SAN ANTONIO IBIZA

San Antonio, Ibiza's second largest town, could hardly be more different from Eivissa. But for all its brash modernity, it is a historically interesting town, one whose development mirrors the development of the island as a whole. To the north of the town, beyond Cala Salada, is the Cova des Vi (Cave of Des Vi) where dynamic cave paintings were discovered in 1917. Doubts still remain about the exact age of the paintings, some experts maintaining that they are Bronze Age in origin and therefore dating from about 2,000 BC.

Others believe that they were the work of Carthaginian soldiers manning a lookout and therefore no older than 600 BC. If they are indeed Bronze Age, the caves are one of the earliest signs of human habitation on the island. The cave is not open to the public, but as it is closed only by an iron grill the paintings are quite visible. When the army of King Jaime took Ibiza, wresting the island from its Moorish settlers, Christianity was established as the major faith. Near the road to Cala Salada, closer to Sant Antoni than the Des VI cave, the Capilla de Santa Agnes, an underground chapel discovered in 1917, dates from this early Christian period. The chapel was restored in the early 1980s and can be visited.

Perhaps because of the existence of this early chapel, in 1305 the Bishop of Tarragon gave permission for a church and consecrated cemetery of Sant Antoni. That church, dedicated to St Anthony and so giving the town its name, is one of the oldest in Ibiza. It was built on the site of a Moorish mosque and incorporates some architectural details it presumably borrowed from Its predecessor, as well as the more typical fortress like looks of its day. For many years Sant Antoni was a fishing port, and one link with those days can be found at Cala Grassio, a little way to the north. There the Cova de ses Llegostes, a natural fish pool, was used by the local fishermen to keep excess fish fresh while they waited for market. Today the cave has been turned into a natural aquarium which can be visited. Sant Antoni had developed into a small town when the 1960s and 1970s ushered in the era of mass tourism. Virtually overnight and it is easy to underestimate just how fast the growth of Sant Antoni was: it was phenomenal the town was transformed into the island's major package holiday centre, exemplifying all that was both good and bad in tourism. While the development of hotels, bars, discos, souvenir shops and the like brought enormous economic benefits to some of the townsfolk, it was at the expense of a landscape that had once been among the finest on the island.