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Shopping on Ibiza has seen something of a transformation since the arrival of tourism forty or so years ago. In those days the term shopping meant a day trip by horse and cart to the ‘ferreteria’ in the village to pick up essential tools for the smallholding. This would be followed by a chance meeting at a nearby bar with a few rarely seen friends to compare farming tips and quench the thirst.
Meanwhile the good lady would labour her way across the valley to the nearest grocers and back again with the few essentials you didn’t grow yourself.
Read moreMost people who haven’t been to Ibiza before are amazed by how the small the island actually is, given its international fame.
It’s fair to say that you can’t drive in the same direction for much more than half an hour before running out of road and reaching the sea again.
This doesn’t leave much room for cities and towns and in fact there is only one city, the island’s capital Eivissa on the south coast, with a population of well below 100,000.
The two large villages that locals refer to as towns are Santa Eulalia on the east coast and San Antonio on the west.
In between those there are a few dozen other villages, some of which comprise little more than a church, a shop and a bar surrounded by a handful of houses. These and the surrounding countryside are beautiful and well worthy of exploration, so hiring wheels is a must if you intend to do more than just laze around the hotel pool.
Read moreOne of the great advantages of an island is that it is surrounded by sea. By definition, this increases the possibility of finding a beach nearby. This is certainly the case with Ibiza which, with its tiny sister island of Formentera, boasts over a hundred beaches.
These come in all shapes and sizes and each has its own individual character. One of the most well known is also the longest – Playa d’en Bossa.
This beach is lined with beach clubs and hotels and serves as the chill-out area for the nearby Space nightclub. It is loud and lively and generally heaving with young tourists recovering from the previous night’s clubbing.
At the other end of the spectrum are the totally untouched beaches only accessible by boat, for those who resent sharing their beach with anyone else.
An added bonus thrown in by the size of Ibiza is the fact that it never takes much more than half an hour to reach any of the other beaches, if you get bored with the beach you’re at.
This is particularly handy when the wind is blowing, because if the wind is creating waves on one side of the island the other side will be calm and flat.
Your most difficult decision then is whether you feel like surfing or a more tranquilo spot of surfing…
Read moreDespite Ibiza’s fabulous natural assets – its spectacular scenery, miriad beaches and cultural legacy – the island achieved its global fame through the handful of superclubs that sprang up here throughout the 1970s.
Names like Pacha, Space, Amnesia and Ku (now Privilege) became famous for providing a huge stage for top ranking artists of the moment year after year, genre after genre.
Over the last couple of decades, with the advent of globally renowned DJs and dance music, Ibiza has become the global headquarters of the new musical movement. The place where the world’s biggest names had to find their annual residency for the summer. Some of the biggest, including Pete Tong and Sasha, have even upped sticks and made Ibiza their home.
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