A couple of days before, I’d run the Santa Eulàlia promenade in roughly the state you’d expect after Sarah’s fiftieth birthday celebrations. Headphones in, shuffling along the seafront, holding it together by the thinnest of margins. It counts. It always counts.
This was the other Ibiza.
I set out early, while the air was still cool and the light was doing something beautiful over the bay. The plan — if you could call it that — was to loop around the hill that sits behind Santa Eulàlia. The mound. Big, green, unmistakable from the waterfront. I’d been looking at it all week.
Out through the town
Santa Eulàlia des Riu. The name on the wall as you leave.
The first stretch was straightforward — residential streets, red brick pavements, white walls catching the early sun. Santa Eulàlia is a proper town. Not a resort in the way that the west of the island can feel. People live here, work here, bring their kids up here. I passed a small group of children heading to school somewhere in the village stretch, backpacks on, completely unbothered by the sweating Englishman running past them. A normal Tuesday morning for everyone except me.
Into the countryside
The open road. Pine trees, hills, and no one else around.
Once you clear the edge of town, Ibiza does something unexpected. It goes quiet. Properly quiet. The road stretches ahead through pine trees, the hills rising to the left, and the noise of the island — all of it — just stops. I had music in but I turned it down. You don’t need it out here.
Red dirt tracks through the trees. This is where the legs woke up.
The terrain shifts as you work around the base of the mound. Red dirt tracks replace the tarmac in places. The soil here is extraordinary — a deep, burnt terracotta that looks almost unreal in the early morning light, like someone turned up the saturation on a photograph. Everything is vivid. The greens too bright, the sky too blue. October in Ibiza, it turns out, is something else entirely.
Ploughed fields, white fincas, hills. The interior of the island looks like this.
The farmland loop took me past orchards and ploughed fields and the occasional finca sitting back from the road. No fences, no footpaths, just a lane and whatever was growing either side of it. I ran through a couple of villages — or the edges of them — the kind where you blink and you’re through.
The bird
Orchards and open land. Somewhere above this, a very large bird was making me stop running.
At some point on the western side of the loop, something large and slow moved overhead. A bird of prey — I think a red kite, though I’m no ornithologist — circling on a thermal above the trees. I stopped. Just stood there with my hands on my knees and watched it turn lazy circles against the blue for longer than I should have. It didn’t seem remotely interested in me. I found that reassuring.
Running resumed. Pace did not.
Red earth and scrub. The colours on this side of the island stayed with me.
The hills catch you on the northern stretch. Nothing brutal — this isn’t a mountain run — but enough to take the edge off any smugness you’d built up on the flat. The views open up as the ground rises. Green hills in every direction, the hint of the sea behind you. For a few minutes it feels like you could be anywhere in the Mediterranean. A proper island interior. Nothing that matches the postcard version of Ibiza at all.
Back to the water
The bay on the way back in. The sun doing what the sun does out here.
The last mile or so brings you back down towards the coast and the town reassembles around you — the road sign, the traffic, the sound of the sea. I came in along the waterfront, the mound sitting behind me now across the bay, and stood for a moment looking back at it.
5.64 miles. 46 minutes. 295 feet of climbing. Headphones on, pace uneven, one extended ornithological pause.
The right run on the right morning.
Back into Santa Eulàlia. The 50km/h sign means town again.