For the place
Hacienda Na Xamena
San Miguel · Ibiza, Spain
Ibiza sells itself on the night. This is the island's other face. The Hacienda sits at the end of a long climb above San Miguel, in the least developed corner of the island, a whitewashed finca a hundred and eighty metres above a quiet bay. Daniel Lipszyc, a Belgian architect, began building here in 1969, when there was no road, no water and no power on the headland, and opened in 1971 as the first hotel in the north. The place still reads as one man's idea: arches and patios, thick white walls, terraces stepping down the rock toward the water. Rooms face west, so the sunset arrives in the room. The signature lies lower down, where the spa's Cascadas Suspendidas spill from one heated seawater pool to the next down the face of the cliff, eight of them, the sea filling the horizon behind. It is the picture the hotel has been known by for half a century, and it earns the reputation.
Two kitchens carry the day. Eden is the proper dining room, Mediterranean and built on what the island's sea and land give up, with the hotel's own farm a walk downhill. Los Nidos, the rooftop bar, is where the evening starts, low tables and cushions angled 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 carry the meal, which on this terrace is the right call.
Most of Ibiza's fame happens after midnight and somewhere else. The Hacienda has spent fifty years being the opposite of that, and it has never quite been fashionable, which is rather the point. It is family-run and comfortably old-school, a five-star that feels lived-in rather than styled. The rooms are classic rather than cutting-edge, and at sixty-nine keys, with weddings on the calendar, it is not a hideaway. But for the setting alone, the cliff, the pines, the water running down to the sea, it belongs here. Come for the north, not the clubs.
A longer reading of Hacienda Na Xamena: the founder who cut a road to the cliff, the eight seawater pools down the rock, and the table that faces the sun.
Read Folio No. 71 →
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Cliffs of Na Xamena above San Miguel, north Ibiza, Spain.
Five-star; whitewashed Ibicenco finca; 69 rooms and suites, west-facing.
Eden restaurant; Los Nidos rooftop bar.
Benirràs and the north-coast coves; Ibiza town 30 minutes.
