Ibiza for The Time Travellers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend
White walls, salt flats, and a rock that hums.
History and architecture, read in the right order. Medieval on Saturday, modernism on Sunday, a guide who knows the gossip, and a drink where the plotters drank.
Friday: Walls and cubes
- Catedral de Santa Maria d'Eivissa
Gothic bones under baroque plaster, on the site of the mosque and the Roman temple before it; the terrace in front reads all five bastions.
- Sa Penya fishermen's quarter
The organic stacked cubes that Le Corbusier and Sert sketched in the thirties; walk the lanes before dark, when they are still a neighbourhood.
- Ca n'Alfredo
A classic restaurant on Eivissa's main promenade, Ibicenco cooking at white tables under the trees, with the evening walk passing the terrace.
Saturday: Broner and the Bauhaus exiles
- Casa Broner
Erwin Broner's own house of 1960, a German modernist who fled to Ibiza; open as a museum with the original furniture and the harbour window.
- Can Pep Simó houses
Josep Lluís Sert's 1960s cluster of white cubic villas, the clearest translation of the Ibizan farmhouse into modernism; a private street, viewed from the road.
- Atzaró
A restored finca hotel among orange groves inland of Santa Eulària, dinner in the garden; the one splurge of the weekend. Book, and arrange the taxi back.
Sunday: Churches as geometry
- Església de Sant Jordi
The fortress church, a white defensive box with buttresses and a crenellated roof that reads like a Louis Kahn sketch; Sunday mass is at eleven.
- Santa Gertrudis plaza
The white church of 1796, the galleries, and the contemporary houses hiding behind dry-stone walls; the village is where the exiles' heirs live.
- Bar Costa
Hams hanging from the beams, painters' canvases on the walls, pa amb tomàquet and a bottle of island wine; the bar has taken art for debts since the sixties.
Monday: Punic and farewell
- Puig des Molins necropolis
Three thousand Punic tombs under a hill of windmills, and the terracotta Tanit from Es Culleram in the museum; walk down into the hypogea.
- Museu Puget
A Gothic mansion with Narcís Puget's paintings of the island's architecture before tourism, the fincas and the women in black; free entry.
- Es Torrent
A beach shack in a cove with no view of any building, fish by the kilo on a plank table, and the airport twenty minutes up the road.