Chilled Ibiza: Experience the Ultimate Sunset Mix

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Here, the reinvention effort was a labour of love, taking an Eighties, plain-Jane family hotel to the next level with a total overhaul, a fine, Italian-inflected restaurant in La Mesa Escondida, wonderful gardens and rooftop tables for soaking up the extraordinary panorama.

My stomping ground was always the rural north: the hills and villages around Santa Inés, San Juan and Cala San Vicente.Lying in bed the next morning with the dazzle of a flaming June day filtering through the shutters, I looked up at the ceiling of my bedroom at Can Domo.

For 10 whole years, I reflected, something very similar to this view of beams and rough-hewn plaster was what I gazed at.The makeover by Dutch interior designer Carmen Straatsma is an exercise in balancing contemporary taste with an injection of personality. Watching the sunset from the clifftop terraza at Hostal La Torre – a key spot for frustrated dance-music lovers during the lockdown period – I smiled to remember a party here during the naughty 1990s, when sleeping pills were distributed under another guise and the sun rose to reveal a landscape littered with snoring bodies. As an indication of just how far it is from blaring techno around the pool, there are plans to host a classical music event here next year. The group has overhauled the house and its grounds, drawing on a deep knowledge of the area’s traditional architecture.

But if the coast is reimagining the infrastructure of the package-tour era, out in the countryside the movement is fuelled by nostalgia for the Ibiza of a much earlier time: simpler and more pastoral. The design ditches the all-white aesthetic traditionally synonymous with Ibiza in favour of earthy, neutral tones, stone, linen and acres of grey concrete. Take Oku, which recently opened on the edge of San Antonio, a rebranding of the Casa Cook hotel that had its soft launch in 2019 and then closed. I drove back west to a place that has lingered in a corner of my mind for a quarter of a century: Punta Galera, where the natural terraces of smooth rock act as shelves for sunbathing like a lizard.The original fixer for anything you want organised while in Ibiza, from villas to chefs, drivers to yoga teachers. On the night I was there, drinking cold fino sherry and nibbling burrata with olives and juicy figs, the soundtrack was a Brazilian guitarist playing soft bossa nova.

Though it looks fresh, Oku is in fact based on the footings of a former three-star stay, a humble bucket-and-spader dating from the package-tour boom of the 1970s.Today the space, renamed El Silencio by its new French owners, has morphed into a sand-on-the-floor seaside restaurant with gorgeous wabi-sabi-like styling, a pool out back and a menu by young-gun chef Jean Imbert, known as the Jamie Oliver of France. The great dome of Privilege up on the heights of San Rafael looked forlorn and unkempt, the encroaching vegetation making it appear like a Mayan ruin in the early stages of being reclaimed by the jungle. Everything was still in post-Covid recovery mode and a strange, faintly dazed feeling was detectable. The old north-south divide is also increasingly redundant: you’re as likely to discover a cool boho scene among the glitz of the south as a whopping heavyweight resort on a wild northern beach. Few places on the planet have undergone changes as sweeping, as transformative, both for good and ill, as Ibiza.