Formentera offers quiet reprieve from Balearic party islands
Why you should visit the island favoured by hippy celebrities like Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan
There is still a Spanish island in the Mediterranean three hours from Dublin with relatively uncrowded white sand beaches, no boozy party zones or loud nightclubs. It’s called Formentera and it’s the least known and quietest of the Balearic archipelago.
For decades, the island has been a favourite hangout of hippies and celebrities seeking to get away from it all. Bob Dylan rented the lighthouse on Cap de Barbaria in the late 1960s and wrote the song Formentera Lady about his time there, while Joni Mitchell used its natural beauty as inspiration for her 1971 album Blue.
Nowadays, Formentera is visited of the likes of Kate Moss and Sienna Miller, but it still has not lost its tranquil, bohemian vibe.
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To get there, you have to fly to its noisier neighbour Ibiza — Formentera has no airport of its own - and take a ferry onwards. These leave from Ibiza every 30 minutes or so, but be warned, they don’t hang about — if you’re not on board on the dot, they’ll pull away and leave you on the quayside.
Our hotel, the Insotel Formentera Playa, sat on the Migjorn coast, five kilometres of beaches all perfect for working on your tan.
Some are sand, some are pebble and some are also nudist, which is the one guaranteed way of ensuring you return home with no unsightly white lines.
As well as peaceful, relaxing holidays, Formentera also aims very much at green tourism and has dozens of walking and cycling routes crisscrossing the island.
Guided by Manuela and Bartolomeo of Formentera E-Bikes, we took a leisurely route which brought us from Punta Prima watchtower, one of the spots where locals used to look out for approaching pirates, to its sister La Gavina watchtower on the west coast.
Along the way, we passed by the Pudent Lagoon where luxury table salt is harvested and flamingos gather in their thousands during the winter migratory season. This is one of Formentera’s wealthier zones, and as we passed by a swish bar which had just opened for the season.
We were able to see the owners of dozens of yachts who had stopped off to enjoy a drink at Temple Bar prices only without the view of passing inebriated stag parties.
Quite a number of Europe’s millionaires have their summer homes on Formentera, including one Belgian tycoon who paid €18m for S’Espalmador, a tiny private island just off its northern tip.
However, while they might own S’Espalmador, its pristine white sandy beaches remain public, and sunseekers, parasurfers and kayakers all flock there to enjoy them.
We watched in awe as some of the parasurfers took advantage of the strong breeze to perform multiple backflips, while speedboats zipped around the bay in front of us.
No trip to Formentera is complete without a snorkelling trip. The sea surrounding the island is home to some of the best marine biodiversity in Europe, so we headed off with our guides from Formentera Divers.
Our destination was the Ses Salines Natural Park, a sheltered cove where fish gather to feed amid the seagrass. The clear turquoise waters offered perfect visibility and we snorkelled in the midst of curious bream and damselfish, which came within feet of our faces, only to quickly dart out of range if a hand was extended towards them.
One of the more photogenic sites is La Mola Lighthouse, Formentera got its name from the Latin for granary, as the Romans used to grow wheat on the island. And where wheat was grown, it had to be milled, so there are several historic windmills dotted across the landscape.
The most impressive is the Moli Vell, or Old Mill, which lies outside the town of Pilar de la Mola on the eastern side of the island.
A few kilometres further on is another photogenic site, La Mola lighthouse.
Perched on the top of 120 metre tall cliffs, it is well-preserved with whitewashed walls and a spectacular view over the Mediterranean from the rear.
Inside, visitors can see the inner workings of the structure built in 1861 and which so impressed Around the World in 80 Days novelist Jules Verne, he included it in one of his other books.
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