The Balearic Islands

Overview

The Balearic Islands are four inhabited islands off Spain’s eastern coast, and the fact that organises any trip is that they work as four separate destinations: Mallorca is a full-sized island with a mountain range, a capital city and working inland towns; Menorca is the quiet one, coves and Bronze Age stones; Ibiza runs Europe’s club season with a pine-covered countryside behind it; and Formentera is a flat sliver of sand with no airport at all, reached by ferry from Ibiza. Picking the right island matters more than picking the right hotel.

Mallorca holds more than three quarters of the Balearic population and most of the variety. Palma, the regional capital, is the only proper city in the archipelago, and the Serra de Tramuntana, a UNESCO Cultural Landscape since 2011, runs the length of the northwestern coast with terraced villages, long-distance footpaths and serious road-cycling climbs. The east and north have the family beaches, the interior has market towns most beach visitors never see.

Menorca has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 1993 and its prehistoric monuments were listed as World Heritage in 2023 under the name Talayotic Menorca. It is measurably calmer than its neighbours, which is exactly why people choose it.

Ibiza carries two reputations at once. The club season fills the coast between Ibiza Town and Sant Antoni from late spring to mid-October; the other Ibiza is a walled UNESCO old town, Dalt Vila, listed in 1999 together with a Phoenician necropolis and the seagrass meadows offshore, plus a hilly interior of whitewashed village churches.

Formentera is 19 km end to end, and in high season ferries leave Ibiza port for it every half hour, taking about 30 minutes. People come for the water, which shades from white sand through pale turquoise, and for the absence of almost everything else.

Catalan is co-official with Spanish, and the island dialects (Mallorquí, Menorquí, Eivissenc) are the everyday speech of the native population; place names and signage are mostly Catalan first.

The islands switch on and off with the season. June to September is peak, with full flight schedules, hourly ferries and full beaches; April, May and October are the underrated windows, still warm, still open, far emptier. From November to March much of Menorca and Formentera simply closes, flight routes thin out, and Palma becomes the one place that keeps a full urban life running through winter.

History & character

Talaiotic beginnings

The islands’ first distinctive cultural layer is the Talaiotic culture of the late Bronze and Iron Ages, which lasted until the Roman conquest in 123 BCE. Its signature structures still stand in the fields: talaiots (stone towers, over 300 of them on Menorca alone), taulas (T-shaped stone sanctuaries found only on Menorca) and navetes (boat-shaped collective tombs). Menorca has the densest concentration, with Naveta des Tudons, Torralba d’en Salord, Talatí de Dalt and Trepucó the headline sites, and the ensemble was inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in 2023 as Talayotic Menorca. Mallorca’s main sites are Capocorb Vell and Ses Païsses.

Carthage and Rome

Ibiza is older still as a town: Phoenician settlers founded a port there in 654 BCE, and the name probably derives from the Phoenician Ibossim. The island became a significant Punic trading and religious centre, and the Puig des Molins necropolis outside Ibiza Town preserves that era. Rome took the islands in 123 BCE, a campaign remembered partly for the Balearic slingers who had fought as mercenaries in Carthaginian armies. The Romans planted the city of Pollentia where the bays of Pollença and Alcúdia meet; its ruins, including a small theatre, sit just outside the walls of modern Alcúdia.

Islam and the Catalan conquest

After Vandal and Byzantine interludes, the islands spent roughly three centuries under Muslim rule from the early 10th century, a period that shaped the rural landscape (terracing, irrigation channels) and left Palma, then Madina Mayurqa, as a sophisticated capital. James I of Aragon (Jaume I) conquered Mallorca in 1229 and Ibiza in 1235; Menorca fell to Alfonso III in 1287. Catalan settlers arrived in numbers, and within a couple of generations the islands spoke Catalan. From 1276 to 1349 there was an independent Kingdom of Mallorca under Jaume I’s heirs, before the Crown of Aragon reabsorbed it.

Corsairs and the British century

The 16th and 17th centuries were dominated by Barbary corsair raids, and the response is still visible: coastal watchtowers on every island and inland villages built defensively. Menorca’s deep harbour at Maó then made it a prize in a bigger game: Spain ceded the island to Britain in the 1713 Peace of Utrecht, the Royal Navy made Maó a Mediterranean base, and apart from French and Spanish interludes the British held it until the Treaty of Amiens returned it to Spain in 1802. The British left sash windows, a gin-distilling tradition and a lasting Anglophile streak in Maó.

Romantics, package tours and DJs

Mallorca’s tourism began with 19th-century romantics: Chopin and George Sand wintered at the charterhouse of Valldemossa in 1838 to 1839, and Sand’s book about it is still sold all over the island. The poet Robert Graves settled in Deià, returned after the Second World War and stayed until his death; his house is now a museum, and the village drew writers and musicians for decades after. Mass tourism arrived in the 1950s to 1970s, when the Franco regime sold Spain as cheap sun and the first hotel walls went up at Magaluf and S’Arenal. Ibiza’s counterculture arrived in the same decades, hippies first, then clubs: of the venues founded in the 1970s, Pacha, Amnesia and Es Paradís are still operating.

Autonomy and the crowd question

The Balearics received their Statute of Autonomy in 1983, and the economy has run on tourism and property ever since. Overtourism is now the dominant political issue: housing costs for residents, water supply, pressure on protected coasts. The responses are concrete rather than rhetorical: a sustainable tourism tax on every overnight stay, a summer vehicle permit on Formentera, and a Mallorcan law to cap the number of vehicles entering the island, approved by the island council in 2026 and expected to bite from around 2027. Expect more rules of this kind, not fewer.

See & do

Mallorca beyond Palma

Palma deserves its own days and has its own guide; the short version is a Gothic seafront cathedral (La Seu) and a circular hilltop fortress (Bellver Castle) bracketing a dense old town. The rest of the island splits into four zones worth planning around.

The Serra de Tramuntana is the headline. Valldemossa has the Carthusian monastery of the Chopin winter; Deià is the Graves village, small, steep and expensive; Sóller sits in a citrus valley and is reached from Palma on a wooden narrow-gauge train running since 1912, with a 1913 tram rolling on down to Port de Sóller. Fornalutx, above Sóller, is the stone-built village of the postcards. Walkers get the GR-221, the Ruta de Pedra en Sec (dry stone route): the main line runs 150 km from Port d’Andratx to Port de Pollença in nine stages, within a signposted network of 261 km, with mountain refuges along the way.

At the island’s northern tip, a 13.5 km road built in 1925 by the engineer Antonio Parietti winds from Port de Pollença out to the Formentor lighthouse of 1863, past the Mirador des Colomer viewpoint. Access by private car has been restricted in recent summers, with buses running from Port de Pollença instead; check locally before driving out.

The east coast is cave-and-cove country: the Coves del Drac near Porto Cristo stage their famous concert on an underground lake, and the shoreline from Cala d’Or up to Cala Millor is the family-resort standard, with the protected coves of Mondragó natural park the prettier alternative. To the north, Alcúdia keeps a walled medieval town (the walls went up between 1298 and 1362, and you can walk most of the circuit) with the Roman ruins of Pollentia just outside them. Inland, the Pla is market-town Mallorca; Sineu’s Wednesday market is the best known.

Menorca

Maó and Ciutadella bracket the island, 45 minutes apart by road, and are covered under towns below. Between and around them the draws are prehistoric and coastal. The Talaiotic sites are genuinely impressive and mostly uncrowded: Naveta des Tudons, the taula sanctuary of Torralba d’en Salord, Talatí de Dalt and Trepucó.

The Camí de Cavalls (GR-223) circles the entire coast: 186 km in 20 stages of 5 to 14 km each, an old military patrol path that once linked the coastal watchtowers, restored for public access with the second phase finished in 2011. Day walkers use it to reach beaches that cars cannot: Cala Macarella and Macarelleta, Cala Mitjana and the red-sand northern coves like Cala Pregonda. Son Bou is the long sandy option for families.

Ibiza

Dalt Vila, the walled upper town of Ibiza Town, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1999 together with the Puig des Molins Phoenician necropolis and the Posidonia meadows offshore; the 16th-century Italian-engineered walls are intact and the climb to the cathedral at the top is the essential Ibiza Town hour. Below the walls, the old fishermen’s quarter of Sa Penya and the Marina run hot on summer nights.

The club season runs from opening parties in late spring to closing events around mid-October, concentrated between Platja d’en Bossa, the Sant Antoni road and the two towns themselves. Marquee nights are expensive; budget accordingly or come in October when the island exhales.

Away from the coast the island is pine forest and whitewashed churches (Santa Agnès, Sant Mateu, Santa Eulària’s hilltop Puig de Missa). Off the southwestern cliffs, the limestone islet of Es Vedrà rises 413 metres straight from the sea inside the Cala d’Hort nature reserve, trailing legends that go back to the Phoenician goddess Tanit. The hippy era survives in the markets: the Wednesday market at Punta Arabí by Es Canar has run since the 1960s settlers started selling their handicrafts.

Formentera

The fourth island is a day trip that deserves a night. Ses Illetes, on the northern spit, is the beach the photographs are of; Migjorn runs the length of the south coast, and Cala Saona faces the sunset on the west. The island is 19 km long and mostly flat, so bicycles are the natural transport from the ferry port at La Savina. At the ends stand the lighthouses, including Cap de Barbaria’s, reached across an empty limestone plateau.

Cabrera

The Cabrera archipelago, south of Mallorca, has been a national park since 1991, extended in 2019, and visitor numbers are capped; day boats run from Colònia de Sant Jordi. Book ahead in summer; the reward is a Balearic coast as it looked before hotels.

Towns & cities

Palma

Palma is the capital and the only real city in the islands, home to around 438,000 people, with the cathedral, the Almudaina palace and a dense Gothic old town; it has a full city guide of its own. Use it as a base for the west of Mallorca or as a two-day city break in its own right; it stays fully open in winter when much of the archipelago shuts.

Sóller and Port de Sóller

Sóller is a citrus-valley town under the Tramuntana’s highest peaks, still linked to Palma by the 1912 wooden train and to its own port by the 1913 tram. The port curls around a nearly closed bay, one of the few natural harbours on that harsh coast.

Valldemossa

Valldemossa is a stone mountain village built around the Carthusian monastery where Chopin and George Sand spent the winter of 1838 to 1839. It photographs beautifully and fills with coaches by mid-morning; come early or late.

Deià

Deià, ten minutes further along the coast road, had 741 residents at the last count and a century of literary residents, Robert Graves above all; his house is now a museum and he is buried in the hillside cemetery.

Pollença and Port de Pollença

Pollença is a proper northern town rather than a resort, with the Calvari chapel stairway climbing straight out of the main square and a serious Holy Week. Port de Pollença, on its wide bay, is the genteel beach annex and the trailhead for the Formentor road.

Alcúdia

Alcúdia packs a walled 14th-century old town, the Roman ruins of Pollentia and a 21,000-strong municipality behind one of the island’s longest beach bays; the sands of Port d’Alcúdia run for kilometres towards Ca’n Picafort.

Manacor and Inca

Manacor, inland Mallorca’s second town, is furniture, artificial pearls and Rafa Nadal’s home town, with the Coves del Drac on its coast. Inca is the leather town, with a big Thursday market and the Dijous Bo fair each November. Neither is pretty in the postcard sense; both are useful for seeing what Mallorca does when it isn’t hosting anyone.

Calvià’s resorts

Calvià municipality strings the southwestern resorts together: Magaluf and Palmanova for the British package market, Santa Ponsa and Peguera for a quieter, partly German crowd. Beaches are good, character is thin; day-trip in for the sand rather than staying if resort life isn’t the point of your trip.

Maó (Mahón)

Maó is Menorca’s capital, set on the deep natural harbour that made it the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean base through most of the 18th century; the British century still shows in the sash windows and the gin. A harbour boat trip past the old fortifications is the best orientation on the island.

Ciutadella de Menorca

Ciutadella, the island’s capital until 1722, kept the palaces, the Catalan-Gothic cathedral and the small fishing port when the British moved the administration to Maó, and it remains the more atmospheric of the two. The evening walk from the Plaça des Born down to the port is Menorca at its best.

Ibiza Town (Eivissa)

Ibiza Town, population around 52,000, stacks the walled Dalt Vila above the harbour quarters of Sa Penya and the Marina. It manages to be both a UNESCO site and a nightlife capital without either half feeling fake, which is a rarer trick than it sounds.

Sant Antoni de Portmany

Sant Antoni, on the west coast with around 28,500 residents, is the young package-holiday and pre-club town; its western rocks face the sunset, which built an entire bar economy. Not the Ibiza for a quiet family week; exactly the Ibiza for the other thing.

Santa Eulària des Riu

Santa Eulària, the third Ibizan town with about 41,600 people in its municipality, is the family-friendly counterweight, with the fortified hilltop church of Puig de Missa above the town.

Sant Francesc Xavier

Sant Francesc is Formentera’s little capital, a low village around a white fortified church, with the island’s shops and services; the harbour and most arrivals are at La Savina, and Es Pujols is the one resort.

Food & drink

Balearic cooking splits three ways: a Mallorcan kitchen built on pork, lard and vegetables from the interior; a Menorcan one shaped by dairy, lobster and a British interlude; and an Ibizan-Formenteran one that leans hard on fish. What the islands share is a paprika-red sausage and a spiral pastry that between them anchor the whole food identity.

Sobrassada is the signature: a soft, raw-cured pork sausage loaded with sweet paprika, spread cold on bread or warmed until it melts, with IGP protection as Sobrassada de Mallorca and a superior black-pig version from the native porc negre. It appears on pa amb oli, the everyday Balearic plate of dense brown bread, ripe ramellet tomato, olive oil and a topping, and in half the island’s traditional recipes.

The ensaïmada is the other flagship: yeasted dough laminated with pork lard (saïm), coiled flat, baked and dusted with icing sugar, from breakfast-sized rolls to the giant boxed spirals that fly home as gifts; it too carries an IGP.

The Mallorcan savoury repertoire is inland food: tumbet, the late-summer bake of fried potato, aubergine and red pepper under tomato sauce; frit mallorquí, an offal-and-vegetable fry that migrated from poverty dish to taberna favourite; and slow-roast suckling pig for celebrations.

Menorca eats differently. Caldereta de llagosta, the spiny-lobster stew of the northern fishing village of Fornells, is the island’s famous dish, priced by weight and never cheap. Maó cheese, DOP-protected as Queso Mahón-Menorca, comes young and soft (tendre) or aged, firm and orange-rinded (curat). The British century left gin: Xoriguer, distilled in Maó, drunk straight or lengthened with lemonade into a pomada, the default fiesta drink.

Ibiza and Formentera cook from the sea. Bullit de peix is the two-act fisherman’s lunch: boiled rockfish with potatoes first, then rice cooked in the same stock. Sofrit pagès is the winter counterweight, a slow stew of chicken, lamb and sausage. The sweet endings are flaó, a cheese-and-mint tart tied to Easter, and greixonera, a pudding baked from leftover ensaïmadas. Hierbas, the local aniseed-and-herb liqueur, closes meals across both islands.

Wine is small but real. DO Binissalem, inland Mallorca, is the historic appellation, built on the native Manto Negro and Callet reds and Prensal Blanc whites. DO Pla i Llevant covers eastern Mallorca with a similar grape mix, and island-level Vi de la Terra labels cover the rest. Quality has climbed steadily since the 2000s, and the better bottles rarely leave the islands, which is a reason to drink them here.

Nature

The Balearics compress an unusual amount of landscape into a small archipelago, and the protected share keeps growing: a UNESCO mountain range, a whole-island biosphere reserve, a marine national park and some of the Mediterranean’s most important seagrass meadows.

The Serra de Tramuntana is the big terrain. Puig Major, the summit at 1,436 metres, wears a military radar station, so the highest walkable point is Puig de Massanella at 1,364 metres; the UNESCO listing of 2011 covers 30,745 hectares of terraced, dry-stone cultural landscape. Black vultures patrol the ridgelines, the range holds 25 endemic plant species, and the Mallorcan midwife toad, a Tramuntana endemic once thought extinct, hangs on in the high canyons after a reintroduction programme.

S’Albufera de Mallorca, behind the dunes of the northern bay near Platja de Muro, is the largest wetland in the Balearics at around 1,708 hectares, an old lagoon turned reedbed and the archipelago’s best birdwatching by a distance. In the southeast, Mondragó natural park protects a short stretch of cove coastline, pine and scrub that shows what the resort coast looked like first.

Cabrera, the scatter of islets south of Mallorca, became a national park in 1991 and was extended in 2019 into one of the western Mediterranean’s largest marine protected areas; landings are capped, which keeps the snorkelling extraordinary.

Menorca is a geology lesson in two halves: a dark, older, slate-and-quartzite north with red-sand coves, and a pale Miocene limestone south cut by wooded ravines that end in the famous white-sand calas. UNESCO recognised the whole island as a Biosphere Reserve in 1993, the first such designation in the Balearics. The Camí de Cavalls coastal path is the way to read that geology on foot, one cove at a time.

Between Ibiza and Formentera, the ses Salines natural park spans working salt pans and the strait’s Posidonia oceanica meadows, part of the 1999 UNESCO listing; Posidonia clones here rank among the oldest living organisms known, with one plant dated at around 100,000 years. The meadows are why the water over Formentera’s sand looks the way it does: the seagrass traps sediment and keeps it clear.

Es Vedrà, the 413-metre islet off southwestern Ibiza, is a nature reserve in its own right, home to a colony of Eleonora’s falcons and its own wall-lizard subspecies; the resident goats were removed in 2016 to protect the vegetation. Offshore cliffs across the archipelago also shelter breeding Balearic shearwaters, a globally threatened seabird, and dolphins are a routine sight from the inter-island ferries.

Climate

The pattern is western-Mediterranean and dependable: hot dry summers, mild damp winters, with the rain concentrated in autumn. Palma averages a daily maximum of 21.8°C across the year and about 449 mm of rain; Menorca is the wet island at 546 mm, and Formentera the dry one, semi-arid at roughly 370 to 420 mm. July and August bring long stretches above 30°C, and heatwaves pushing well past that have become a normal feature of high summer.

The sea lags the air by a season. It is cold into May, becomes properly comfortable in late June, peaks in August and early September, and stays swimmable well into October; September is quietly the best beach month, warm water and thinning crowds.

Wind is the variable the mainland forecast misses. The tramuntana, the cold north wind, batters the archipelago in winter and gives Menorca’s north coast its stripped, treeless look. Summer afternoons bring reliable sea breezes instead, which is one reason the islands rank among the Mediterranean’s main sailing grounds.

Altitude changes everything on Mallorca. The high Tramuntana runs several degrees cooler than Palma in summer, useful for walking on hot days, and snow settles on the peaks in some winters. Plan mountain walking for spring and autumn regardless: summer heat on the exposed limestone stages is genuinely punishing.

When to go

April to mid-June is the connoisseur’s window. The GR-221 and the Camí de Cavalls are at their best, the Tramuntana is green and flowering, the sea is warming from bracing to acceptable, and towns are open but not full. Easter week is the one busy patch, and Ciutadella’s Sant Joan festival in the last week of June marks the real start of high season on Menorca.

Mid-June to early September is peak: everything open, everything full, everything at maximum price. It is the only time for guaranteed hot beach weather, and the worst time for spontaneity; book accommodation, vehicle-carrying ferry slots and hire cars months ahead, especially for the mid-July to mid-August core. The islands’ patron-saint fiestas cluster in these months, sea processions in the ports in July and town festivals through August.

Mid-September to October is the second sweet spot: the warmest swimming of the year early on, perfect walking weather later, the Binissalem area’s grape harvest, and Mallorca’s own day, the Diada, marking Jaume I’s 1229 landing each 12 September.

November to March is the closed season everywhere except Palma and, partially, the bigger Mallorcan towns. Much of Menorca and almost all of Formentera shutters; flight schedules shrink to a fraction of summer’s. The compensations are real: empty trails in mild weeks, almond blossom across the Mallorcan plain late in winter, and the January bonfire festivals of Sant Antoni and Palma’s Sant Sebastià, which belong to residents rather than visitors and are better for it.

Getting there

Three commercial airports serve the islands. Palma (PMI) is one of Spain’s busiest, handling on the order of 30 million passengers in peak years, with direct flights from most of Europe. Ibiza (IBZ) and Menorca (MAH) are heavily seasonal: dense European route maps from May to October, then a skeleton of mainland-Spain connections through winter. Formentera has no airport; you fly to Ibiza and take the boat.

Ferries are the other half of the system, run mainly by Baleària, Trasmed and GNV from Barcelona, Valencia and Dénia. To Mallorca: Barcelona to Palma takes 7 to 8.5 hours (usually overnight), a fast service to Alcúdia does it in 3.5, Valencia to Palma runs 7 to 9.5 hours and Dénia to Palma about 5. Overnight boats with a cabin are a genuinely pleasant way to arrive with a car.

To Menorca, Barcelona serves both ports: around 8 to 9 hours into Maó, or 3.5 hours on the fast boat into Ciutadella. To Ibiza, Barcelona takes 8 to 9.5 hours, Valencia 5 to 6.75, and Dénia is the quick way in at 2.25 to 3.25 hours. Corsica Ferries adds a seasonal Toulon to Alcúdia link from France between April and November.

Between the islands, ferries do the work: Palma to Ibiza in 2.25 to 4 hours, the one-hour Alcúdia to Ciutadella crossing linking Mallorca and Menorca, a weekly Palma to Maó sailing, and the Ibiza to Formentera shuttle, more than 40 departures a day in season, taking about half an hour. Short inter-island flights also connect the three airports for those tight on time.

Getting around

Mallorca is the only island with real public transport. TIB (Transport de les Illes Balears) runs an integrated network of interurban buses, trains and Palma’s metro on a single stored-value card, alongside Palma’s EMT city buses. The railway runs inland from Palma towards Inca, Sa Pobla and Manacor; the seaside branch is the separate, tourist-priced but genuinely lovely 1912 wooden train over the mountains to Sóller.

A hire car is still the default for the Tramuntana villages and the remoter coves, with a caveat: the Ma-10 mountain road is narrow, spectacular and shared with an endless stream of road cyclists, for whom Mallorca is a major training destination. Drive it patiently or take the bus. Summer parking at the famous coves fills by mid-morning; the bus-and-walk combination increasingly beats driving to the beach.

Menorca is car country: distances are short, but buses beyond the Maó-Ciutadella spine and the summer beach lines are sparse. In July and August, park-and-walk or bus access applies at the most popular southern coves, Macarella above all; check current arrangements rather than driving to the cove and hoping.

Ibiza works with a mix of buses between the towns and beaches, licensed taxis and hire cars or scooters; ride-hailing apps are effectively absent, so plan around taxis and the night buses in club season. The inland roads are twisty and slow, which is part of their point.

Formentera is best done on two wheels: the island is 19 km long and mostly flat, and bikes and scooters rent by the day at La Savina. Bringing or hiring a car means dealing with the summer vehicle permit, covered under practical information; the honest answer is that a car is rarely worth it here.

Practical info

For Spain-wide basics (currency, plugs, tipping, holidays, entry rules) see the Spain country guide; everything below is Balearic-specific.

The tax applies to every overnight stay, hotels and holiday rentals alike; under-16s are exempt, and from the ninth night in the same establishment the rate halves. Winter rates are a fraction of summer ones.

Vehicle rules are tightening across the archipelago. Formentera requires an entry authorisation for incoming vehicles from 1 June to 30 September under its 2019 sustainability law; apply at formentera.eco before bringing any vehicle over, and note that locally hired bikes and scooters sidestep the issue entirely. Mallorca’s own law capping vehicle entries has been approved by the island council and is expected in force around 2027, with fines of €300 to €30,000 planned for breaches; if a future trip involves shipping a car over, check the current rules when booking.

On the water, the Posidonia seagrass meadows are legally protected, and anchoring on them is banned in the protected zones between Ibiza and Formentera and in many Mallorcan coves; charterers get mooring-buoy maps with the boat, and fines for anchoring on seagrass are enforced.

Catalan is co-official and its island varieties are the local speech; signage runs Catalan-first outside the resort zones, so it helps to know that Maó, Eivissa and Ciutadella are the names you will see on road signs. Spanish works everywhere, English almost everywhere touristed. A bon dia costs nothing and lands well.

Summer beach access is managed at the pressure points: the Formentor road has been closed to private cars in recent high seasons with buses substituting, and the Macarella coves on Menorca restrict parking. As a rule, if a beach is famous, assume you cannot simply drive to it in August and check the current access arrangement first.

Health basics: 112 is the emergency number throughout, each of the four islands has a public hospital, and summer heat is the main routine hazard, so carry water and treat midday beach hours with respect. Jellyfish appear some weeks in late summer; local flags and pharmacies handle it. In Ibiza’s club scene, remember that drug possession remains illegal in Spain and plain-clothes policing around the clubs is standard.

The islands are relaxed places by disposition. Ibiza in particular is one of Europe’s most LGBTQ-friendly destinations, and same-sex couples will find the whole archipelago unremarkable territory; the club coast keeps different hours from the fishing villages, and the two coexist by mostly ignoring each other, which after fifty years of practice they do very well.