Ibiza is no longer Ibiza

IbizaThere's a UC song that goes like this: "Ibiza is no longer Ibiza; / in Ibiza everything has changed: / we don't smoke cheap tobacco, / the fresh water has turned salty, / the dogs and the threshing floors sleep / and we speak in broken Spanish." (from the album Touch and re-touch, 1998).

Ido, with UC's permission, we'll go towards verse.

No leg, yes pills

Indeed, we don't smoke tobacco from the hoof. I remember as a child, in the center of Vila, seeing an old man go by on a moped smoking tobacco from the hoof; the moped was falling apart, the stench of the hoof announced its presence twenty meters away. Today he would be arrested for not wearing a helmet, not having a valid vehicle inspection certificate, and for some kind of environmental offense.

On the other hand, arrests for drug trafficking are not frequent in Ibiza, considering the enormous consumption during the season linked to nightlife and daytime activities. If we add up just the capacities of the main nightclubs in Ibiza –UNVRS, Ushuaïa, Pacha, Hï, and Amnesia–, the figure reaches 30,700 people; not counting the dozens of beach clubs and smaller rooms. These arrests often occur outside of the peak season. In October 2023, the Customs Surveillance Service intercepted three vans loaded with 8,300 kilos of hashish; they were driving along a road in San Juan de Labritja with almost no lights, after collecting the bales of drugs from a cove. It is the largest hashish seizure in the history of the Balearic Islands.

There is no data on drug seizures from the Ministry of the Interior broken down by island. Therefore, we must piece together the overall picture from specific, relevant news reports. Perhaps the most noteworthy one of 2025 was published in July. The New York Times with the following headline: 'Club Drugs Strain Health System on Ibiza, Spain's Party Island(Nightclub drugs strain the healthcare system of Ibiza, the Spanish party island). The news made headlines in national and international media and explains the workload of ambulance personnel during the summer. "Sometimes we make three or four trips in one night to the same nightclub," recounts one worker. "There are nightclubs we have to visit every night." The article concludes that the exorbitant prices of nightclubs have fueled the clubbers to consume pills, which are much cheaper, instead of alcohol.

Yes: the fresh water has turned salty

According to 2023 data, twelve of Ibiza's seventeen groundwater bodies are salinized or in poor condition. The reason is that wells have been overexploited for years, since extracting groundwater is cheaper than desalinating seawater. In 2001, 75% of the water consumed in Ibiza came from wells, while only a quarter was desalinated. With the latest consolidated data available (2023), water extraction from aquifers still represents 47.5%. If overexploited aquifers drop below a critical level, seawater penetrates and salinizes them. This is the situation in Ibiza. In theory, there were plans to recover Ibiza's aquifers by injecting desalinated water, plans that, obviously, have remained just that: plans. A dead letter.

As for water consumption, it reveals an almost proportional increase in population. In 2001, Ibiza consumed 15.58 cubic hectometers of water; in 2023, 29.8. Almost double. In 2001, Ibiza had 88,078 inhabitants; in 2025, that number was 164,265, according to the INE (National Institute of Statistics). An 86.5% increase in just 25 years.

One last figure regarding water and population. In 2025, according to cadastral data... Ibiza DailyIbiza has 11,425 swimming pools. A ludicrous figure (that's one pool for every 14 Ibizans!) and completely stupid from an environmental point of view. I wrote 'stupid' because 'unsustainable' was too obvious an adjective. In recent years, 1.5 swimming pools have been built every day in Ibiza.

The threshing floors sleep, the dogs not so much

In Ibiza, the threshing floors lie dormant, a relic of the past. There's no longer any need to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, in recent years, efforts have been made to promote the cultivation of local wheat varieties, such as the Ceja variety, while Ibizan artisan bread has managed to industrialize without losing its essence. But artisan bread actually represents a very small part of overall consumption. The Ibiza Bakers and Pastry Chefs Association estimated artisan bread consumption at between 3 and 5% of the total in 2017. Most of the bread eaten in Ibiza is pre-baked and arrives frozen by ship, a product of extremely poor nutritional quality.

There is no island-specific data on agricultural activity in the Balearic Islands, at least not on the Social Security website. According to the latest available data, there are 2,413 workers registered in the special agricultural system across the Balearic Islands. In reality, since historical figures have been available (2012), the number of registered workers has fluctuated between 3,000 and 2,200, with a slight downward trend. Generally speaking, agriculture has been abandoned across the islands in favor of the tourism sector, a phenomenon that is presumably even more pronounced on Ibiza. Without island-specific data available, we know, for example, that in Ibiza the organic farming sector (clearly booming in recent years) employed 346 people in 2021.

The threshing floors sleep, but the dogs have no rest. They have to guard their owners' houses. According to official data, there are currently 78,913 homes in Ibiza. We also know that in 2021, 35% of the island's homes were single-family houses; this gives us an estimate of at least 30,000 villas and detached houses. This figure also helps us count the number of swimming pools. No, dogs don't sleep in Ibiza; on the contrary, it's a paradise for dogs and alarm installers.

If only it were still broken Spanish…

'Champurrar' or 'chapurrear' means to speak a language in a very basic way, with deficiencies and little clarity. But the real problem in Ibiza is not the decline in the quality of Catalan, but the virtual disappearance of Ibizan in many areas and contexts.

The last survey of language use in the Balearic Islands, from 2014, already showed that only 28% of the Ibizan population identified as solely or primarily Catalan speakers, the worst figures in the Balearic Islands. Theoretically, a similar survey should be carried out every ten years (the previous one was in 2004), but don't bother looking for the 2024 study because you won't find it. We wonder how the authorities will decide their language policy if they don't have reliable and up-to-date data.

There's a fairly simple way to gauge the state of Catalan in Ibiza, at least in the island's capital. You can walk the length of Vila (population 53,000, the second most populated municipality in the Balearic Islands), from Les Figueretes to Talamanca, and count how many times you hear a conversation in Catalan and how many times you hear it in another language. If you're not very lucky, it's quite possible you'll walk through Ibiza's capital without hearing a single word of Ibizan. And if you repeat the experiment in Santa Eulalia del Río or San Antonio de Portmany ('Santa' and 'Sanan', when referring to contemporary young Ibizans), the result might be exactly the same. Some might say the method isn't very scientific. And I'll reply that it's simply a matter of repeating the experiment many times, until it becomes statistically significant. If the philologists at the UIB (or whoever is responsible) take much longer to conduct a new study on the uses of Catalan, they might find that there's nothing to study in Ibiza.

I want to thank the members of UC for the verses and the excuse to organize and shorten an article that, otherwise, could easily last ten long pages. Ibiza is no longer Ibiza. Not really, not too much.