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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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

Other ways to see Ibiza