SPAIN
SPANISH ISLAND FORMENTERA WAS THE FAVOURED ESCAPE OF 1960S FREE SPIRITS AND BOHEMIANS. ALTHOUGH THIS HIPPIE HAVEN IS NOW FIRMLY ON THE TOURIST TRAIL, IT’S STILL SLOWER AND DREAMIER THAN ITS PARTY SISTER, IBIZA
Unspoilt Formentera island is Cinderella to wicked party-sister Ibiza. Biénne Huisman finds it’s a great place to chase her imagination
My journey to Formentera started with Pink Floyd.
I grew up with Pink Floyd, and later as a journalist their music soundtracked many hotel nights travelling on the job – classic albums like The Dark Side of the Moon. It was during a London visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum – at an exhibition on the group – that I saw it: a print of a windmill on a desolate plain in wild red and blue. ‘Formentera’ read the card. ‘A Spanish island right next to Ibiza. The band liked to summer here in the late 60s and 70s. It inspired their soundtrack to the 1969 film More, about hippies and heroin addiction … a pivotal early album, haunting and raw as the landscape itself.’ I was intrigued.
The opportunity to join friends at a finca (farmstead) near Sant Josep in Ibiza came up. They were keen on clubbing; I preferred dabbling in long sea-swept days and exploring Formentera, considered Ibiza’s country-bumpkin outpost, and by many the western Mediterranean’s last unfettered paradise.
It was a breathless morning when Formentera first unfurled before me on the ferry. To our left lay the island’s platinum beach, Playa de Ses Illetes, already dotted with umbrellas, its turquoise water teeming with boats. Next to it were the Ses Salines salt pans and, ahead, the breakwater of La Savina port, with yachts bobbing in rows, their shiny hulls beaming exotic trophy-wife names such as Pulita and Walanka.
The sea around Formentera is translucent because of ‘Posidonia prairies’ – a plant with floaty leaves like ribbons that filters the water. These marine meadows are under threat, with strict new laws regulating how anchors may be dropped. Along the shores, shallows brim with tiny fish that flit between your legs.
On our ferry, a hunched man unrolled rope thick as his arm, preparing to dock. Behind the wheel the captain was barking orders in Spanish, his voice gruff through his silver beard and his shoes dangling inches off the floor like a child’s. He got up to help, a limp in his step not detracting from the gravitas of his bearing.
A couple sitting in front of me had fallen asleep, leaning into each other. The dishevelled pair were catching a ride back to their house on Formentera. Leaving Ibiza’s port 30 minutes earlier, they had gushed about their night dancing at Hï Ibiza, where South African DJ Black Coffee played the main slot, the one just before dawn.
‘His music, it’s different, it connects people,’ the woman said, biting into a churro – a signature Spanish pastry, like bagels in New York. On her phone, she showed me a video of silhouettes thrashing against purple laser beams. Bass throbbed from the device, startling the silence as we chugged towards La Savina.
‘If Ibiza is brash and bold, Formentera is dreamy’
Indeed, everything they say about Ibiza is true. The Spanish party island is home to all-night clubs and every type of drug. It has a door-to-door narcotics delivery service, like Dial-a-Pizza, complete with a menu for calibrating neurochemical trips. ‘What about the police?’ I asked a friend. He shrugged. Walking along the island’s main highway, I discovered relics of a strange netherworld: a life-sized elephant mounted on a fake wall, a winged dragon sculpted from scrap metal, a robot with motorbike parts for arms. Renegade club decor?
Make no mistake, Ibiza is lovely – in that beachy, impossibly blue Mediterranean kind of way; hidden coves behind tall pine trees, architectural gems and atrocities cascading down hills. Throbbing warehouses aside, it breathes nature and history. But the best thing about Ibiza is its sister island, just three nautical miles away.
If Ibiza is brash and bold, Formentera is dreamy. About 83-squarekilometres in size (smaller than the Gariep Dam), Formentera is flat and rural with six small towns, some of the world’s finest beaches and barren cliffs studded with lighthouses and a sprinkling of forts – relics of a fighty past.
Formentera’s late development was due to pirate raids. Early modernity passed the island by as it lay shunned and uninhabited for centuries, until a few farmers and fishermen moved over in the 1700s. After WWII, as hippies, musicians and artists chased the sun to Ibiza, Formentera became the final refuge.
On our ferry, I bade the couple farewell and waved to the captain, stepping onto the dock. Cafes spilled across the port. There were white sun umbrellas, teenagers under straw hats licking helado, a large dog sprawled in a sliver of shade. La Savina’s main road – the only road, really – was patchy with scooters bumping over potholes, their noise grinding the still air. Along the street, low buildings appeared to have been plonked down haphazardly; beyond, the Estany des Peix lagoon gleamed mirror-smooth and boat-speckled.
Amid the bustle, a deli offered respite: strong cappuccino and yoghurt cake with honeyed apple. My mission was to find Formentera Guitars, the island’s guitar school. It was the obvious link to its musical legacy – and perhaps (hopefully) something more, its artistic hippie heart? Shakira purred in Spanish from the speakers as the waiter spoke; he was from Verona. Asked about Formentera Guitars, he nodded. Two towns away, he gestured. Inland. Too far to walk.
Striding past blackboards advertising scooters at €30 a day, I found a bicycle shop with a kind girl at the counter. For a quarter of the price, I hired a low-slung bike with sturdy wheels, a bicycle lock – which she assured me I didn’t need – and a map. It showed Formentera as spreadeagled, roughly triangular: La Savina and Playa de Ses Illetes on one tip, the lighthouse at Cap de Barbaria on another. The furthest extremity is Far de la Mola, on the island’s highest point, known as the ‘lighthouse at the end of the world’. Formentera’s coastlines are concave: the north is more built-up, with the resort town of Es Pujols in a rocky nook; in the south, the Playa de Migjorn beach sprawls uninterrupted and long – this is where the locals go.
The bike-shop girl circled my destination on the map: Sant Ferran.
It was five kilometres away. On my receipt, under nationality, she simply wrote ‘African’.
‘Gracias!’ I waved, pedalling up the road, map aloft. Leaving the port,
I was alone but for a trickle of cars and my shadow flitting against a stone wall, waist-high with occasional vines, blue sky spanning wide. There were fig trees, the peppery scent of junipers, fields yellow with flowers. Bicycle lanes flank most roads on Formentera, a surprisingly orderly arrangement, and only slightly tricky for having to keep on the right side.
On up the hill, sat Sant Francesc Xavier, a cluster of buildings in shades of biscuit and cream that is the island’s capital. Along a cobbled street were shops and cafes next to bursts of scarlet bougainvillea. There were clothing rails outside with crocheted dresses, cotton caftans and some glamorous bikinis. I stopped to buy a straw hat that could fasten around my chin, then pedalled on east, past vineyards and cracked red earth, my calves burning.
Further on lay San Ferran: a dusty grid around a square with a modest stone church. An old man shuffled past, grey head slumped on his shoulders. He directed me up a side street to a simple two-storey abode, whitewashed with green shutters, red electric guitar above the door. ‘Formentera Guitars’ said the sign.
Inside the shop, brisk fluorescent light swept over guitars on the walls; caramel and brown and oxblood red, with more stacked on the floor. A large, upright bass stood next to an amp and speakers, with towers of beer crates by the door.
Four men looked up as I entered. One of them was the owner, Ekkehard Hoffmann, a lanky musician and lapsed electrical engineer originally from Bremen. Under tufts of white hair his eyes were very blue; his T-shirt quoted Einstein in Spanish: ‘Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.’
Ekkehard arrived on Formentera 25 years ago and kind-of never left. People from all over the world travel to his shop to build their own custom electric or bass guitars from scratch. We chatted while he was bending metal strings over a slender guitar neck inlaid with mother-of-pearl, his hands rough and his nails grit-lined.
‘Yes, I changed my name to Ekki. It’s easier for the Spaniards to say,’ he said.
For the past nine years, Ekki has hosted the Formentera Guitars Festival in Sant Ferran’s square. In this same square, he told me, Mick Jagger and members of Pink Floyd used to drink beer and strum guitars at Fonda Pepe, a traditional Balearic tavern and inn. I asked about Bob Dylan, who supposedly lived in a lighthouse on the island. Ekki laughed. ‘No, that is a rumour. Must have been some guy who looked like Bob, or someone who wanted to get laid.’
Around the corner from Ekki’s shop, Fonda Pepe still plies its trade. I pushed my bike to the tavern, parking it next to three sleeping cats. At the bar I gleaned some gossip: old Mr Fonda Pepe would let hippies sleep here on the terrace; in the mornings he brought them coffee. Known as the ‘Philosopher of Formentera’ to celebrity clientele and the homeless alike, Mr Pepe passed away in 1995. His son Julian recently got sick, too, and is recovering from heart surgery. The restaurant is under new management but the interior remains stuck in the past, dusky with a black-andwhite checkered floor. After a quick plate of grilled calamari,
I set off back to the port.
Cycling down the hill, I wondered at the scenery. At first glance it appeared simple, unadorned, as if assembled by some rushed God and set down without much further thought or creative ambition. But in this simplicity lay a deep humanity and beauty, a sense of gently passed time and transience. Halfway back to Sant Francesc Xavier, to my left, I saw it: an old windmill some distance from the road, etched starkly against the sunset. I paused. Could it be the one?
And I thought, just then, how our imagination turns destinations into so much more than their geography?