Formentera

I took the last ferry from Ibiza to Formentera on a Tuesday evening in late October, which meant arriving in the near-dark at La Savina port to an island that had mostly decided the season was over. The ferry terminal was closing. One taxi was waiting. The driver — a man of perhaps sixty who communicated primarily through glances at the rearview mirror — drove me to my finca in ten minutes on a road that seemed to have no turns and passed through a landscape of flat pine forest that was difficult to read at night. “Mañana,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the darkness outside, as if to suggest that what I was missing was the point.

He was right. The morning light on Formentera operates according to a different logic than the other Balearic islands. There are no mountains to interrupt it, no valleys to funnel it — it arrives across the flat pine landscape in sheets, modulated only by the particular quality of the sea on either side. The island is twelve kilometers long and, at its narrowest, a few hundred meters wide. On a bicycle, which is how most people navigate it, this narrowness means you are almost always within sight or sound of the sea. The salt lagoon — the Estany Pudent — runs along the center of the island, a shallow body of water that attracts flamingos in certain seasons and turns the light pink at dusk in a way that seems engineered for maximum effect.

Ses Illetes is the beach that gets the photographs, and the photographs are not lying. It is a narrow spit of white sand between the lagoon and the open sea, the water on the seaward side a shade of turquoise that registers as almost tropical, the clarity suggesting depths that turn out to be only a meter or two. In August it is crowded with boats anchored offshore and people who have made a pilgrimage from Ibiza. In October it was empty of everything except two couples who had clearly had the same idea I had, and we ignored each other respectfully and swam in water still warm from the summer that didn’t need a wet suit.

The lighthouse at La Mola, on the island’s eastern plateau, marks the cliff edge where Formentera drops into the sea. Jules Verne mentioned it in a novel, which has become a point of local pride proportional to an island that otherwise cultivates a fairly systematic indifference to what the outside world thinks of it. The road to La Mola climbs gently through almond trees and figs, and there is a Wednesday and Saturday market at the top where the island’s remaining hippy culture sells jewelry, preserved food, and hand-dyed cloth to an audience that has traveled up specifically for it.

The restaurants on Formentera operate in the knowledge that ingredients arrive by ferry and are therefore treated with the respect that scarcity and freshness command simultaneously. Grilled fish with olive oil and salt. Paella that takes forty-five minutes and doesn’t apologize. The local fig cake — a disc of compressed dried figs with anise — appears at every bar as an accompaniment to coffee or the local herbal liqueur. I ate it for breakfast on my last morning and thought: this is the correct way to close a stay on an island that has made restraint into a philosophy.

When to go: June and September through early October. The island in July and August is genuinely overrun — the beaches are mobbed, the restaurants have waiting lists, and Ses Illetes becomes a traffic problem solved primarily by banning cars nearby. September is near-perfect: warm sea, emptying beaches, and a ferry service that still runs regularly enough to make day trips from Ibiza practical.