The Ibiza Case
On how a dictatorship accidentally created the conditions for one of the twentieth century's most fertile cultural experiments, and what the growth imperative did to it next.
Pliny the Elder recorded the name in the first century AD. The Greeks had called them the Pityussae — islands of pines — for the forests that covered them. The pine trees and the gnarled juniper, the sabina, introduced by the Phoenicians and cultivated for its extraordinarily hard wood, were the first thing anyone noticed about the place. They are still there. Some of the junipers at Cala Bassa, on the island's west coast, are a hundred years old. They are classified as cultural heritage under Spanish law and cannot be touched. The beach club sets its Balinese beds in their shade.
The trees are the right place to start, because what happened to Ibiza is the story of a place whose aura — whose specific cultural gravity — was produced by conditions that had nothing to do with commerce, and then consumed by a commerce that could not have existed without them. The aura is now eroding. The trees are still there. The question is how long the trees can outlast what is being sold in their shade.
The first wave of artists and intellectuals arrived in the 1920s and 1930s — European modernism discovering that the Mediterranean was cheap, warm, and sufficiently far from the noise of the metropolis to think. What drew them was not a destination. It was an absence. Ibiza in 1930 was rural, developmentally lagging, and almost entirely separate from the modern world. The roads were bad. The ferry connections were infrequent. The peasant economy produced olives, almonds, and salt. There was almost nothing to do, which was precisely the point.
Among those who passed through or stayed were Walter Benjamin, Albert Camus, Le Corbusier, Joan Miró, Tristan Tzara, and the architect Josep Lluís Sert. These were not tourists. They were people looking for a place outside the circuits of cultural production — outside the galleries and the salons and the critical apparatus — where something might form before it was named. Ibiza offered that, in the specific way that only genuinely marginal places can: not by providing infrastructure but by providing the absence of it.
Then the Spanish Civil War came, and the isolation deepened. Franco's dictatorship closed Spain to the world. But something paradoxical happened. Ibiza was impoverished enough, remote enough, and sufficiently resistant in spirit to the regime's values that it became a refuge — first for those fleeing fascism, then, in the 1950s, for a different kind of fugitive. The beatniks arrived. Jack Kerouac's generation, or those adjacent to it, discovered that you could live in Ibiza for almost nothing, that the local population was tolerant, and that the Guardia Civil largely left foreigners alone. Ibiza was politically opposed to the Franco regime in its bones, but the opposition expressed itself as passivity rather than confrontation — which meant the island became, in one writer's description, the Casablanca of the mind.
Among those who settled there in the early 1960s was Elmyr de Hory, the Hungarian art forger, who threw lavish parties and sold fake Picassos until Orson Welles made a film about him — F for Fake, shot partly on Ibiza. His neighbour and friend was Clifford Irving, who would later fabricate a biography of Howard Hughes, an act of imposture so audacious it became its own form of art. The beatnik community of Ibiza in those years was full of this quality — people doing things that no institutional framework had authorised or even named, on an island that was too poor and too marginal to care.
The hippies arrived next, in the mid-1960s, and the character of the island shifted. The introspective bohemianism of the beatniks gave way to something louder and more communal. The hippie movement — Carolyn Cassady, who had been part of the Beat scene, called it a vulgarisation at ground level of the Beat movement, with more light and colour and media repercussion — founded craft markets, established communes, and began, almost without intending to, to contribute to the island's emerging tourist economy. Franco died in 1975. The 1970s were a time of relative openness. The counterculture deepened its roots.
What is important about this sequence is not the mythology — the free love, the sunsets, the cosmic significance attributed to dancing in an olive grove — but the structural conditions that made it possible. Ibiza in the 1960s and 1970s was cheap, which meant people with no money and no institutional backing could live there. It was marginal, which meant what they did had years to develop before visibility arrived. It was tolerant — structurally, politically, temperamentally — which meant the specifically non-conformist, the specifically weird, the specifically unwanted by mainstream cultural production could find a place to be. The music that would eventually give Ibiza its global identity as a clubbing destination grew directly from this: Pacha, the island's first club, opened in June 1973 in a converted farmhouse on the outskirts of Ibiza town — white clay exterior, open-air backyard, a swimming pool. In an era before mobile phones, people danced until the sun came up and went swimming at sunrise. No brand, no marketing strategy, no business plan beyond the immediate summer. The specific atmospheric quality that today makes a table at Pacha cost what it costs was produced in those conditions: deliberate cheapness, deliberate obscurity, a community of people with no commercial intention whatsoever.
This is how culture works. It requires the years before visibility. It requires the cheap space, the marginal geography, the community of practice that can develop density and specificity without being captured by the market. Every serious cultural formation of the twentieth century followed the same logic: Manchester in 1978, Seattle in 1989, Berlin after the Wall. Ibiza followed it across several decades, accumulating layer upon layer of cultural sediment — the beatniks, the hippies, the early club scene, the producers and DJs who came in the 1980s and 1990s and turned the farmhouse dances into something global. And then the market arrived, as it always does, to monetise what the years of obscurity had produced.
It should be said that the market also amplified and distributed. The club economy that followed did not only extract — it made available to millions something that would otherwise have remained a private experience of a remote island. That is the growth imperative’s genuine offer. The question is what it costs.
The Cala Bassa Beach Club — CBbC — sits on one of the most beautiful coves on the island's west coast, surrounded by Mediterranean pine forest and the hundred-year-old gnarled junipers that Pliny recorded and the Phoenicians cultivated. The club covers effectively the entire beach. Balinese beds are arranged in the shade of the ancient trees. The pricing structure is sophisticated: the municipal regulation caps the price of ordinary sun loungers, but premium products — the beds, the gazebos, the private areas — fall outside the regulated category, as markets always find ways to step around the ceiling while staying beneath the law. A free public area is maintained, as Spanish coastal law requires. In 2025 the Spanish government introduced formal daily visitor quotas for Ibiza beaches, a belated institutional acknowledgement that the growth imperative had reached the edge of what the island could absorb.
The irony is precise. The beach club is selling the atmosphere — the quality of the light through ancient branches, the specific texture of a cove that has been beautiful since before Rome existed, the sense of being somewhere that accumulated its character across two thousand years of specific history. It did not create this atmosphere. It could not create it. The aura of Cala Bassa is the residue of the Phoenician junipers, the Greek naming, the Roman recording, the centuries of agricultural poverty, the beatniks and hippies who arrived because it was cheap and marginal, the club culture that Pacha began in 1973 with people who had no commercial intention whatsoever. The market arrived after the accumulation was complete and began charging for what it had not made.
This is the standard operation. It happened in Notting Hill and in Brooklyn and in Hackney and in every neighbourhood that culture colonised before capital followed. The specific quality that makes a place worth going to — the aura, the atmosphere, the sense of specific human life accumulated over time — is produced by conditions of cheapness and marginality that the market systematically destroys in the act of monetising them. Remove the cheap rent and the artists leave. Remove the artists and the aura dissipates. Remove the aura and what remains is a surface, beautiful perhaps, but without the interior depth that gave people a reason to go there in the first place. You cannot manufacture what the trees at Cala Bassa took a hundred years to become.
There is a broader argument here, which is the subject of a book I have been writing across fourteen years of watching this process from inside one of its more revealing positions — the design and materials industry, which sits at the precise intersection of cultural production and commercial extraction, close enough to see both clearly.
The argument is that what has happened to Ibiza is not a local story about a Mediterranean island. It is the same logic operating at every scale simultaneously — cultural, political, anthropological, and finally biological. The growth imperative does not stop at the edge of a beach. It does not stop at the edge of a city. It does not stop at the edge of the self. The platform economy colonises the interior of the psyche with the same logic that colonised the farmhouse dances at Pacha. The transhumanist programme targets the biological limits of the self with the same logic that removed the price caps and built the Balinese beds in the shade of heritage-protected trees. In each case the thing being consumed is the specific quality that creaturely limitation produced — the depth, the urgency, the specific weight of existence in a place and a body that will not last forever.
The trees at Cala Bassa are still there. The regulation protects them. Two thousand years of specific history cannot be fully extracted in a single season. But the erosion is visible and it is accelerating. What Ibiza is becoming — what it has been becoming since the 1990s, when the club economy arrived and the price of a farmhouse stopped being cheap — is a demonstration of what the growth imperative produces when it completes its work. Not destruction. Something more insidious: a beautiful surface, impeccably maintained, from which the interior has been quietly removed. The shell preserved. The substance moved elsewhere.
This essay is drawn from themes developed in The Dream of Never, a completed manuscript examining the cultural, political, and anthropological logic of the growth imperative — from the design weeks of London and Milan to the theological genealogy of Western capitalism to the transhumanist programme's pursuit of unlimited existence. The book is currently under submission.
michelerovatti.com · Writing since 2012