On the Rise
We have watched Ibiza become a caricature of itself, and every summer more travellers ask us the same thing. Where in the Balearics can they still hear the cicadas over the bass. The answer, increasingly, is the island next door.
Menorca has never been loud. UNESCO named it a Biosphere Reserve in October 1993, and the designation was not a marketing flourish. It drew lines. Building heights stayed low, and the dry-stone walls that stitch the interior into a green quilt were protected rather than cleared. While its sisters chased volume, Menorca kept its distances long and its lights dim, and you can still drive a coast road here and meet almost nobody.
The luxury on this island is subtraction. Fewer beds, darker skies, longer silences.
The change worth reporting is in the sparse north. This spring the Vestige Collection opened Binidufà, an eleven-room finca set in a valley below its older sister, Son Ermita. Both are eighteenth-century farmhouses, and together they hold roughly 800 contiguous hectares that run down to three untouched bays on the north coast. Binidufà took its first guests on 16 April and closes again in November, and that seasonal rhythm tells you where the priorities lie. This is agriculture with rooms attached, not a resort with a token farm bolted on for the brochure.
We like what the restraint does to the cooking. Son Ermita leans Mediterranean, Binidufà turns plant-forward, and both cook from what the estate and the island's small producers can supply that week. Rooms start at around €650 a night, and the arithmetic is deliberate. The northern fincas are built for the opposite of scale: a handful of guests spread across a working landscape, close enough to swim before breakfast and far enough from the airport crowds to forget them.
The island rewards the curious beyond its beaches. Scattered across the interior are talayots and navetas, Bronze Age stone monuments that UNESCO added to its World Heritage list in 2023. Among them stands the Naveta des Tudons, a burial chamber some three thousand years old, still intact in a field near Ciutadella.
Menorca will not suit everyone, and that is rather the point. There are no superclubs. The nearest thing to a queue is the short walk down to a cove, and the pools are for swimming, not for the camera. What there is instead is a coastline that Europe agreed, three decades ago, to mostly leave alone. For the traveller tired of the other Balearics, that agreement is beginning to look like the smartest luxury in the western Mediterranean.
