🇪🇸 Spain · The Islands
Ibiza carries a reputation that precedes it: the party island, the great clubs and the sunsets set to electronic music. And it is true, that Ibiza exists and it is legendary. But stopping there would mean missing almost everything. Because the smallest of the big Balearics is also an island of dazzling natural beauty, with clear-water coves among the pines, almond groves, whitewashed villages, a walled city listed as World Heritage and more than two thousand six hundred years of Mediterranean history written into its soil.
The island has many faces. There is the monumental Ibiza of Dalt Vila, the fortified old town crowning the city, with its Renaissance walls, its cathedral and its sea views. There is the magical Ibiza of Es Vedrà, the rocky islet wrapped in legend off the southwest coast. There is the Ibiza of the coves (Comte, Salada, d'Hort) and of the nearby paradise of Formentera, half an hour away by ferry. And there is the quiet Ibiza of the north, of the hippie markets, the inland villages and the sunsets without music, heir to the counterculture that landed here in the 1960s.
This guide covers Ibiza with a practical and honest eye: what to see beyond the partying, how to reach the best coves, how to get to Formentera, what a night at the clubs really costs (spoiler: a lot), how the eco-tax works and what rules there are against noise and boat parties. With a little planning — and choosing the right season — Ibiza can be both an unforgettable party and a Mediterranean haven. You decide which island you want.
Ibiza's history begins with the Phoenicians, who established a settlement at Sa Caleta at the end of the seventh century BC and founded the city of Ebusus, traditionally dated to around 654 BC. Under Carthaginian rule, the island became a prosperous Punic trading base, with the sanctuary of the goddess Tanit in the cave of Es Culleram and the great necropolis of Puig des Molins, the best preserved in the Punic world. Rome absorbed it as a municipality (Flavium Ebusitanum) and exploited its salt pans. After the Vandals and the Byzantines, the Muslims took it in the year 902 and called it Yabisa. In 1235, troops of the Crown of Aragón, led by Guillem de Montgrí, archbishop-elect of Tarragona, conquered the island on 8 August and began the Catalan era. For centuries the salt pans were its great wealth and the walls of Dalt Vila (built on the orders of Philip II) defended it from Barbary pirates. In the twentieth century, the arrival of the hippies in the 1960s and the mass tourism that followed turned the island into the international destination it is today. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Balearics at the heart of the Mediterranean: the talayots of prehistory, Phoenician and Punic Ibiza, the conquest of Mallorca by James I in 1229, centuries of corsairs, and the tourism that transformed them in the twentieth century.
Read the history of The Islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Ibiza is far older than its party reputation might suggest: it was one of the great cities of the ancient Mediterranean. Although there were prehistoric inhabitants on the island, its history proper begins with the Phoenicians, the seafaring and trading people from what is now Lebanon who crossed the whole Mediterranean founding trading posts. Towards the end of the seventh century BC, the Phoenicians established a settlement at Sa Caleta, on the south coast of the island, whose archaeological remains survive and form part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing.
Shortly afterwards the population moved to the bay where Ibiza town now stands, and there Ebusus (or Ibossim) was born, a port city that tradition, following the historian Diodorus Siculus, dates to around 654 BC. The name 'Ebusus' has been linked to the Phoenician god Bes, a protective, cheerful and somewhat grotesque divinity much venerated on the island. The choice of site was no accident: Ibiza had an excellent natural harbour, fertile land and, above all, salt pans, that is, salt, one of the most valuable products of antiquity, essential for preserving food.
Ebusus prospered quickly as a strategic trading base on the sea routes between the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, Sardinia and the rest of the Mediterranean. The island exported salt, salted fish, wool, lead and figs, and traded with the whole known world. One of the most important cities of the western Mediterranean had been born, and its greatest period of splendour was still to come.
The great moment of ancient Ibiza came when the island entered the orbit of Carthage, the powerful Punic metropolis of North Africa and heir to the Phoenicians. From the sixth century BC, Ebusus became a flourishing outpost of the Carthaginian world and lived its golden age. The city minted its own coinage, developed a powerful industry (salt, salted fish, pottery, dyes) and filled with temples, workshops and shops. Its population and its wealth grew enormously.
Two exceptional testimonies to that Punic splendour survive. The first is the necropolis of Puig des Molins, the cemetery of ancient Ebusus, considered the largest and best-preserved Punic necropolis in the world: over the centuries, some 3.000 underground tombs (hypogea) were cut into the hillside, where the Ibizans buried their dead with rich grave goods. Ibiza was believed to be a sacred island, a blessed place to rest eternally, free of venomous animals, and many Punic people from elsewhere wanted to be buried here.
The second is the cult of the goddess Tanit, the great Carthaginian female divinity, mistress of fertility, love and death. At the cave sanctuary of Es Culleram, in the north of the island, she was worshipped and hundreds of figures and offerings have been found. Over the millennia, the image of Tanit has become a genuine symbol of Ibiza. Phoenicians and Carthaginians left so deep a mark that Ibiza is today one of the key places for understanding Punic civilisation in the Mediterranean.
After the Punic Wars, in which Rome defeated Carthage, Ibiza gradually entered the Roman sphere, although it kept a notable degree of autonomy and its Punic character for a long time. In time the island was fully absorbed into the Empire: it first received the status of a federated city (civitas foederata) and later, under the Flavian dynasty, became a Roman municipality under the name Municipium Flavium Ebusitanum. Rome went on exploiting the island's great resource, the salt pans, and Ebusus remained an active port on the trade routes of the western Mediterranean.
The decline of the Western Roman Empire dragged Ibiza into the dark centuries of late antiquity. In the fifth century, the Vandals, who had founded a kingdom in North Africa, occupied the Balearics. In the sixth century, Justinian's Byzantine Empire recovered them for the Eastern Roman world, and the island was tied, ever more weakly, to Byzantium. It was a time of insecurity, with piracy lurking and the population pulling back.
In the year 902, Ibiza was brought into the Muslim world, joining the rest of the Balearics within al-Ándalus. The Muslims called it Yabisa, and for more than three centuries the island lived under Islam. Irrigation and farming systems were improved, the town developed and much of the population converted to the new faith. The Arab imprint survives in place names, in farming techniques and in the layout of the old town. Like the rest of the archipelago, Ibiza was at times also a base for the piracy that harried the Christian coasts, which put it in the sights of the northern kingdoms.
The decisive turn towards today's Ibiza came in 1235. In the context of the Crown of Aragón's Mediterranean expansion begun by James I with the conquest of Mallorca (1229), the taking of Ibiza was entrusted to Guillem de Montgrí, archbishop-elect of Tarragona, who led the expedition together with the infante Peter of Portugal and the count of Roussillon. The Christian troops occupied the castle of Ibiza, on top of today's Dalt Vila, on 8 August 1235. The conquest meant the end of Muslim rule and the beginning of the Catalan era: the Muslim population was largely replaced by Christian settlers arriving mostly from the Girona area, who brought with them the Catalan language, still the island's own today in its Ibizan variety.
Through the following centuries, Ibiza's great wealth remained what it had been in Phoenician times: the salt pans. Salt was produced in the basins of Ses Salines by evaporating seawater, and its trade, controlled and highly lucrative, was for centuries the island's main economic engine and a source of conflict and privilege. 'Ibiza salt' was exported across the Mediterranean.
But the island also lived through centuries of fear. The constant threat of Barbary pirates and corsairs from North Africa forced Ibiza to fortify itself. In the sixteenth century, King Philip II ordered the building of the spectacular Renaissance wall that still surrounds Dalt Vila, one of the best preserved in the world, and watchtowers and fortress-churches were built across the island where the rural population sheltered during attacks. That walled, salt-producing Ibiza, agricultural and seafaring, with a hard and austere life, remained almost unchanged well into the twentieth century.
Ibiza's transformation into a global icon is a recent and fascinating phenomenon. For centuries it was a poor and isolated island, apart from the great currents of history. That began to change in the middle of the twentieth century. As early as the 1940s and 1950s, some artists and intellectuals arrived, drawn by its light, its quiet and its low prices. But the great turning point came in the 1960s and 1970s, when Ibiza became one of the favourite destinations of the international hippie movement.
Thousands of young people from all over the world, at the height of the counterculture, landed on the island in search of freedom, nature, sun and an alternative way of life. They settled on country estates, filled the coves and created a culture of their own that left an indelible mark: the hippie markets (such as the legendary Las Dalias), the characteristic 'Adlib' fashion of loose white clothing, sunsets with music and an atmosphere of tolerance and bohemianism that is still part of the island's soul. Ibiza won a reputation as a free and cosmopolitan paradise that projected it to the world.
On that foundation grew, from the 1980s and 1990s, the phenomenon that makes it world-famous today: the electronic music industry and the great clubs (Pacha, Amnesia, Space, later Hï), which turned Ibiza into the global capital of nightlife and a magnet for millions of visitors every summer. In 1999, UNESCO recognised its heritage and natural value by inscribing 'Ibiza, Biodiversity and Culture' on the World Heritage list, covering Dalt Vila, the Puig des Molins necropolis, the Phoenician site of Sa Caleta and the posidonia meadows in its waters.
Today Ibiza lives in permanent tension between its many faces: the island of partying and unrestrained luxury, with very high prices and heavy summer overcrowding that creates problems of housing, water and sustainability; and the authentic island, that of the white villages, the salt pans, the coves and the free spirit inherited from the hippies. Between the two, between the noise of the clubs and the silence of Es Vedrà at dusk, one of the oldest and most fascinating islands in the Mediterranean goes on beating.