“I had hardly finished telling everything to the men before we reached the island of the two Sirens, for the wind had been very favourable. Then all of a sudden it fell dead calm; there was not a breath of wind nor a ripple upon the water, so the men furled the sails and stowed them; then taking to their oars they whitened the water with the foam they raised in rowing. Meanwhile I took a large wheel of wax and cut it up small with my sword. Then I kneaded the wax in my strong hands till it became soft, which it soon did between the kneading and the rays of the sun-god son of Hyperion. Then I stopped the ears of all my men, and they bound me hands and feet to the mast as I stood upright on the cross piece; but they went on rowing themselves. When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate, the Sirens saw that we were getting close in shore and began with their singing.” (Homer’s Odyssey, circa 800 BC).
Woven endlessly into repeated stories of the island’s power, the Es Vedrà connection here is a stunning and fabulous myth. In both senses apparently, since according to Martin Davies, a local historian whose company Barbary Press has published several beautifully designed and well-researched books about the island, it is just that – a myth. “We don’t really know a lot about the Sirens, but that rock was probably in the straits of Messina,” he says. “That’s one of the points in the Ulysses story which most experts agree about. It would be between Sicily and the toe of Italy, so in fact Es Vedrà has nothing to do with the Odyssey!”
In any case, the myth has always been a popular one. One night during London’s Swinging Sixties the guitarist Eric Clapton (who would play at the Plaza de Toros in Ibiza Town in 1977) ran into underground artist, film-maker and illustrator Martin Sharp at London’s Speakeasy club. Just back himself from a trip to Ibiza, Sharp had written a poem that was inspired by both Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ and the Es Vedrà legend of the Homer sirens, and he gave it to Clapton to turn into a song. ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ was to appear on Cream’s album, Disraeli Gears, for which Sharp also designed the psychedelic cover image.
Es Vedrà has basically always remained free of human habitation, with the notable exception of the Catalan friar Francisco Palau. “Ibiza, that beautiful, rich and fertile possession of Spain,” he wrote in the 1860s, after having been arrested and exiled to the island by a group of mercurial Spanish Carmelites. Palau then spent six years in deep and gratifying solitude and prayer, living the life of a hermit on the imposing rock that would later appear on the cover of British musician Mike Oldfield’s 1996 album, Voyager. Other than Palau though, Es Vedrà’s only long-term inhabitants have been the wild goats, and a colony of the endangered Eleanora's falcons.
Many musicians and artists have been drawn to return again and again to the island whose golden light is also continually remarked upon. Ibiza light is noticeably different from that further across the sea in Sicily, for example. Ibiza is affected by more shadows, as a result of the many low hills that are spread around the landscape. Clean winds blow away most traces of pollution, and the rich sunset is enhanced by its advantageous position in the Mediterranean.
The remarkable artists Hipgnosis (who designed dozens of commanding album sleeves for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and others) started to bring this light into their work a long time ago. Aubrey Powell, one of the founder partners of Hipgnosis has had a house in Formentera, Ibiza’s small neighbouring island, for many years. He told me, “The light here in Formentera was very influential for me in terms of what we did with Hipgnosis. It was something I saw very early on; the particular vistas and landscapes that you get here which are very Dalíesque. You could see why Dalí painted in Cadaqués because it has the same kind of vibe, and that incredible light that you get is very like what you see in Hipgnosis works, those particular types of landscape. Take Elegy for The Nice with the desert and the beautiful sky, or the diver on the back of the Pink Floyd album cover Wish You Were Here, the still water with this incredible blue sky. Hipgnosis were very into landscapes, it would give the impression of an atmosphere as it happened. For me as the main photographer for Hipgnosis I was definitely influenced by what I saw here.”
Once upon a time, archaeologists and historians claim, Ibiza was inhabited only by bats (in terms of resident mammals). In 1994, the bones of sheep and goats, dug up at Es Pouàs near Santa Agnès revealed that the island would later have been inhabited by a Neolithic group who had made their way across the sea from the Spanish mainland. Further remains of horseshoe-shaped houses were also found at Cap de Barbaria over in Formentera.
The Greeks passed through and took note of Ibiza in the 9th century BC, but it was the Phoenicians of the Levant, the masters and commanders of the Mediterranean sea, who are traditionally recognised as the first settlers to establish a culture on the island. These maritime sovereigns (who were originally based on the coast of today’s Lebanon and Syria and became known as the Carthaginians after the founding of Carthage) were drawn to the Balearic Islands, and perhaps especially the tiny Ibiza, as it provided for them a very handy recess between the active port of Sardinia and the Spanish mainland. They arrived on the island around 650 BC, and brought the first alphabet that was used in Ibiza with them.
The first Phoenician settlement has long been believed to be at Sa Caleta, on the south coast. The site is still marked there today. However, local historian Martin Davies points out that this has now gone up for debate, as archaeologists have recently claimed that it wouldn’t have made sense to have ignored such a beautiful and strategic bay as the main one in Ibiza Town in favour of Sa Caleta. “All these things depend on what they find, a ceramic fragment or whatever,” Davies says, “and one newly found object can change the whole picture. The archaeology of the island is a constantly updated field.”
Several hundred Phoenicians congregated at Sa Caleta nonetheless, and they are believed to have survived thanks to their advanced hunting and fishing methods. They had brought with them their hunting dogs, whose probable descendant is the Ca Eivissenc (the native Ibiza Hound) or Podenco. To this day Podencos are the most noble and independent-minded of any dog you can see on the island. They can easily roam for over 20 miles in one stretch, and are often spotted in the countryside at night, fearlessly roaming for hours in search of prey as they trot like confident racehorses down the middle of the country roads, unperturbed by traffic.
The Phoenicians named this tiny island Ybšm and the generally received wisdom is that the name comes from Bes, the Egyptian god of home protection, music, dance and sexual pleasure; although a few linguists argue that their word for balsam, perhaps referring to the scent of the pines, is the true source. After all the Greeks named Ibiza and Formentera the ‘Pityûssae’, islands of the pines. Phoenician coins did feature an image of Bes though: a bearded elfin god with a huge phallus. Ybšm was a great hideaway and warehouse even then. Sailors could store goods picked up on their travels on the island, where there was less chance of theft than there was on the Spanish mainland.
So it was that Ibiza developed its significant early role as a sanctuary, and by the time the Phoenicians had settled in it became one of the major ports in the Western Mediterranean. This era saw the introduction of viniculture to the island; a pioneering Phoenician development that to some extent inspired both the Greeks and Romans in their wine-making techniques. Wine was transported and stored in the huge rounded earthenware amphoras that to this day are a celebrated artefact of the island. During the Phoenician era Ibiza’s wondrous salt pans were also focused on, and they began to form a major part of the island’s economy, as did the mining of silver and lead, and the growth of arable farming.
One of the most magnificently