Life | Spain Sanctuary] Ibiza #Escape

EJ's note

I used to judge people who chose all-inclusive resorts.

I'm not sure when exactly that judgment softened, but Spain is where it fully dissolved. There's a "need" in it I hadn't given myself permission to appreciate before — an unassuming tranquility, nothing to plan, and nothing to decide. Just showing up and letting the resort hold you for a while.

People hear "Ibiza" and picture clubs. This was a retreat trip, through and through — yoga in the mornings, the pool and the beach in the afternoons, early dinners, asleep long before midnight.

It was my second time on the island — the first was a sailing trip back in 2024, all movement, all wind and rigging and someone else's schedule. This time was stillness.

Enjoy!

P.S.: Try the paella, and don't skip the aioli — that garlicky, olive-oil-forward version that shows up everywhere on the island.

I. Things I loved about Ibiza

1. The first season cut: We spent long stretches just lying down. Not sleeping, not scrolling, not even really talking. Just breathing. I don't think I've done that — actually nothing, on purpose, for that long — in longer than I can remember.
2. ME Ibiza itself: The hotel sits right on its own stretch of beach in S'Argamassa, tucked in pine trees along the quieter east coast near Santa Eulalia — next door to Nikki Beach but somehow entirely removed from its energy. A secluded little bay, its own private feel. You forget the rest of the island is even the same island you've heard about.
3. Flying yoga, on a rooftop, for the first time: The hotel's rooftop has an adult-only infinity pool with sweeping ocean views, and that's where I tried aerial/flying yoga for the first time — suspended in a hammock above the mat, the sea somewhere behind and below.
4. An unplanned beach afternoon: Some friends from France happened to be in town at the same time, so one afternoon turned into an easy, unscheduled beach gathering, just lying in the sand together and letting the day be exactly as long or as short as it wanted to be.
5. Moonlight: There's an old belief on this island that predates almost everything else about it — the Phoenicians who first settled here worshipped a moon goddess named Tanit, protector of the island, tied to fertility, creativity, and the water itself. Her temple once stood where Ibiza's cathedral stands now, and locals still perform traditional dances around the island's wells and springs in her honour every summer. Watching the moon over the water at ME Ibiza, I kept thinking about how apt that felt — an island so associated, even now, with sun and noise and daytime spectacle, quietly older beneath all of it, and devoted at its root to the moon instead.

II. Where I Would Take You

A couple of things I'd point you toward, beyond the resort itself:

• The west coast at sunset — Cala d'Hort or Café del Mar, both facing the islet of Es Vedrà, said to be Tanit's other home on the island. It's less a viewpoint than a nightly ritual for the whole coastline — worth timing your evening around.
• Las Dalias hippie market — a legacy of Ibiza's 1960s counterculture roots, still running, still full of Tanit iconography in the jewelry and pottery stalls if you know to look for her