Published in The Independent on Sunday, 1 September 2002
So more than half the population of Britain wants to live abroad and their first choice among non-English-speaking countries is Spain.
So more than half the population of Britain wants to live abroad and their first choice among non-English-speaking countries is Spain. Down here on the Balearic island of Ibiza this news has raised a few delighted chuckles among the locals. They presume that the Brits longing for exile are the same high-spenders who flock here during August, the height of the clubbing season, and who pay up to £50 a head to join 10,000 other ravers at Privilege, officially the world’s biggest nightclub. It is more likely, however, that they resemble me, wanderers in the autumn of their life who admire the Spanish, especially the Ibicencos, for their gentle hedonism, tolerance, loyalty, good manners and recognition of what is important in this world and what is froth.
Peter Bond, a former BBC sports announcer from the days when he had to wear a dinner jacket even to broadcast on the radio, introduced me to Ibiza. Back in 1964 his ferry had stopped there on its way back from Majorca. Within two hours he had exchanged his travellers’ cheques to pay a £12 deposit to buy a flat in the old walled town.
Within a month he had resigned from the BBC, cashed in his pension, bought a Triumph sports car and was roaring down the highways of France on his way to Barcelona to take the overnight ferry to exile in paradise. When he died last year his widow Heather buried his ashes between his tennis court and his swimming pool, overlooking the village of San Rafael, and the villagers saw him off with a tennis tournament and an enormous paella. Bond was as British as they come – “The name is Bond. But Peter, dear boy, not James.” Yet he found an acceptance and a happiness in Ibiza that he had not found in Britain.
He was not alone. I have spent this year travelling all over Spain with my daughter, who is looking for a house to buy there. We bumped into others on a similar quest and inevitably met many of the thousands who have succeeded. But we kept coming back to Ibiza.
For those who know Ibiza only from lurid newspaper reports of British holiday louts who ride their motor-scooters into the hotel pool, vomit over the restaurant floor, bare their bottoms at each other and roar their approval as the owners of one nightclub have sex on stage (at least they are British and married), our affection for the island may be hard to understand. But away from the tourist centres, which are carefully confined to several easily identified areas, traditionally clad locals get on with doing what they have been doing for centuries – tending their crops, raising their pigs and chickens, hand-pressing their grapes, dodging their taxes and, above all, minding their own business.
Over the centuries conquerors came here – but eventually they left – and Madrid made half-hearted attempts to cultivate some sense of Spanish nationalism. But all retired in the face of island isolationism: mainland Spaniards are still known as fueristas (outsiders).
Confident, independent and self-reliant, the Ibicencos saw no reason to get into a flap about the behaviour of visitors. So when the hippies arrived in the Sixties and found that the locals didn’t care what they did, what they smoked or what they did not wear – bare breasts were common at a time when Madrid still censored magazines – they spread the word that they had stumbled on a hippy version of paradise. They felt then, as many outsiders do today, more at home in Ibiza than they did in their own lands.
Creativity flourished, of a more subversive kind than Chopin’s in Majorca. This is where former hippy Elmer de Hory, a painter with a genius for being able to dash off Modiglianis, flooded the art market with copies so good that many found their way into the collections of (later) embarrassed galleries.
This is where Clifford Irving, an American fiction writer, churned out a best-selling biography of the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. Unfortunately it turned out that Irving had made it all up, much to Hughes’s annoyance. Irving was prosecuted in the US and his Swiss wife jailed in Switzerland, but Ibiza wondered what all the fuss was about – especially when the romantic background story emerged. Irving had explained to an earlier wife, a British publishing executive, that his periodic absences were spent working on his biography of Hughes when in fact he was with his new lover. Suspicious, the wife asked to see a chapter or two. Irving quickly made them up, decided that they were rather good, especially when his wife praised them, and went on to make up the entire biography. There was even a Hollywood twist. Irving engaged an American lawyer to defend the new Swiss wife. When she got out of jail she left Irving, married the lawyer and they opened an antique shop – in Ibiza.
The island’s easy-going attitude extends to politics. Another minority in Spain, the Basques, claim independence and fight for it through the military group ETA with bombings and assassinations. After Franco’s death, Ibiza too struck a blow for its Catalan identity and its dialect, in a rather more laid-back manner: it changed its place names. San Antonio became Sant Antoni de Portmany, San José became San Josep and so on. Honour was satisfied with a few brushstrokes.
As for the EU and the single currency, well why not? Money from the EU has funded new roads and restored ancient buildings. The change-over from the peseta to the euro not only took place without the upheaval everyone prophesied, but also brought some unexpected economic benefits. As in the rest of Spain, a lot of business in Ibiza is transacted in cash. When Ibicencos realised that on change-over day, 1 January this year, the fiscal authorities were likely to ask: “Where did you get all these pesetas you want to convert into euros?”, a rush began to get rid of cash that had been kept under the mattress. Land and property prices soared and there was a construction boom. Everyone benefited, and continues to do so, something Tony Blair might point out could well happen here.
No, my daughter didn’t find anything but we will keep looking and we will continue to visit Ibiza whenever we can. Our last week’s stay produced seven sunny days, wonderful seafood meals priced at half what one pays in London and an understanding of why the British poll on exile produced the results it did.
Now there is an added attraction. The nightspot entrepreneurs have announced that they are pulling out and moving to cities such as Lisbon. The old-timers who love Ibiza for everything except the clubs and their music can celebrate a rare, leisurely fought but much deserved, wrinklies’ victory.
