A lot more to Ibiza than foam discos and cocktails

IT’S A beautiful day and we look out on a bay full of ferries coming and going and honking and hooting and waking us up earlier than we usually wake: they are going to Barcelona, to Valencia, to the next door small island of Formentera and to Talamanca, a beach across Ibiza Bay, writes Damien Enright.

We assess what the temperature must be like out of doors: People walking in the sun are, some of them, wearing T-shirts but, often, lightweight jackets. It is near the end of October, after all. Soon, the weather, like everything else on this island, will be closing down. A peace will descend almost, but not quite, like the peace that prevailed here when I arrived as a kid in 1961 and found an island frozen in time for, subsequent to its Catalan population backing the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and Generalissimo Franco winning that war with the troops he brought with him from Morocco where he was military governor of Spanish Sahara.