The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Hurrah! The holiday season just got longer
Who says a summer escape has to be in summer? Anna Hart finds Ibiza perfect right now
Afew years ago, my friend Chris looked me in the eye when I was prattling on about the best summer month in which to visit Ibiza, and said: “The real secret of Ibiza is November, of course. This is the month residents love the best.”
“You mean when annoying tourists like me have gone?” I asked. “Precisely,” said Chris.
Chris is a Northern Irish fashion designer turned meditation teacher who now lives in Ibiza and makes millions teaching millionaires to be less stressed. Millions are, after all, very stressful things to have. But Chris is a wise man – and his words landed.
So this weekend I’m in Ibiza, lapping up the last of the summer luxury. I’m staying at a beautiful 24-room hotel, the Atzaró (atzaro.com), which was one of the first agroturismo hotels on the island. By this I mean it was the first hotel, back in the Ibizan dark ages of 2004, to show off its garden and orange grove proudly rather than hide the vegetables around the back, like a shameful secret, because growing your own stuff was something only poor hotels did. Can’t they afford to go to the supermarket?
Today, of course, there is nothing more aspirational than a kitchen garden. Even city hotels boast about their “bee borders” and there are few restaurants that don’t bang on about being farm-to-table. But the Atzaró was way ahead of the curve, and this family-run working orange farm and hotel remains much-loved by residents and a loyal set of glamorous, globetrotting guests. Resident chickens wander around the beds of rosemary, sage and kale, and if you get hungry, you can pluck a low-hanging fig or satsuma from the tree rather than tuck into the minibar. This is my kind of luxury. Pillow menus are stupid.
The Atzaró was also one of the first hotels to work towards prolonging the Ibiza season, open from March to November. This year, hoteliers and restaurateurs are watching, anxiously, to see what the pandemic does to visitor numbers as the season draws to a close. And it turns out I am not the only gatecrashing tourist lingering on the island after Hallowe’en. The Atzaró is fully booked, even though room rates have sunk to a reasonable £200 from the peak-season £600 a few weeks ago.
I’m always pleased to see a shift from strictly-bordered seasonal tourism, which makes travel more pricey and crowded for holidaymakers. Seasonal economic extremes also present challenges for the local community, such as job insecurity and fluctuating rents, the very opposite of stability and balance. So it’s heartening to hear that the Atzaró
is seeing no shortage of “summer guests” this autumn.
My parents, both in their 70s, have always been experts in the art of off-season travel. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, transporting a family of five around the world wasn’t cheap, and so I grew up in a household of bargain-hunting travel obsessives. School holidays impose travel seasons on families, but we never seemed to go to “normal destinations at normal times of the year”, as I once grumpily put it, probably in my teenage years. Admittedly, every so often our renegade holiday strategy wouldn’t work out for us, like one memorable late-season (OK, Easter) Scottish ski break in Glenshee where there was no snow, only muck. But for the most part, we did pretty well for ourselves by travelling the month after most tourists would consider visiting.
Right now, at the Atzaró in Ibiza, it feels like guests are sharing a fabulous secret, successfully enjoying our “summer holidays” in November. There’s a similar after-party happening in destinations across Europe; my Instagram feed is dotted with holiday photos from Puglia, Provence, Skiathos and Faro.
And it’s not just footloose and fancyfree-lancers like myself here, lingering after the charter flights have stopped. There are wealthy retirees, hell-raising around the surrounding farmland on e-bikes. There are honeymooners padding around the spa, presumably dazed to be finally married after seven cancelled weddings. There are families enjoying the final days of their halfterm break, splashing around the pool or terrorising the peacocks.
We all know that the pandemic has made, and broken, plenty of habits and patterns this year – and maybe our attachment to seasonal holiday destinations is one to ditch. Perhaps my parents were right never to go “to normal places at normal times of the year”. Perhaps “normal” really is over.