers is a freelance writer based in Berlin who has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, New York magazine, and Rolling Stone. When exposed to the sun, he turns a pleasant shade of pink.