Formentera, Spain: the secret alternative to Ibiza

It was more than a decade ago, but it could have been yesterday. Speeding down Formentera’s only real highway, kicking up clouds of billowing dust on the way to a midnight supper at Can Carlos. My espadrille-clad feet propped on the dashboard of our ancient Golf Cabriolet, wiry laces twisting like tendrils around my conker-brown ankles. James drove barefoot, shirtless, as I lay back in the passenger seat and watched great swathes of creamy stars swoosh by overhead, suspended in a fathomless navy sky. The night air was so hot it caught in our throats like honey. James and I had fallen in love only that summer and Formentera was our bolthole, our refuge, an offshore escape from the gossip mill that is Ibiza in peak season. Over the years that have followed, the island has become a constant in our lives; a place so etched in my consciousness that, if it didn’t exist, I’d have to invent it.

Formentera is a geographic anomaly, a curiously shaped island barely connected in the middle, honed by four wild winds and thousands of years of shifting tides. It is the smallest and most southerly of the inhabited Balearic Islands, home to Roman salt pans and high plateaus, Bronze Age settlements and strange seabirds. Just over a mile wide at its narrowest point, it has a jagged coastline defined by towering cliffs, tottering lighthouses and endless bone-blonde sands. Some 12,000 inhabitants are scattered through its six whitewashed villages, a self-sufficient and resilient tribe accustomed to burning summers, stormy winters and desolate periods when those winds – the Tramuntana, the Migjorn, the Llevant and the Ponent – wreak havoc on the treeless plains.

Until as late as the 1960s, the locals on neighbouring Ibiza were suspicious of Formentera. The island was for pirates and sirens, where spirits lived in caves and crops refused to grow. Half a day’s choppy boat ride away, Formentera was the end of the world. The boat may no longer take half a day, but with no airport or other means of access, it’s only the migrating flamingos that flit in and out with ease. This place exists in autonomy, in relief; a dry, febrile land of cuboid houses and scrawled horizons. If Ibiza is juicy, abundant and technicolour, Formentera is bleached out and desaturated, the island equivalent of a Super 8 film. For eight months of the year, it simmers with a heat so slippery and mercurial the horizon appears to dance. Formentera is dissected by one main road, a gravelly two-lane highway flanked with fruit shacks and retro garages, their faded Repsol signs peeling in the sun. Countless dirt tracks scratch outward from the highway like 
the legs of a centipede. Exploring these caminos has become a fixation of ours. They criss-cross one another senselessly, ending abruptly at pearly beaches, time-warped hotels or rocky coves edged with fisherman’s huts. We drive these lanes lazily, put-putting along in a hired Citroën Méhari while our three sandy children doze dopily in the back.

The earth in Formentera is mineral-red like Ibiza’s, and we pass prickly pear bushes whose spiny pads are clad in pink dust as thick as setting plaster. Inland low-slung stone walls corral fields of listless sheep, their angular forms huddled beneath spalling fig trees whose outspread arms are propped up with sabina branches. This ancient technique encourages abundance and shade on an island where neither come for free.

In the early 1970s, Formentera was on the hippie trail, and idealistic youths – my father included – retraced the steps of the ancient incense traders on a loop that linked Goa, Kabul, Marrakech and Ibiza. These counterculture refugees whiled away days at Fonda Pepe, the frontier-style saloon bar that still reigns in sleepy Sant Ferran, or later on the pavement outside Formentera Guitars, where Chris Rea hung out while recording the video for On the Beach. Didier Malherbe, of the psychedelic rock band Gong, lived in the Balearics in 1968, declaring Formentera ‘a really wild, moon-like place, not like Ibiza [where there] were more clubs and more alcohol.’ Perhaps it’s the heat, or the lack of diversions, but there’s a bohemian imprint to the island that defines it even now. Sant Ferran – still sleepy by day but buzzing at night with a little pavement market and live music – is now home to Macondo, a post-beach pizzeria haunt of ours, where every inch of wall is scrawled with graffiti and pinned with tattered club flyers. Children roll marbles up and down the paved plaza outside while long-haired parents roll fragrant joints, sipping Mojitos amid clouds of deep green smoke. In Sant Ferran it is forever 1973.

Formentera’s beaches – the island’s calling card – are luminous, improbably blue thanks to offshore meadows of posidonia seagrass. Playa de Ses Illetes, on the northern tip, is where gleaming superyachts deposit gleaming guests to be whizzed ashore to eat salt-baked sea bass and sip Whispering Angel at impossible-to-book beach club Juan y Andrea. When we were younger, day-tripping with friends from Ibiza, we’d cluster around the tiki bar at El Tiburon, a low-key beach shack, and drink ice-cold Caipirinhas from plastic cups. These days my heart lives on Playa de Migjorn, the three-mile stretch of beach on the southern coast that’s the preserve of old timers and overnighters, locals and the lo-fi. This exposed stretch of sand is backed by scrubby dunes and peppered with laid-back chiringuitos. Holidaymakers may find themselves at Lucky, or the deeply quirky Blue Bar, but it’s barely there Kiosko 62 that has my heart. My husband and I visit religiously, the first evening of every trip. If we’re early, we grab one of the coveted tables on the deck and sip Pomadas – extravagant measures of Menorcan gin topped with Fanta Limón. We order paper plates of nachos and guacamole before settling in with the backgammon board. If I’m losing, I’ll slip out of my dress on the sand and swim far from shore. From the sea, Kiosko looks shipwrecked, adrift; held together by frayed rope, nails and good luck.

Over the years we’ve stayed everywhere on the island. During our first trips, we fell in love with Es Ram, a rustic-luxe boutique hotel on the hillside above Caló d’Es Morts, where whitewashed casitas tumbled down the scrubby hillside and Kate Moss could be spotted on the fluttering daybeds among the pines. When Es Ram shuttered, we hit the shores, holing up at Las Dunas Playa or Talaya, cutesy beach bungalows hidden in the dunes. One unforgettable weekend we chartered a tiny wooden boat and slept out at sea, eating takeaway pizza and watching shooting stars while our newborn baby snoozed below deck. The thrill of sleeping on the island never leaves me, but the most special kind of magic is reserved for those lazy, sun-soaked, late afternoons when we decide on a whim to forgo our ferry home to Ibiza. More often than not, we’ll end up in a bare-bones beach hotel, children packed like sardines into their beds, their dreams whitewashed by the sun. It’s these furtive, glorious nights – snatched from nowhere – that hold the shiniest of memories.

Little as it may be, Formentera is much lauded now as a foodie’s paradise. Two Michelin stars make for impressive stats, more so on an island which, until 50 years ago, relied upon the greasy-grey Balearic shearwater seabird for protein. Can Carlos – a twinkly walled garden with an open grill – is my favourite place to eat on the planet. But failing that, I’m more likely to be found perched on a rock, poking salt-crusted stems of foraged rosemary into a hastily made bocadillo of sharp Manchego and sweet tomatoes. Like everything else on Formentera, food feels elemental, essential, to be devoured bite after sandy bite.

Elemental is perhaps the best descriptor for this wild little island, where life is something that happens outdoors. I travel for a living, yet nowhere else am I so keenly aware of the relentless beat of the sun, the sticky heat of the road, or the salty tang of the sea in the air. Nowhere else do I so enthusiastically forgo the brushing of my hair, or go so resolutely barefoot, or dress so haphazardly – crochet! Patchwork! Pyjamas! – if I bother to dress at all. Formentera grips me in a way that I can’t seem to wrap my words around. It is a fever that I just can’t shake, a fierce longing that feels primal. In one heady hiatus in the endless pandemic, we snuck in a trip to Casa Pacha, a rootsy hotel at the southerly end of Migjorn. On the flight from Heathrow, I was seated – thrillingly – next to a woman named Maria who had lived on Formentera in the 1970s. En route to Ibiza she regaled me with stories of full moon parties in Porto Salé where everyone arrived naked, loaded with baskets of bread and cheese and wine, where the boys played percussion with sticks on the rocks before diving into the deepest water. She remembered house parties that spilled onto silvery beaches and acid sessions with Hank Wangford (the Notting Hill celebrity doctor turned country-music star) and Far Out Phyllis, an Ibiza scenester immortalised in Peter Kinsley’s novel The Pistolero. It is tales like this, patchouli-scented and sepia-tinged at the edges, that make me nostalgic for an era of Formentera that I never knew. To satisfy this yearning, a read through of our Formentera guide - filled with places to stay and activities to do - has inspired me to return once again.

Sunset is Kiosko 62’s witching hour; as dusk approaches the beach fills with bodies, clustering around the ramshackle bar or sitting on the rocks like gulls. The wild-haired owner Francisco juggles beer bottles as Nina Simone blasts from the crackly speakers and a few colourful stragglers begin to dance, kicking up dust as they move. The olive-green cargo netting of Kiosko’s roof is silhouetted in the setting sun, a jagged flag against a painted sky. As night falls, the air fizzes with thundery heat and the lighthouse at Cap de Barbaria blinks out its warning. Named for the Barbary Coast pirates who plundered Formentera moons ago, it’s a reminder that this far-flung slice of Spain has long been the preserve of the wild.