Labour of love: Ibiza's heritage craft revival

‘I didn’t know that I would make instruments. I didn’t know that I would make things at all. All of this that you see, these are just solutions for making things better. With the help of God, anything is possible.’ Pere Vergés Coma is referring to the homemade string instrument that rests upon his lap, and in particular to the curving sheep’s horn that holds it upright on his knee. The instrument is hewn from some unrecognisable wood, polished like mahogany, as seamless as a turtle’s shell. Vergés curls over the instrument, poised and cat-like, and begins to pluck. The note that comes forth is primal yet psychedelic, at once wrought from the belly of the earth yet not of this world at all. The finca walls resonate with sound. A shaft of sunlight falls through the window, illuminating dust motes in the near blackness. A goat bleats. Time stands still.

Pere Vergés is something of an enigma in Ibiza. A lone wolf living in the wild hills above Santa Inés, he has spent the last 40 years carving out the type of existence virtually unchanged since the time of the industrial revolution. His home, a crumbling, whitewashed finca on a remote promontory overlooking a wooded valley, is an intact repository of living history. Candles flicker in the gloomy interior, sheepskins are tossed over rudimentary wooden furniture, tools and hats hang from hooks high on the stucco walls. It is in the finca and its adjoining workshop that Vergés creates his instruments, an assortment of stringed, woodwind and percussion pieces made entirely by hand using materials found in nature. ‘I discovered a new way to make a string instrument when I saw the carcass of a pita (agave) outside the house. When hollowed out, the heart of the plant is rigid yet ultra-lightweight, with beautiful acoustics.’

Vergés was no latecomer to instruments. Upon arriving in Ibiza as a young man he was taught to reskin drums by Yaron Marko, an elder of Ibiza’s musical community. Vergés went on to work with a Ghanaian drum maker and soon became known for his deft way with the traditional goatskin. Ibiza has a colourful history with instrument making – influenced in no small part by the legacy of the Arabic occupation – and the island is famed for pine and skin trumpet drums, flutes made from chestnut, juniper castanets, and cane woodwind pieces. While instruments are his art, Vergés is one of a dwindling generation of countrymen whose hand can be turned to anything. His finca – one of the island’s most untouched – has been maintained using entirely traditional methods, from the posidonia and earthen roofs to the limewashed walls. Water is drawn from a well and gathered in rainwater runoff from a vast threshing circle. The ‘filter’ is a handful of dried thyme. ‘These houses came from the earth, and they were made to go back into it,’ Vergés says ruefully. ‘People will always try to modernise but that is not the right way for this island. Perhaps I am a relic. But all we have is this moment.’

Ibiza’s history of craftsmanship goes back to its very earliest inhabitants. Phoenician ruins at Sa Caleta dating back to 650BC prove that - along with a village layout of relative sophistication - these seafaring traders engaged in crafts such as weaving and metalworking. The drystone walls uncovered at Sa Caleta were built using methods virtually unchanged to this day. The Frenchman known simply as Ricardo, who lives on a hillside near the Font d’Atzaró, has been building this way for decades. Ricardo arrived in Ibiza in the autumn of 1970. ‘A friend and I were hitchhiking from France to Morocco. But we ran out of lifts, so my friend – who was Spanish – suggested we head to Ibiza.’ Ricardo trained as an architect and has an eye for beauty in form. He fell into stonemasonry and has ended up with a career as one of Ibiza’s most sought-after artisans. ‘The sound of the stones breaking is like music. I cut them all with straight edges so that they will fit tightly, like a jigsaw puzzle. It’s the artist part of me, I cannot change that. Art is not on the outside; it is something inside your soul.’ 

In Ibiza there are few crafts which began as solely art. Almost all had a purpose beyond their visual appeal. Ceramics, along with esparto weaving, are perhaps the oldest of Ibiza’s heritage crafts. Amphorae – curvaceous earthenware vessels for transporting oil, olives and wine – have been made on the island for over 2000 years. Amphorae made in Ibiza in around 300BC have been dredged from the waters off Denia, and it is widely agreed that under Roman rule the island became a major exporter of all things ceramic. When Toni Marí ‘Frigoles’ began work as a potter’s apprentice it was 1945. He was 11 years old and worked in a factory that produced water pipes, gutters and pots for domestic and agricultural use. During the busiest part of the farming season, the factory turned out over 1000 cadufos – vessels for waterwheels – every week. In the 1960s, when the mass production of plastic aligned with Ibiza’s first major tourism boom, the outlook for the island’s traditional ceramicists changed dramatically. ‘We were factory men before the tourists arrived,’ explains Frigoles from a clay-covered seat in his taller, an overflowing workshop where everything is coated in a thick layer of dust. ‘But suddenly plastic was everywhere - lighter, cheaper, virtually unbreakable. It could have been the end for us, but tourism turned us into artists.’ Soon Frigoles and his contemporaries were turning out an endless stream of artisan knick-knacks for visitors – miniature statues of Ibiza’s goddess Tanit, replica Phoenician effigies and souvenir plates. ‘It was an exciting time,’ Frigoles smiles. ‘The night markets were busy, the island was full, and it felt like the whole world was noticing Ibiza.’ Frigoles shows me a tatty issue of the cult Spanish magazine Blanco y Negro. Dated 1973, it shows the potter as a young man, tanned, lean, deftly throwing clay in front of the crowds. Frigoles still works clay when he feels up to it, but at 89 years old I suspect its more for comfort than for commerce. It is his daughter, María José, who has taken the active reins of the company, and it is now her work that is piling up on the shelves in the workshop. She experiments with glazes and moulds, turning the minerally, iron-coloured earth in her hands. One of a new generation of Ibiza’s craftspeople, she feels a responsibility to uphold the island’s traditions.

On a hillside near Es Cubells, Vicent Marí Serra ‘Palermet’ bears a similar responsibility. Palermet learnt his skills at the knee of his paternal grandfather, Pep Palermet, who in 1962 was the last quarryman at Sa Pedrera de Cala d’Hort, now commonly known as Atlantis. Pep was a master esparto weaver, a craft which can be traced back in one form or another to paleolithic times. Esparto is a wild grass which grows in great quantities on Illa de S’Espartar, an uninhabited islet off Ibiza’s southwest coast. To be processed successfully, the grass must be harvested in June then allowed to dry in the sun. When dry it is then soaked for around 30 days in the sea, allowing a natural fermentation process to occur which strips away the tough outer fibres. Only when the fibres have been softened can they be braided into the 13-strand plait that is needed to create the foundation of baskets, espardenye (espadrille) soles, panniers, rugs and agricultural equipment. It is time-consuming work, both in terms of learning and creating. ‘It might take me 15 hours to make that basket,’ Palermet tells me, pointing at a small, lidded structure. ‘Would you pay €200 for it? The time we need to create things the proper way is no longer economically viable. So, we must do it deliberately to preserve the knowledge.’ At Sa Rota d’en Coca, a heritage finca near Santa Inés, Toni Boned still builds kilns for smelting limestone and burning charcoal. He also distils pine resin, a waterproofing agent for shoes, but also – even more obscurely – used historically to coat the oversized straw hats worn by salt harvesters at Las Salinas. The resin glaze prevented the salt carried on the heads of the salinéros from leaching through their hats and causing disfigurements. Boned shares his skills with visitors and with the younger generations of Ibicenco schoolchildren. ‘These are the traditions of our fathers, our uncles, our grandfathers,' he says softly. 'They are as much a part of our heritage as our language. Our culture is fragile, and our fathers are old now. It is up to us to keep the fires alight.’