CAUGHT between the SAND and the SKY

It was the early 1980s when the legendary Spanish photographer Alberto García-Alix discovered Formentera. Born inLéon in 1956, he would become the latest in a long line of photographers, artists and writers to lose their hearts and minds to a 20-kilometre sliver of sand whose magnetic, mercurial appeal is still impossible to define. García-Alixwould go on to develop a profound connection with the smallest and most southernly of the Balearic Islands, culminating in his mythical black-and-white photography book, Lo Más Cerca que Estuve del Paraíso (The Closest I Have Been to Paradise). The book – which would go on to win Spain’s National Photography Prize in 2019 - captures atmospheric and often intimate portraits of island life, shedding light on the eclectic and artistic cast of characters who’ve washed upon Formentera’s shores. ‘It was life, those more than twenty years that stretch like an accordion before my eyes and reveal themselves’, recalls García-Alix. ‘That symphony of wind and water... waves from which to see the echo of other summers. An infinite summer. I will always return to Formentera as a prodigal son.

Formentera is that rare thing. An island that promises nothing yet gives everything. Where long-haired, nut-brown hippies ride bicycles threaded with decades of colourful ribbons. Where sun-baked toddlers doze sleepily among baskets of ripe tomatoes and cheese. Where scrawny, snake-hipped sheep cluster beneath the precious shade of fig trees. Amid its full-bodied and bountiful Balearic neighbours, Formentera is pared-back and primitive, a mere slip of an island just one kilometre wide at its narrowest point, honed by four wild winds - the Tramuntana, the Migjorn, the Llevant and the Ponent - and many thousands of years of shifting tides. It is adry, febrile land of harsh elements, of inhospitable geography, of failed conquests and of hard-won freedom. It is an islandas yet untamed.

I have been visiting Formentera since my late teens. We’d arrive on the first morning ferry from Ibiza, unruly gaggles of conker-brown club kids, straight from the dancefloor at Pacha. Clutching overflowing baskets of bread and wine, we’d navigate the itty-bitty coastal path that hugs the ancient salt flats between La Savina and Playa Illetes, and spend our days supine on tie-dyed sarongs, smoking joints and kissing new-found lovers. Many years later, my now-husband and I would spend barefoot summers holed up in pared-back little beach bungalows; sun-struck, listless and mad with love. We had our honeymoon in the long-lost and much-missed Hotel Es Ram and our children took their first salty swims on Playa Migjorn. Last summer, all five of us set off at sunrise to walk the 13th-century Camí de Sa Pujada, a cobbled Roman road that links towering, breezy La Mola with the teeny harbour of Es Caló. Later, we sipped café con Leche as the wizened fishermen put-putted out to sea and our children swam, slippery as eels, from Es Caló’s crumbling,shell-strewn jetty. Formentera has always been our retreat, our refuge, the alter-ego to our busy, buzzy life on the ‘big’ island. But this narrative as an offshore escape has endured far longer than any memories of my own. In the early 1950s, when Ibiza had begun to develop a reputation as a countercultural Mediterranean backwater for the Beat Generation, Formentera was still the end of the world. But by the 1960s, word had got out that the diminutive island was even more of a haven of permissiveness than Ibiza.

Aubrey Powell, the British graphic designer famed for his work with Pink Floyd, was one of the first wave of long-haired arrivistes: ‘I first came to Formentera in 1965 with Dave Gilmour, and then the year afterwards with Syd Barrett. I stayed for months living like a hippie, and I just fell in love with it. It was difficult to get to. It was remote. But a lot of writers, painters and musicians gravitated there.’ Unlike in nearby Ibiza, where Franco’s postwar tourism boom concreted over pristine rural backwaters such as Cala San Vicente, Formentera’s environmental legislation shut down overdevelopment before it had even got off the ground. Today there is only one real “resort” – Es Pujols – a retro seaside town with its roots firmly in the 1980s. Elsewhere, Formentera is low-slung, low-rise, with a shimmering, sun-baked horizons crawled with sugar-cube houses whose sloping, pan-tiled roofs are a reminder that the architecture here has its roots in the island’s Roman heritage, rather than the Phoenicianforefathers of neighbouring Ibiza. Desiccated dry stone walls the colour of dried apricot kernels line the endless, dusty caminos. Blue-green sargantana lizards – all but vanished from Ibiza - slip into the restless shadows of Playa Migjorn’ssilvery boardwalk. Ancient, whitewashed churches - their sea-facing sides left unpainted, lest they be spotted from afar by pirates – offer cool tombs of shade in the brutal midday sun.