Everyone knows Ibiza and Ibiza knows everyone. Especially since a global youth – more or less trendy, more or less jet-set -, has made it its favorite destination to quench its thirst for celebration. We almost forget the children of the beat generation of the late 1960s and, well before them, the true instigators of the myth, these intellectuals from the 1930s to 1950s like Walter Benjamin, Camus, Prévert.

Go back, therefore … Who really knows the ancient Ibossim (the current Eivissa), homeland of Bes, Egyptian god of partying and dancing, venerated by the Punics? Who better than Diodorus of Sicily knew how to describe the largest of the Pityuses (literally the island of pines), all in pretty hills and coves? And what about the neighboring island of Formentera, the ancient Ophiussa (the snake island) of the Greeks, called Fromentaria (the wheat island) by the Roman legions?

Who does not dream of one day taking a dip in the crystal-clear waters of the coves of Ibiza? To experience the centuries-old alliance between nature and culture, so often acclaimed by artists looking for new horizons? The little natural ibicenco Eden still exists alongside the clubbers’ promised land. And there, no need (necessarily) of artificial paradise to take off. Ibiza Off, it’s here.

A little Eivissa in the ears

3 p.m., main entrance gate to Dalt Vila, the historic city of Eivissa (photo). The last clubbers abandon the tables of their favorite croissanterie in the marketplace. That’s not all, if you want to hold the week, you have to go back to bed!

A few meters away, the lady from the tourist office reopened her gatehouse. She begins distributing audio guides to her skinny customers. An hour and a half of visit for € 6 is the third of the price of soda cans sold in a box. A passport number, a signature, an MP3 player in exchange, and all you have to do is let yourself be guided in the streets, trudging towards the church.

In the tender numbness that comes with the feeling of letting yourself be taken in hand, a female voice invites you to measure time, to look at a detail of the facade, a coat of arms, a mascaron. We hear shouts, people who are swelling, peddlers who harangue the crowd, animals who fight, clarines, a donkey and poultry who cackle. Irons that intersect, too …

From the top of the hill, a tangle of white house’s cascading towards the port as in a painting by Cézanne. Ibossim is reborn under the intonations of a sensual voice imbued with poetry, then it is Medina Yabisa – the Arab city -, the Reconquista led by the Catalans and finally the great period of insecurity in the time of piracy.

This sound overview paints a picture of a little-known city, born of the desire of men to maintain trade between them. A discovery of Ibiza a hundred places from the bling-bling dance floors of the Pacha and others, the sirens of consumption and electro.

Crunchy coves

The interior of Ibiza undulates in wooded hills cut out by oversized road axes. It is by crisscrossing the small country roads, scented with pine oil, that you have to reach the paradisiacal coves which made the island famous.

North of San Antonio, Cala Salada (photo), a small cove like a spoon in the sheet of brittle rock, spreads out its crystal-clear waters against a background of overseas waters. Nothing to do with Platja d’Enbossa and its procession of deckchairs. No beach bar distributing decibels everywhere. Here we tan the song of the cicadas and, what’s more – if we wish – in the simplest device …

In 1932, the German Jewish writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin, fleeing Nazism, would discover the sweetness of ibicenca life while deploring the construction of the first hotel in San Antonio. Today ultra-concrete, San Antonio lives only to the rhythm of clubbers’ charters, mainly British. Fortunately, there is the back of the season and the hinterland, which still contains beautiful little corners with generous nature. The tourist office has marked out Nordic walking routes.

From San Antonio to Eivissa, the west coast has a series of creeks, each one more beautiful than the other: Cala Bassa, Cala Vedella, Cala d’Hort, Cala Jondal. A route to go on a scooter, the beach towel around your neck. It is an opportunity to move from one chiringuito (beach hut-restaurant) to another.

In September, when the season for rasons (raones in local dialect) arrives – these small fish with skin so crisp when they are fried -, the beaches are lively until very late in the evening. A short distance offshore, the rock of Es Vedrà with its 380 m high, springs from the sea like the prow of a sinking ship.

Inland Ibiza, natural

In the center of the island, on the heights of Sant Llorenç, the hamlet of Balàfia (photo), flanked by its watchtowers, watches over the plain. In the middle of prickly pears, almond trees, pines and small citrus orchards, stands an architecture of limed stone, eaten by bougainvillea. Here no laser, no rhinestones. The stress? It dates from the time when the entire island was prey to pirates, hence the need to regroup on the heights to better defend themselves.

Balàfia is the very expression of the ibicenco myth. Not that of a certain idea of the feast of the hot nights of Eivissa, but that dictated by the image, it was literary. All magazines echo this postcard showcasing the sacrosanct union of man and nature praised by intellectuals of the 1930s, in particular by Jean Selz, writer and art critic who lived in the island between 1932 and 1934.

It is the Ibiza of the interior, small hilltop villages and its fortified whitewashed churches, the apologetic expression of a lifestyle based on the appropriation of time in harmony with the environment, the beginnings of the hippie currents of the 1960s.

Today, the tourist office of the island, anxious to reverse a relationship with the island that addicts to the “party at all costs” bring down, offers a multitude of routes to be traveled by mountain bike or on foot. It is the occasion of a melee with a laughing nature, most often virgin of any human intervention and scented with aromatic herbs. And maybe you will come across these podencos, an indigenous hunting dog breed of Egyptian origin.

A generous land

“In Ibiza, the difference between the seasons is minimal. Winter is only a slight worsening of autumn”.

Émile Michel Cioran, Cahier de Talamanca, Mercure de France, 2008

A large part of the ibicenco territory still remains quite wild if we disregard the beautiful fincas (traditional farms, photo) nestled in the hollow of the valleys, most of which were sacrificed on the altar of high-end tourism. Around these new charming residences for fond customers, – where one sometimes wonders if one would not be more in Bali than in the Balearic Islands -, spread cultures: carob trees, olive trees, fig trees and gardens of citrus fruits (lemon tree, citron, orange trees), without forgetting the vine.

It is in the region of Sant Mateu and Sant Josepthat local winegrowers cultivate the divine nectar. A tradition which, having been enriched by the Romans, dates back to the installation of the Phoenicians in the 7th century. BC Some historians go so far as to assert that the main wines consumed on the peninsula at the time came from Ibiza, as the amphorae caught in the sea would tend to prove.

But if viticulture has known its hours of glory in the 19th century – mainly due to a resumption of exports to France, then affected by phylloxera – it was not until the early 1990s that production really took off.

Ibiza is not only a land of fusion cuisine, concocted for a “pipole” clientele, languid in luxurious sofas planted by the beach under the impavid eye of a giant Buddha. No. Ibiza is also a minimalist but nevertheless tasty cuisine, dictated by the need to cope with periods of famine: dried fish, fried pork, for a plate that gives pride of place to potatoes and rice.

A cocina ibicenca to taste during an escapade inland. Take a seat side by side on a large table, in one of these roadside taverns, to meet a hardworking peasantry still attached to its traditions.

The Las Dalias deal

“Islands, islands, islands, islands where you will never take land” declared Blaise Cendrars. The island is the place of nowhere, the inaccessible territory par excellence, and yet. Many people have touched the finger myth of the wonderful elsewhere!

In the vein of German artists and political refugees who had fled Nazi Germany, a flock of hippies tumbled in the late 1960s. Suddenly, the image of a paradise island took root in the Western imagination: praise of a life preserved from the aggression of the consumerist world, as if Ibiza had always kept itself outside the course of History.

The beautiful then becomes the obligatory passage on the road of the Z’indes. In winter, the community begins their transhumance to the East to buy raw materials, jewelry or cheap second-hand clothes, a commodity that they will sell in the summer on the markets. No taxes, the conditions are favorable and innovative for the time.

Today, the famous hippy markets of Ibiza, that of Las Dalias (photo) in the lead, are trying to continue this tradition. But it is clear that all babas they remained, the “old” ended up diving into the conso like everyone else. Everything increases. We are now taking the blue card, no question of letting go of a client…

Because if tourists do indeed flock en masse during the night markets, it is summer only; winter, difficult to live with love and fresh water; over the years the power flower has left some petals to wilt.

Formentera, the treasure island

Desire for that matter. Formentera is one of those pieces of planet that freezes our gaze in a world of stereotypical images: coves of blond sand, turquoise sea, semi-deserted moors swept by the wind, from which some whitewashed constructions sometimes emerge: the silhouette of a mill, a lighthouse.

Formentera, it is a desire to travel that assigns the beach to sunbathing, even naturism, the place of the church with the bars to throw a little last before go and walk the hippy market, the villa with a balcony on the sea, the fan with a nap. To be convinced, you just have to view the ad for a brand of beer posted on You Tube. This spot brought a Spanish clientele who had almost forgotten it to the island in 2009. Power of the visual, musical magic.

Formentera is above all the idea of a happy life, that of an almost cosmic harmony with the earth element, the familiarity of myth. In terms of music, the island is more like a dry guitar played in the setting sun when Ibiza sinks into its electro-house, trance or minimal nights.

Besides, if you are passing through Formentera at a time when its earthy neighbor displays its closing evenings (around mid-September), then go take a tour of the Fonda Pepe in Sant Ferran. Created on the initiative of Eki – a former hippy who has been stuck on the island since the time when Pink Floyd was basking the Migjorn platja pill -, the Formentera guitar festival (photo) attracts aficionados of the acoustic guitar every year.

Over 2 days, we savor, if not the best, at least the most playful picks of the moment: rock, blues, jazz and also a few times from the flower power years.

A world at the end of the world

Formentera is an island on a human scale where it is very pleasant to walk, even if, with the exception of the Pilar de la Mola and its lighthouse, the landscape is rather flat. Numerous are the development of cycle lanes in their own site which allow to dawdle on the small sandy paths which cross the island in all directions.

But the tourist office having decided to play the green card thoroughly, the most beautiful beaches – namely those of its Illetes , now classified in the natural park of saltworks -, are subject to toll when we decide to go there with a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. A good opportunity to go there by bike and, for the lazy, by electric scooter!

Few prehistoric remains (unlike Menorca) and very little history. That said, the beautiful reserve many surprises. At the southern tip, the Cap de Barbaria lighthouse (photo) rises to the sky in the middle of an almost desert heath. Landmark for ships entering the Strait of Gibraltar, it stands on a sort of karst riddled with caves, where pirates once stashed their loot. On such a flat geography, it is not easy to defend oneself: this is one of the reasons why the island has remained uninhabited for so long.

Here, no villages worthy of the name, barely a few roofs grouped around their fortified churches; no steeple, and with the exception of those organized by the old hippies, no markets either.

However, some hamlets deserve to come and park your bike there. This is the case of Sant Francesc, with small bars all in glory of the time that stops, or of Sant Ferran, like a Mexican pueblo asleep at the bland hours of summer, which wakes up as soon as the moon has mounted. As in the days when King Crimson and others ignited the evenings of the Fonda Pepe.

Between salt and earth

Formentera is clear water.

The reason? Posidonia meadows, these vast fields of phanerogams that line the sandy bottom of the country from Neptune to Ibiza (they are around 100,000 years old and represent almost 80% of the world’s reserves). A veritable “lung”, each square meter of this precious plant cover releases up to 20 liters of oxygen per day, helping to make the island’s coves real aquariums.

Formentera also boasts of having more than 50 m of underwater visibility, a real record. Suffice to say that here snorkeling (swimming with fins, mask and snorkel) is one of the favorite activities of holidaymakers.

But if the Posidonia meadow defies the chronicle, it is not so much for the clarity of its waters as for the exceptional contribution in pure water that it provides to the salines. Classified as World Heritage by Unesco, they now provide a condiment for the least original: liquid salt. After hot water, we invent the salt marshes upside down!

This salt, which by the way was one of the keys to the military expansion of the Roman Empire, is now very popular with virtuoso chefs of the new cuisine. Marketed in spray form, it contains more than 72 minerals and trace elements, can enhance the flavor of food, or even salt without salting too much!

The island’s restaurateurs were not asked to adopt it, to enhance theirbullit de peix (fish stew), guisat de peix (fish stew) and other sofrit (hotpot), spearheads of local gastronomy. But we can’t say that their addition is less salty.

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