One man's idea, above San Miguel
Daniel Lipszyc first came to Ibiza in 1954, a Belgian architect who kept returning until he decided to build. In the late sixties he bought the land at the Na Xamena cliff, in the least developed corner of the island, and started work in 1969. There was no road to the headland then, no water and no power. Two years later the hotel opened with fifty-four rooms, the first five-star on Ibiza and the first of any kind on this stretch of the north.
It still reads as one man's idea rather than a committee's. White arches and patios, thick walls that hold the cool, terraces stepping down the rock towards a bay a hundred and eighty metres below. The rooms face west, so the sunset arrives in the room rather than being something you go out to find. Half a century on, the house has grown to sixty-nine keys and passed to the founder's son, Alvar, but the plan is the one Lipszyc drew, and the restraint is his.
Eight pools down the cliff
The signature lies below the rooms, where the spa gives on to the Cascadas Suspendidas: eight heated seawater pools that spill from one to the next down the face of the cliff, the open sea filling the horizon behind them. They were built for the hotel and exist nowhere else, and they are the image it has traded on for fifty years. In a photograph they can look like a marketing invention. In person the thalasso is real, warm salt water and the long drop to the sea, and the picture earns itself.
The rest of the wellness sits under the same name, Spa La Posidonia, set back into the hillside where the stone keeps the heat out. There are three freshwater pools as well, two in the open and one under cover for the days the north wind gets up. None of it is styled to within an inch of its life. It is comfortable rather than clinical, which suits a house of this age.
In a photograph they look like an invention. In person the picture earns itself.
Dinner faces the sun
Two kitchens carry the evening. Eden is the dining room proper, Mediterranean and built on what the island's sea and land give up, with the hotel's own farm a short walk downhill. Los Nidos, the rooftop bar, is where the night starts, low tables and cushions set square at the sunset. Breakfast is taken by the pool. None of it sets out to reinvent Ibicenco cooking. It feeds you well and lets the view do the heavy lifting, which on this terrace is the right call.
That is the argument of the whole place. Most of what the island is famous for happens after midnight, on the other coast. The Hacienda has spent fifty years being the opposite, family-run and comfortably old-school, and it has never quite been fashionable. On the north cliffs, with the pines and the water and the last of the sun on the table, that reads less like a shortcoming than the entire point.
Come for the north, not the clubs.
Ibiza has no shortage of white hotels, and plenty could be lifted on to another island without much loss. The Hacienda could only stand here, on a headland one man cut a road to in order to build. The rooms are classic rather than sharp, and at sixty-nine keys, with weddings on the calendar, it is not a hideaway. But for the setting, the founder's stubbornness and the water down the rock, it holds its place in VANE.
Photos: Hacienda Na Xamena (official), with credit.
