LA ISLA BONITA

For decades, the Spanish island of Formentera has been a playground for hippies and artists. Now, thanks to a wave of stylish hotels, the secret is getting out.

- By Julia Chaplin

I HID UNDER A camel-hair Berber tent on the beach to shade myself from the intense Mediterranean sun, next to a young woman from Atlanta who was tapping out poems on an old typewriter. She asked me for a word—the first that popped into my head—to add to her psychic verse. Nearby, a German model turned healer in a backless goddess dress and no tan lines was talking about breath work. An artist in a crocheted bikini came by and sought help dragging a large metal sign that read SAVE ME into the sea.

I smiled, because without even standing up, I had stumbled upon the elusive essence of Formentera—a pristine island four miles south of Ibiza that feels like a bohemian holdover from an earlier time. It has no Ibiza-style megaclubs, just sand dunes, pine forests, and secluded coves.

The stiletto-shaped slab of craggy rock lies at the southern end of the Balearic Island chain. Its geographic isolation has, for the past five decades, made it a low-key social sanctuary for artists, musicians, fashionable eccentrics, and other vacationing visionaries.

Hippies first arrived in the 1960s. Bob Dylan is reputed to have slept in an old windmill. Pink Floyd stayed for extended periods, and the band used the eerie image of an island windmill on the cover of its soundtrack for More, Barbet Schroeder’s 1969 film about the hippie-heroin scene that was partly filmed on the island. Joni Mitchell, fleeing fame and Los Angeles, stopped there on a sabbatical through Europe that inspired her 1971 album, Blue. The design crowd came next and built chic beach escapes: they included Consuelo Castiglioni, the founder of Marni, and Philippe Starck, the French architect.