Before the dance began
Today, it’s party central — but 40 years ago, Ibiza moved to a more subtle music, says Irma Kurtz
Paradise is ever an island. “A beautiful island,” said my German colleague, Claudia. “Unknown. Unspoilt. Ibiza.”
That was 40 years ago, we were on subsistence wages at a language school in Paris. There was no easy jet to heaven then: angels worked their passage. Claudia was not being altruistic in disclosing paradise on earth — she needed someone to share travelling expenses.
Many days later, I woke in my chair on the deck of the Wednesday boat from Barcelona — the only connection to paradise — and for the first time I opened my eyes on the gingerbread fortress, Dalt Vila, its renaissance walls aglow in a celestial dawn. The ensuing two-week holiday lasted for more than a year.
When my son heard I was going back, he looked alarmed. Ibiza may be going up in the world — the trend is for boutique hotels and stylish bars — but its bread and butter is still drink-fuelled teenagers and meat-market superclubs. No place for old women, then.
But arriving four decades later, on the boat from Barcelona, I watched the port rise out of a midday haze and, for a blissful moment, present beauty perfectly mimicked memory. At the foot of the gangway was a tall Englishman, hair now white, darker in bygone summers when he was regularly seen among the dozen or so others hanging around the jetty on Wednesday mornings, sizing up new talent off the boat. This time he had come to meet one of his oldest friends.
“You are going to hate the traffic,” he told me.
As I recall, it was he who imported the first foreign vehicle to an island that has since become utterly car-dependent. In olden days, the roads were tracks for wagons and beasts of burden (what has become of them?); we sailed dinghies to the beaches, or paid fishermen (what has become of them?) to deliver us as far as Portinatx in the north, and hoped they’d remember to pick us up later.
Under the shadow of sky-scraping ships in port, my old friend chose one of countless eateries and bars and ordered a lunch that cost approximately twice what I’d lived on for a week in the olden days, including a few meals out at Juanito’s, the only quayside restaurant back then. Juanito’s recitation of his unwritten menu always began, “Hay higado...” (“There is liver...”)
Later, at the hotel, struggling to stay awake for the drama of a Spanish sunset, I tried to decide which had more painfully humiliated my memory during my quick once-over of Ibiza town as it now is. Finding McDonald’s there? Or Cartier?
BEACHES DEFINE paradise only for visitors; inhabitants are soon too busy or blasé. Long ago, most of us had only cold water at home; a bigger treat than sunbathing was an occasional hot bath in the one and only local hotel. Access to popular beaches in high season now is jammed by cars all parked facing the sea; turning to head home is a lengthy, challenging manoeuvre.
Foreign residents nowadays prefer private swimming pools, especially in the pine-scented hills where some of them pay through their turned-up noses — £4m was the asking price of one gorgeous shack I visited — to avoid the increasingly noisome coast.
Passenger ferries leave Ibiza port for some beaches and towns, including Santa Eulalia, a sedate retirement community, and the sun-slum of San Antonio — once a charming fishing town, it now seethes all night in season with yobs and yobettes from every European nation and, increasingly, from the USA.
Strolling the Playa d’en Bossa, more or less a family beach, a short boat trip from Ibiza town, sea-music drowned in the ubiquitous groin-thumping beat from bars and food stalls, I imagined myself still resident, employed on one of the new English-language papers created mainly to tout clubs and DJs. I’d be writing an agony column, perhaps, advocating contraceptives, of course, but for heaven’s sake, a more discreet disposal of them afterwards than those bobbing in on the tide around my toes.
CALA DE Benirras is a timeless and evocative cove in the northwest, where I sat at dinner with my old friend; we were joined by a distinguished resident, Sandy. Only the ancient Domino Bar — now defunct, once the sole foreign hang-out in Ibiza town — shimmers in the dreams of old-timers like Sandy’s bar in Santa Eulalia. Reminiscing, the two men dropped resonant names of bohemian seraphim: Denholm and Terry the actors, Elmyr the forger, Ivan Spence and Bob Mumford the artists; and do you — does anyone? — remember the dazzling American neurotic Janet Frame? Or the stunning, doomed Nico, a sometime Warhol muse who fell mortally off her bike on an island back road? Pot Peggy? Bad Jack? Canadian Bob, founder of The Domino? They say he went home to Toronto and became a monk. It figures.
Sa Penya used to be the cheerful neighbourhood where I once lived over a breakwater, under the walls of Dalt Vila. It was populated by descendants of peasant farmers, refugees from traditional hardship and the perils of the countryside. The area has been taken over by gypsies, I was told, who deal drugs and live apart under their own law. Nothing looked familiar in the neglected streets of crumbling houses, deserted except for a solitary ruined youth pounding on a door that would not open.
Urban antennae a-quiver suddenly, I knew I was being watched from more than one high window; I hurried back to more congenial stone-cobbled streets, where old folks sat outside on kitchen chairs, cats prowled, babies cried, bougainvillea glorified walls and gardens, and here and there, between small traps laid for tourists — a jewellery store, a coffee bar, shops selling clothes made in India — was our old paradise glimpsed, if not regained.
Determined to witness night-time carousal before leaving, I waited dutifully behind a glass of wine outside a bar in the port — truly, Soho-on-sea — for a bruited parade of transvestites around midnight. On a balcony nearby stood a local woman, older and greyer than I, looking out to sea, her eyes sheltering a library of memories. I couldn’t hear but saw from the movement of her head that she was singing happily to herself.
Traffic increased, two young drunks shrieked and laughed; undistinguished music bothered the gathering dark. When the woman smiled and turned away, I quickly paid my bill and left.
Later, alone in the small roof garden of La Ventana Hotel, within the embrace of ancient walls, I reclined on Moorish cushions. La Ventana’s decor, like much in Ibiza, is indebted to hippies. Ages before hippies, before beatniks, bohemians, and the current marauders, Ibiza was invaded by Arabs, Romans, Byzantines and Visigoths. Nevertheless, from where I sat in the luscious, starry, salt-stung silence, it was evident that paradise, ever an island vulnerable and protected, endures. And so it will. Sure as hell.
“Only avoid high season,” I thought, as I crept downstairs to bed, “wake early, go to sleep early, and let the night take care of its children.”
OUTSIDE THE Portal de Ses Taules, on the road to the port, the morning fruit market was in full swing; its perfume of melons and bruised oranges rising from the olden days. One disconsolate reveller winced when the wheels of my suitcase clattered past the cafe terrace where he nursed a beer. He was fair-haired and handsome in his white feather boa and a see-through hoop skirt edged in silver.
My old friend keeps Ibiza time; I did not wait very long before boarding for Barcelona. Sure enough, the ship was already shuddering towards departure when he appeared dockside. We saw each other, much too far apart to speak, we both spread open arms and hands to the sky, and made a dumb show of regret and farewell.
Today, it’s party central — but 40 years ago, Ibiza moved to a more subtle music, says Irma Kurtz
Paradise is ever an island. “A beautiful island,” said my German colleague, Claudia. “Unknown. Unspoilt. Ibiza.”
That was 40 years ago, we were on subsistence wages at a language school in Paris. There was no easy jet to heaven then: angels worked their passage. Claudia was not being altruistic in disclosing paradise on earth — she needed someone to share travelling expenses.
Many days later, I woke in my chair on the deck of the Wednesday boat from Barcelona — the only connection to paradise — and for the first time I opened my eyes on the gingerbread fortress, Dalt Vila, its renaissance walls aglow in a celestial dawn. The ensuing two-week holiday lasted for more than a year.
When my son heard I was going back, he looked alarmed. Ibiza may be going up in the world — the trend is for boutique hotels and stylish bars — but its bread and butter is still drink-fuelled teenagers and meat-market superclubs. No place for old women, then.
But arriving four decades later, on the boat from Barcelona, I watched the port rise out of a midday haze and, for a blissful moment, present beauty perfectly mimicked memory. At the foot of the gangway was a tall Englishman, hair now white, darker in bygone summers when he was regularly seen among the dozen or so others hanging around the jetty on Wednesday mornings, sizing up new talent off the boat. This time he had come to meet one of his oldest friends.
“You are going to hate the traffic,” he told me.
As I recall, it was he who imported the first foreign vehicle to an island that has since become utterly car-dependent. In olden days, the roads were tracks for wagons and beasts of burden (what has become of them?); we sailed dinghies to the beaches, or paid fishermen (what has become of them?) to deliver us as far as Portinatx in the north, and hoped they’d remember to pick us up later.
Under the shadow of sky-scraping ships in port, my old friend chose one of countless eateries and bars and ordered a lunch that cost approximately twice what I’d lived on for a week in the olden days, including a few meals out at Juanito’s, the only quayside restaurant back then. Juanito’s recitation of his unwritten menu always began, “Hay higado...” (“There is liver...”)
Later, at the hotel, struggling to stay awake for the drama of a Spanish sunset, I tried to decide which had more painfully humiliated my memory during my quick once-over of Ibiza town as it now is. Finding McDonald’s there? Or Cartier?
BEACHES DEFINE paradise only for visitors; inhabitants are soon too busy or blasé. Long ago, most of us had only cold water at home; a bigger treat than sunbathing was an occasional hot bath in the one and only local hotel. Access to popular beaches in high season now is jammed by cars all parked facing the sea; turning to head home is a lengthy, challenging manoeuvre.
Foreign residents nowadays prefer private swimming pools, especially in the pine-scented hills where some of them pay through their turned-up noses — £4m was the asking price of one gorgeous shack I visited — to avoid the increasingly noisome coast.
Passenger ferries leave Ibiza port for some beaches and towns, including Santa Eulalia, a sedate retirement community, and the sun-slum of San Antonio — once a charming fishing town, it now seethes all night in season with yobs and yobettes from every European nation and, increasingly, from the USA.
Strolling the Playa d’en Bossa, more or less a family beach, a short boat trip from Ibiza town, sea-music drowned in the ubiquitous groin-thumping beat from bars and food stalls, I imagined myself still resident, employed on one of the new English-language papers created mainly to tout clubs and DJs. I’d be writing an agony column, perhaps, advocating contraceptives, of course, but for heaven’s sake, a more discreet disposal of them afterwards than those bobbing in on the tide around my toes.
CALA DE Benirras is a timeless and evocative cove in the northwest, where I sat at dinner with my old friend; we were joined by a distinguished resident, Sandy. Only the ancient Domino Bar — now defunct, once the sole foreign hang-out in Ibiza town — shimmers in the dreams of old-timers like Sandy’s bar in Santa Eulalia. Reminiscing, the two men dropped resonant names of bohemian seraphim: Denholm and Terry the actors, Elmyr the forger, Ivan Spence and Bob Mumford the artists; and do you — does anyone? — remember the dazzling American neurotic Janet Frame? Or the stunning, doomed Nico, a sometime Warhol muse who fell mortally off her bike on an island back road? Pot Peggy? Bad Jack? Canadian Bob, founder of The Domino? They say he went home to Toronto and became a monk. It figures.
Sa Penya used to be the cheerful neighbourhood where I once lived over a breakwater, under the walls of Dalt Vila. It was populated by descendants of peasant farmers, refugees from traditional hardship and the perils of the countryside. The area has been taken over by gypsies, I was told, who deal drugs and live apart under their own law. Nothing looked familiar in the neglected streets of crumbling houses, deserted except for a solitary ruined youth pounding on a door that would not open.
Urban antennae a-quiver suddenly, I knew I was being watched from more than one high window; I hurried back to more congenial stone-cobbled streets, where old folks sat outside on kitchen chairs, cats prowled, babies cried, bougainvillea glorified walls and gardens, and here and there, between small traps laid for tourists — a jewellery store, a coffee bar, shops selling clothes made in India — was our old paradise glimpsed, if not regained.
Determined to witness night-time carousal before leaving, I waited dutifully behind a glass of wine outside a bar in the port — truly, Soho-on-sea — for a bruited parade of transvestites around midnight. On a balcony nearby stood a local woman, older and greyer than I, looking out to sea, her eyes sheltering a library of memories. I couldn’t hear but saw from the movement of her head that she was singing happily to herself.
Traffic increased, two young drunks shrieked and laughed; undistinguished music bothered the gathering dark. When the woman smiled and turned away, I quickly paid my bill and left.
Later, alone in the small roof garden of La Ventana Hotel, within the embrace of ancient walls, I reclined on Moorish cushions. La Ventana’s decor, like much in Ibiza, is indebted to hippies. Ages before hippies, before beatniks, bohemians, and the current marauders, Ibiza was invaded by Arabs, Romans, Byzantines and Visigoths. Nevertheless, from where I sat in the luscious, starry, salt-stung silence, it was evident that paradise, ever an island vulnerable and protected, endures. And so it will. Sure as hell.
“Only avoid high season,” I thought, as I crept downstairs to bed, “wake early, go to sleep early, and let the night take care of its children.”
OUTSIDE THE Portal de Ses Taules, on the road to the port, the morning fruit market was in full swing; its perfume of melons and bruised oranges rising from the olden days. One disconsolate reveller winced when the wheels of my suitcase clattered past the cafe terrace where he nursed a beer. He was fair-haired and handsome in his white feather boa and a see-through hoop skirt edged in silver.
My old friend keeps Ibiza time; I did not wait very long before boarding for Barcelona. Sure enough, the ship was already shuddering towards departure when he appeared dockside. We saw each other, much too far apart to speak, we both spread open arms and hands to the sky, and made a dumb show of regret and farewell.