Heritage
UNESCO World Heritage
Ibiza town ('the capital') with its impressive fortress, declared UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. This international award acknowledges its historical, cultural, and architectural value. It is the best preserved coastal fortress in the Mediterranean. Dalt Vila's acropolis is filled with alleys and monuments, such as the castle and the cathedral. It has been a cultural crossover for centuries, and this frotress' environment is the stage for concerts, poetic cycles, exhibitions, and cultural activities all year round.
The Phoenician remains of Sa Caleta, in Sant Josep, and the Phoenician-Punic necropolis of Puig des Molins, in Ibiza, are also part of this World Heritage Site, since UNESCO considers that they "are exceptional evidence of urbanization and social life in the Phoenician colonies of the western Mediterranean. They constitute a unique resource, in terms of volume and importance, of material from the Phoenician and Carthaginian toms" reads the official justification for inscription.
The UNESCO committee defined Ibiza as a privileged environment due to its diversity and natural values, considering the richness of the prairies of oceanic posidonia, seabed plants, the best preserved in the Mediterranean and located within a Natural Reserve. These prairies hols 220 different species, including three globally threatened, one of them being the monk seal. They are responsible for the purity and transparency of the water that surrounds the island.
Hippy heritage
Since the 1930s, Ibiza has become a peaceful destination for some avant-garde European artists that were forced to run away from authoritarian regimes. On the island, they found a primitive space that unleashed their creativity.
And during the 60s and 70s, many Americans who wanted to get away from fighting the Vietnam Wat discovered in Ibiza a place in the Mediterranean that had remained isolated form tourism up until then.
Little by little, the island became one of the international refuges for the hippy movement. In this atmosphere overflowing with freedom and pertness is where the Adlib fashion was born, a comfortable and simple look that wanted women to make real conscience of their own body in order to be able to dress to their taste, without impositions.
Ibiza becomes famous for its flea markets, where merchants not only sell fashion, but also handicrafts, pottery, exotic musical instruments, original costume jewelry...; and also for its cosmopolitan and multicultural nature. Ibiza's flea markets attract the curious and the celebrities from all around the world. Some claim that the stands are small trend laboratories where they can find designs, genres, and objects that, in time, will be seen on the shop of the large European cities.
In the last decades, the island has turned into a refuge for artists from all around the planet who have chosen Ibiza as a place to live. They exhibit their work and sell it in the art galleries, markets, shops, handicrafts, handicraft workshops, etc. Ibiza is their source of inspiration.