Ibiza is a paradise lost
By IRMA KURTZ
Last updated at 08:53 10 agosto 2006
Transformed: A world away from the hippy days of the Sixties, Ibiza is a rather more raucous island
After an uncomfortable night curled up against a bulkhead in steerage, I scrambled up onto the deck. Peering out in the morning light, I wondered: was I really awake? Several hours earlier we had set sail from Barcelona. Was the ancient city on the horizon, surrounded by hills of rare Mediterranean green brightening in the dawn, a dream?
Pinching myself, I was delighted to realise that I had, in fact, discovered a real-life paradise. Arriving on an island, hardly known to tourists in 1963, called Ibiza, I had come for a week but ended up staying for a year.
In the early Sixties, visitors to Ibiza were the last of the true bohemians, fleeing from conventional life and trying to make destinies of their own as writers, artists or simply as moody layabouts. We spent our days tap-tapping on typewriters at short stories or daubing colours onto canvas, swimming, sailing, laughing and talking with new friends, and wondering at the sunsets and the stars at night.
Not only was Ibiza blessed with beautiful beaches and a sweet climate, and not only were the locals welcoming and honest, but equally important to an arty crowd like ours, life on the island then was phenomenally cheap. A meal at the best restaurant on Ibiza Town's front, Juanito's, cost the equivalent of 50p today, including a glass or two of potent red wine.
Recently, I returned to Ibiza to see how the island has changed in the past 40 years. I could not have been more horrified or bitterly disappointed.
As an agony aunt for many years, I have witnessed all levels of human behaviour and have always been reluctant to pass judgment - but with my beloved Ibiza, I can't help myself.
As a result of the overwhelming culture of drug-taking, gargantuan nightclubs and vomiting tourists, my paradise island is no longer.
On the first day of my visit, I made my way through the Old Town's suburb of Figueretes. Once just a few pretty houses on an enticing shore where old ladies used to hang out their washing and watch for the fishing boats, Figueretes is now a mass of high-rise hotels, thumpingly noisy bars and shops.
In the warm morning air, I strolled to the beach, which was once pristine and practically deserted. Now it was packed with sunburnt tourists - either still drugged or drunk from the night before or hung-over - discussing who got lucky and who got sick and who made the biggest asses of themselves the night before.
It is hard to imagine amid today's scramble for raucous entertainment in the many drug-riddled discos that just two bars were all Ibiza offered visitors in the early days.
The nightlife in the Old Town centred on the Domino Bar, whose owner had a vinyl collection that included Billie Holliday, Miles Davis, Chet Baker and all the jazz greats.
The Domino closed at 2am on the dot, and anyone who had drunk one too many was left to sleep it off and leave at their leisure.
Several miles away from Ibiza Town, Sandy's Bar provided the same service for another batch of expats who lived in Santa Eulalia. Sandy allowed customers to use it as a poste restante and to borrow his telephone, one of the few on the island at the time.
In the old days, there were few paved roads and only two or three foreign cars on an island where locals still relied on mules and carts to get about. Driving in Ibiza now is tense. Streams of traffic are almost entirely made up of rented cars driven by people who have learned their road etiquette in disparate parts of the globe.
Put 300 Frenchmen, 400 Italians, 1,000 Brits, some Yankees and a few Eastern Europeans behind the wheel on one road, and all you can do is pray that nobody is in a hurry and everyone is sober.
The first time I visited Ibiza, I fell in love within an hour of arriving. Newcomers always did. Falling in love was an extension of the passion we felt for the island. Sexual promiscuity, however, was not part of it all.
True enough, few, if any, of the early unions between foreign residents lasted for ever, but hopeful serial monogamy was our way back then.
Hearts were broken. But there was no boasting of records in one week, as it all too prevalent now. Not that we were perfect, but our appetites were of a different order.
Inadvertently, for instance, I stole the lover of a long-time foreign resident on the island. For a whole year afterwards, the wronged woman arranged that whenever I came in, the barman at The Domino had to play the record of Billie Holliday singing: "I'll be around, no matter how you treat me now. Some other girl has come along. But when she's gone, I'll be around from now on..."
Forty years later, walking along the beach of Figueretes, as I remembered how it used to be, there on the incoming tide was a used condom bobbing into the shore. Further along, under some overhanging rocks, I came across the crumpled pages of a very nasty, hard-core porn magazine. "Where have all the flowers gone?" I heard myself humming.
The next morning, when I visited the brawling, overbuilt ugliness of the clubbing mecca San Antonio - once a tiny fishing village inaccessible except by boat - I couldn't avoid the conclusion that the masses of young people arriving from all over Europe and America to get drunk, to get high, to have sex, are merely seeking a fortnight in their very own idea of paradise - uncouth and unoriginal though I may consider their idea of paradise to be.
In this once serene place, I tried to console myself with the thought that there have always been devils of some kind in paradise.
As a young Englishman weaved towards me, waving his arms and singing aloud, revolted though I was, I asked myself: "Have I or anyone else the right to criticise another's idea of paradise?"
The lad stopped suddenly to be violently sick at the side of the road. "If that's your idea of paradise," I thought angrily, "why did you have to come here and ruin mine?"
And it is not just the average punters who have ruined my paradise island. The celebrities of former times were a lot less brash and intrusive, too, than the DJs, ageing pop stars and showy girls named after capital cities and hotel chains who hang out on Ibiza so very publicly now.
In the past, famous residents were mostly classy actors such as Den-holm Elliott and Laurence Olivier, as well as writers and artists of note.
And nobody who saw Andy Warhol's muse Nico striding along the beach will ever forget the sight - she was such a stunning beauty that I couldn't believe she and we other women were of the same species.
We had our villains in Ibiza back then, too. Elmyr de Hory, for instance, a Hungarian, was judged by many experts to be almost as gifted - though not as original - as painters like Picasso, Matisse and Renoir, whose works he forged and passed off as the real thing.
The American Clifford Irving, another resident of the time, wrote a book about this master forger, entitled Fake.
This turned out to be a great irony as Irving got himself and his wife, Emily Sommer, into a spot of bother by producing an 'authorised autobiography' of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, based on fabricated letters and interviews.
But the truth is there now seems an almost charming quaintness about the foreign rogues on Ibiza in my day. Conmen, after all, are dreamers, and though what they do is not good, they are certainly imaginative.
Until quite recently, for all the drugs and booze and crashing house music, despite rampant promiscuity and all-night raves, Ibiza did not feel like a place where an experienced traveller felt serious evil was being done - just serious stupidity.
But, of course, wherever drugs are big business must come drug turf wars. And a shoot-out between rival British gangs in San Antonio last week that left three men in hospital with bullet wounds brought the stink of sulphur into paradise.
But just as I was about to totally despair, I drove up to the north of the island - beyond the mass of tourists and thumping bass, out of the reach of McDonald's, and far from the new multi-lane highway that is being built in spite of local dissent.
And there, at last, was the original Ibiza - not the Eye-bee-thuh of the so-called clubbing 'culture', but the gentle and welcoming hills dotted with white villas that I had seen long ago from the deck of a ship.
The half a million British tourists who visit Ibiza every year via its efficient but unremarkable international airport will never know the vision of the Old Town rising before them at dawn that I saw from the ship.
Nor are any clubbers likely to befriend the local people and discover the tolerance, humour and common sense still characteristic of them. But fortunately, Ibizencos have survived invasions of Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Moorish pirates, and they will weather this attack, too, and in style.
I wandered alone in this remote corner of the island, crushing wild thyme underfoot. And then suddenly, there, over the edge of the cliff, was the Mediterranean, sparkling blue below, holding close her islands.
Over the thrumming of a million cicadas in surrounding trees rose the irresistible song of Ibiza, my old paradise.
In the Sixties, my Ibizan paradise had no international airport - getting there involved a proper journey, and our wish, once we arrived, was to find our true selves; or at least attempt to.
These days, it seems to me that eccentricity or even just individuality is increasingly despised in a world devoted to a uniform self-indulgence and ephemera.
Oh yes, the mass of young people flying into Ibiza now are still looking for a kind of paradise. But what do they hope to achieve there? Fuelled by drugs, drink and meaningless sex, the aim evidently is to lose themselves in a mindless nihilism.
Ibiza - The Original Party Island, presented by Irma Kurtz, is on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday, 10.30am.
