Ibiza is one of Spain’s Balearic Islands, known worldwide as a summer capital of clubbing.
The party has bohemian roots. In the late 1960s and 1970s the island drew artists, hippies and young Americans escaping the draft, and in 1973 Ricardo Urgell turned an old whitewashed farmhouse near the harbour into Pacha, the island’s oldest club, despite advisers warning that there were not enough hippies to fill it. Its first themed night, Flower Power, all daisies and peace signs, was still going when the club turned fifty in 2023. The surprise for first-timers is how much Ibiza has besides nightlife: UNESCO lists it as a World Heritage site for its Renaissance walls of Dalt Vila, its Phoenician remains and its underwater meadows of Posidonia seagrass, among the best preserved in the Mediterranean. The seagrass, it must be said, goes to bed much earlier than the visitors.