Chilled Ibiza: Experience the Ultimate Sunset Mix

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In front of this impromptu shrine, a bearded fellow in the lotus position was doing something with a rolling paper. Or a smart seaside hotspot such as Beachouse at the scrappy end of Playa d’en Bossa, where the large Ushuaïa and Hard Rock Hotels fizzle out into overgrown waste ground and car parks.

Though most of my friends here have moved away, a few stubbornly cling on, resisting the sky-high cost of living in a spot that’s become a magnet for the super-rich. On a hot day it bustles with beautiful people who come for chef Rafa Zafra’s impeccably prepared fish and shellfish. It was Marañón who introduced me to the community of estate owners who are restoring and regenerating great swathes of abandoned land.

The design ditches the all-white aesthetic traditionally synonymous with Ibiza in favour of earthy, neutral tones, stone, linen and acres of grey concrete.

A 300-year-old casa payesa in the classic ibicenco style, this gorgeous San Lorenzo property had stood abandoned for 80 years before its exemplary six-year restoration job. Parts of my mental geography were virtually unrecognisable: Santa Gertrudis, in my day a one-horse hamlet with a couple of bars and a tobacconist, was now a fully grown town of done-up villas with a world-class cocktail bar, Overall, and Bottega il Buco, an outpost of New York restaurateur Donna Lennard’s Il Buco, also found in NoHo and the Hamptons.Not to be missed are the multicoloured installation by artist Miranda Makaroff and chef Jean Imbert’s avocado dish – it’s oven-baked and delicious. Watching the sunset from the clifftop terraza at Hostal La Torre – a key spot for frustrated dance-music lovers during the lockdown period – I smiled to remember a party here during the naughty 1990s, when sleeping pills were distributed under another guise and the sun rose to reveal a landscape littered with snoring bodies. I went there for dinner one evening with Serena Cook who, after almost 20 years at the helm of Ibiza’s most creative concierge business, has her finger firmly on the island’s pulse, can always get the best tables and is the keyholder to some of the most special villas around. One of the first wave of agriturismos in Ibiza, Can Domo was recently taken over by the three Spanish partners behind Can Tres on Formentera. It’s a story I’ve told before: for 10 years I lived in an old casa payesa in Sant Vicent de sa Cala at a time (the 1990s) when rent was as cheap as chips, smartphones and the internet hadn’t happened yet, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a good hotel on the island.