The night before, we’d been at Chinois. Franky Wah was playing his SHEN residency — Sarah has a thing for Mr. Wah — and cocktails had started somewhere around mid-afternoon. Three couples, Sarah’s 50th, Ibiza in late September. It was exactly as good as it sounds.
At 8:48 the next morning, I laced up and went for a run.
I want to be clear that this was not a sensible decision. My head had opinions about the whole idea. My legs were still somewhere back at the bar. But there’s something about waking up on an island with that much coastline outside the window — a September morning, the light already doing things — that makes the alternative, lying in a dark room, feel like a genuine waste.
So. Trainers on. Out the door. Down to the water.
The morning light over the Mediterranean from the rocks at Santa Eulària. October 1st. 8:48am.
The coast road, and off it
The route east from Santa Eulària looks straightforward on a map. On the ground, between a hangover and an Ibizan coastline that has no interest in being straightforward, it is something else entirely.
The path drops off the road and onto rocks almost immediately. Red sandstone, scrub pine, stone steps cut into the cliff above the water — the kind of coastal path that demands you pay attention, which is not always easy when your brain is still partially in a cocktail glass. The sea was flat and silver. The sun was already loud. I stopped more than once just to look at it, which I am choosing to count as strategic recovery rather than stopping.
The coastal path south of Santa Eulària. Stone steps, Mediterranean scrub, and a sea that has absolutely no sympathy for your hangover.
There are coves along this stretch that most people on this island never see, because most people on this island are not running along the cliff at nine in the morning with a head full of regret and a Strava app running. Small fishing harbours where boats sit on perfectly still water under pine trees. Inlets that feel genuinely secret — the kind of place you stumble on and immediately want to keep to yourself.
One of the coves between Santa Eulària and Es Canar. Boats, trees, nobody there. Just the water.
The coves
Every couple of kilometres the path would open out onto another small beach or bay — some with hotels behind them, palm trees, the infrastructure of Ibiza tourism just waking up for the day. The umbrellas still folded. The pedalos stacked. A lone figure on a wooden jetty doing whatever lone figures on wooden jetties do at 9am. I ran through all of it, or around it, or in one or two cases straight through the grounds of somewhere that probably expected guests rather than a sweating Englishman in running kit.
A wooden jetty on the approach to Es Canar. Somebody had the right idea.
The fishing boats were the detail that kept stopping me. Every cove had them — small, practical, not performing for anyone — moored in clusters in the shallow water, the Ibiza hills behind them. This is the version of the island that doesn’t make the posters.
Fishing boats at anchor, somewhere between Santa Eulàra and Es Canar. The hills behind. The other Ibiza.
Es Canar
The Hippy Market at Punta Arabí was closed and quiet when I ran past it, the entrance still in morning shadow, a banner advertising Wednesdays. I noted this for later — we would come back — and carried on to the beach at Es Canar.
The Hippy Market at Punta Arabí. Every Wednesday. Not today.
Es Canar is where the run changed shape. The beach was already warm, umbrellas going up, the bay a flat impossible blue. I stood at the far end and looked back down the coast I’d just run, and did the maths. Six-and-a-half miles. Hangover still present but negotiating. Sun getting serious.
The direct road back to Santa Eulària was the obvious call. I took it.
Es Canar beach at the turnaround. The umbrellas going up. The sun meaning business.
What actually happened
This was Sarah’s 50th birthday trip. Ibiza had been her place once — she’d worked here, lived here, known it before it became what it’s become. Coming back was loaded with that. The three of us who’d spent the previous night dancing to Franky Wah were all somewhere between nostalgic and wide awake to the fact that the island had moved on from what it was. Expensive where it used to be free. Polished where it used to be rough.
And somewhere in that — in the conversations over that week, in the particular quality of the late September light on the water, in standing on a coastline that beautiful at nine in the morning and feeling it properly rather than from a sun lounger — something shifted. Not a decision exactly. More like a direction becoming clearer.
We got back to England and I started putting things in motion. Italy was already the idea. After this week it started becoming the plan.
The bay at Es Canar on the run back. Flat water. Islands on the horizon. Head clearing.
