Chilled Ibiza: Experience the Ultimate Sunset Mix

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I went there for dinner one evening with Serena Cook who, after almost 20 years at the helm of Ibiza’s most creative concierge business, has her finger firmly on the island’s pulse, can always get the best tables and is the keyholder to some of the most special villas around.

Another example of this is Petunia, where I stopped one evening for dinner on a terrace with mesmeric views of the rocky islet Es Vedrà. On the walk down through the forest, balsamic scents of heat-baked pine and rosemary flung open the synapses of my memory. Meanwhile, the island continues to evolve, even if old-timers such as me sometimes have a hard time adjusting to the new realities.There was an atmosphere of elegant unflashiness, chastened chic, that seemed somehow attuned with the mood of the times. It was Marañón who introduced me to the community of estate owners who are restoring and regenerating great swathes of abandoned land. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). 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.

It’s a story I’ve told before: for 10 years I lived in an old casa payesa in Sant Vicent de sa Cala at a time (the 1990s) when rent was as cheap as chips, smartphones and the internet hadn’t happened yet, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a good hotel on the island. Parts of my mental geography were virtually unrecognisable: Santa Gertrudis, in my day a one-horse hamlet with a couple of bars and a tobacconist, was now a fully grown town of done-up villas with a world-class cocktail bar, Overall, and Bottega il Buco, an outpost of New York restaurateur Donna Lennard’s Il Buco, also found in NoHo and the Hamptons. Six Senses Ibiza is certainly big and opulent, and involves a massive investment by a powerful international brand, but having visited on the eve of its opening, I’m happy to report that the alarm is mostly unjustified.Arriving at the sweeping bay of Cala Xarraca, on the far tip of the island close to Portinatx, I cast my mind back 25 years to a summer weekend’s camping beside a freshwater spring that dribbled out of the cliff.