Much is made of courting rituals, traditional and modern, in Ibiza. Often described as an island that is good for flings but unsophisticated in the ways of love, clubland’s generally short-term flirtations come from a long tradition that cherishes outlandish coquetry above subtle and steady entreaties. Gifted British linguist and translator John Ernest Crawford Flitch grasped this when he witnessed some heated scenes in the church of Santa Eulària, and he reported in his 1911 book, Mediterranean Moods, how “The fire was no mere feu de joie but a deadly encounter; not a smile that was merely flippant or trivial or coquettish, but regards that were grave, as all ardour is grave. Then I knew that Mass may have other uses than that of devotion. One breathed something more intoxicating than the smoke of incense. The air was also heavy with the smoke of passion…life burning at the fever-point. Certainly the chief business of Santa Eulalia is loving.” Later, after observing youths dancing and making music on their pipes at the sea’s edge he observed that, “courtship in Ibiza is a delicate and dangerous negotiation. The girl is not hasty to attach herself to a single lover. Why should she be when she has the hearts of half a dozen suitors and more to play with? But the game is full of dangers and it requires a firm and adroit hand to play it without disaster.”
German philosopher (and translator of Proust and Baudelaire) Walter Benjamin spent many happy times in Ibiza in the early 1930s. He and his friend Jean Selz, who claimed to be the “only Frenchman on the entire island”, were just two of the visitors who came to Ibiza and reported in their writings what life was really like back then. This era in the island’s history is often nostalgically evoked by older residents, as it represented an era of beautifully unpretentious and calm bucolic living in a tiny and still untrumpeted community. The few visitors that were on the island all seemed to recall spending their days swimming, hill walking, meditating and reading in blissful solitude, and all against a backdrop of great natural beauty.
Benjamin lived in an old house in Sant Antoni but would frequent the Migjorn bar which, like the Hotel Montesol (originally the Gran Hotel) on the town’s central avenue, Vara de Rey, first opened its doors in 1933 and soon became a social hub for the few foreigners in the community. As is so often the case, the freedom of spirit afforded by the unspoilt and calm natural beauty of the island’s daily life would translate even back then into scenes of dissolution on the Mediterranean bar terraces. One night Benjamin, who was usually a picture of temperance (although he had famously smoked hashish in 1927 in Berlin), proceeded to get catastrophically drunk after knocking back some 148% proof gin in the Migjorn bar, whereupon he collapsed on the sidewalk, before insisting on walking the 15 kilometres back home to Sant Antoni. Benjamin and Selz also sat smoking opium one night above the port in Dalt Vila. A brilliant critic and noted philosopher, Walter Benjamin took his own life at Port Bou in 1940, rather than be held captive by Nazis.
When France’s Socialist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated by the outlaw Raoul Villain, and mobilisation for what became World War I was declared in France three days later, it was to Ibiza that the runaway executioner eventually fled. The curiously-named Villain knew of the island’s reputation as a safe place for a stowaway, and with the help of artist Paul Gauguin’s grandson, he built himself a house in the then remote Cala de Sant Vicent, in the far north. Hoping to spend the rest of his days in peaceful obscurity, Villain’s luck changed rapidly when he was apprehended during the Civil War by Republican troops who found his behaviour odd, and suspected he might be a Fascist. He was convinced the soldiers were looting his precious worldly goods and had tried to defend his home, rather than taking to hiding as his neighbours had strongly advised but his verbal protests backfired horribly, and Villain was shot dead on the beach. It took him two long painful days to die, mainly because the troops had issued a severe warning to the neighbours not to help him in any way, but once he was seen to be dead, the ever hospitable Ibicencos buried him, with a French flag.
Ibiza’s evolution from a melancholic hinterland doused in the malingering murk spilled during the Civil War into a dazzling and seductive tourist zone, took a matter of only a few years once building started. The bohemian travellers, most of them artists or outlaws (and often both) had started to congregate in the island bars and take up residence in apartments around Ibiza Town, Dalt Vila and Figueretes, or in countryside fincas. At the time these were all very cheap to rent by European standards, particularly once you factored in the gloriously warm, sunny, natural and stress-free environment that was a crucial part of the package. Aside from the Migjorn and the Montesol, other bars were opening around the port, including Clive’s, run by the enigmatic charmer Clive Crocker, and the Domino bar which had become a base for the beatniks, jazz lovers and black marketeers. Then there was the Bar Alhambra next to the Montesol on Ibiza Town’s Vara de Rey, and behind the medieval walls in Ibiza’s old town, stood the Hotel El Corsario (‘the pirate’).
El Corsario was opened by one Emil Schillinger. Already the proprietor of the well known port side hostel, El Delfín Verde, Schillinger was a former Nazi who had gained social respectability on the island after sheltering the Jewish refugee art dealer Ernesto Ehrenfeld. This is an example of the island’s tacit code of immunity, which many similar stories would back up. As a further example, at the end of the Algerian war, the island took many exiles of the OAS, the country’s dissident secret army, into its bosom without any fuss.
El Corsario soon became a lively meeting place and social club for the so-called Grupo Ibiza ’59, a posse of artists including such luminaries as Erwin Bechtold and Egon Neubauer, as well as architects such as Josep Lluis Sert (who worked closely with Le Corbusier) and Erwin Broner. Errol Flynn would often stay at El Corsario, and across the early years of Ibiza’s reign as a celebrity island other paparazzi-friendly names including Aristotle Onassis, Grace Kelly, Romy Schneider, Dean Acheson, Maximilian Schell, Walter Gropius, Prince Rainier of Monaco, members of Pink Floyd and many more would add colour to the hotel’s lively and comfortable rooms. Then the proto-nightclub La Cueva de Alex Babá was opened in the mid-60s by Alejandro Vallejo-Nágera, a local man who was considered by many to be the first real Ibiza hippie. Cannabis and opium were now being consumed on the island, as was LSD. In fact many of the very first reports of successful (and otherwise) LSD trip tales anywhere were reported as happening in Ibiza.
The Irish writer and broadcaster Damien Enright lived in Ibiza and Formentera in the early 1960s, until his dreams of paradise were shattered when the woman he loved took off with someone else behind his back, and his once idyllic life came disastrously undone due to his being undermined by fair weather friends. He eventually got enthusiastically but naively embroiled in a high risk international drug running gamble which went chaotically wrong for him, and later wrote a memoir which captures both of the famous Ibiza extremes – the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. In the memoir, Dope in The Age of Innocence, he lovingly describes the Ibiza Town port side bar scene, and the exuberance and near religious fervour of the jazz lovers of his circle. That circle included Bill Hesse, the American saxophonist who would stand by the sea at the edge of Formentera and blow his saxophone passionately into the night winds, completely naked, and who, according to Enright, “had taken acid. As he put it, he had seen the man, he had seen the light. Bill lived for music. When I came back from London and told him I’d bought Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, he got up next day at dawn and crossed on the boat to Ibiza to hear it at the Domino bar. He passed by our house that evening, to tell me about it. There were almost tears in his eyes.”
The Domino bar, whose owners had a vinyl collection that included the works of Billie Holliday, Miles Davis, Chet Baker and all the jazz greats, would close at 2 a.m. Drunks would then roam meaninglessly around the port side, or sleep it off on the pavements outside the bar, or perhaps, fired by amphetamines, sit and talk till dawn as the fishing ships came in. These hours, roughly between 2 a.m. and 9 a.m., are locally known as la madrugada – the morning hours that in fact comprise the late partying hours of the day before – a phrase