Most people who visit Ibiza never make it north. They loop between the beaches and the clubs, get a glimpse of Dalt Vila, and fly home thinking they’ve seen the island. They haven’t.
The north is where Ibiza keeps its actual personality: red-earth roads through pine and fig, whitewashed villages that haven’t changed in decades, a Sunday market where locals buy their cheese and herbs alongside the tourists, and a half-finished concrete hotel on a clifftop that a celebrated Catalan architect began in the 1970s and never got to finish.
A day in northern Ibiza is the best day you’ll spend on this island. Here’s how to do it properly.
Start in Santa Gertrudis: Jamón, Art and a Village Square
The road up from Sant Antoni takes about fifteen minutes, winding through almond and carob trees before it drops you into Santa Gertrudis de Fruitera. Pull into the village. Park. You’re going to want to stay longer than you planned.
The square is anchored by an 18th-century whitewashed church on one side and Bar Costa on the other. Bar Costa is the only place to begin. It’s dark inside, the ceiling hung with cured hams, the walls covered in paintings traded over the years by the artists and expats who’ve made this village their base. Pull up a stool at the bar or grab a table outside under the shade. The menu doesn’t need to be long: order the jamón ibérico on bread with tomato, maybe a plate of manchego, a cold beer. That’s the whole point. It’s open from breakfast through to late evening and it’s been doing the same simple thing, with the same quality, for generations.
The square itself is worth a slow wander. Santa Gertrudis has quietly become one of the more interesting design destinations on the island, with boutiques and studios tucked into the old village buildings. You’re not being sold a lifestyle here. It just happens to be beautiful.
If you’re building a full north day around a Sunday, plan to be at Santa Gertrudis in the late morning before or after the Sant Joan market (more on that in a moment). The two villages are only about twenty minutes apart and they anchor each other perfectly.
Sant Joan on a Sunday: The Market the Locals Actually Use
Sant Joan de Labritja [san ZHOO-an duh la-BREE-cha] is the smallest, quietest municipality on the island. The village amounts to one whitewashed church, a square, and a handful of places to eat. On Sundays, from around 10am to 4pm, that square turns into one of the most unpretentious markets on Ibiza.
The Sant Joan market isn’t trying to be Las Dalias. There are no incense clouds or silver jewellery empires. What you get instead: local organic produce, fresh flowers, handmade ceramics, artisan cheeses, jams, clothing and accessories made by people who actually live here. Live music starts around noon, once the church service across the square has finished. It’s the kind of market where you find yourself buying a jar of honey you weren’t looking for and staying for a second coffee.
The Giri Café sits right on Plaza España, the village square, and is the right call for lunch here. It’s inside a 300-year-old townhouse that opens onto a garden full of vegetables, herbs and flowers. The menu follows whatever that garden and the local markets are turning out that week. Seasonal Mediterranean cooking, done with care, in one of the nicest outdoor settings on the island. Note that it’s seasonal: open from roughly mid-spring to late autumn. If you’re visiting outside season, the square has a small café or two that keep the basics running year-round.
And unlike plenty of the island’s markets, the Sant Joan one runs every Sunday throughout the year, not just in high season.
La Paloma in San Lorenzo: Worth the Detour
A short drive south of Sant Joan, the tiny village of San Lorenzo holds what many people consider the best lunch table in the north. La Paloma opened in 2004 in a converted finca surrounded by citrus orchards, and it’s been packing out every service since. The menu changes weekly, written on a chalkboard and brought to the table. The chef’s roots are in Tuscany, the produce is local and organic where possible, and the dishes have that quality of feeling genuinely made rather than assembled.
La Paloma runs two services: the Paloma Café for lunch (12:30–15:45) and the Paloma Restaurante for dinner (19:30–23:00). Go for lunch if you want the garden at its best, sunlight filtering through the orange trees. For dinner, the candlelit garden does its own kind of magic. Book ahead either way. Turning up without a reservation in season is optimistic.
Full disclosure: La Paloma has come highly recommended by people whose taste we trust, and it keeps eluding us. Every time we’re in the north, something gets in the way. It’s firmly on the list.
Benirràs: The Beach That Drums the Sun Down
Drive north from Santa Gertrudis through the hills and you reach Benirràs [beh-nee-RRAS], a small horseshoe cove backed by steep, pine-covered hillsides. Just offshore sits a lone rock islet, Cap Bernat, which the locals call “the finger of God” for reasons that become obvious the moment you see it silhouetted at sunset.
The cove is genuinely beautiful: clear, calm water, a mix of sand and pebbles, no large beach clubs, a couple of family-run restaurants and some artisan stalls along the shore. But the reason people stay for the whole afternoon is what happens as the sun starts going down.
Drummers have been gathering here at sunset since the early days of Ibiza’s hippie era. It started as a Sunday thing. But the crowds grew big enough that the large organised Sunday sessions became a headache, and the authorities have discouraged the mass events ever since to keep the beach from overflowing. What you’ll find now is looser, and honestly more genuine: informal drumming sessions most evenings of the week, with Sunday still drawing the biggest crowd. The sound builds slowly as the sun drops behind Cap Bernat. Bongos, djembes, hand percussion layering on top of each other until it feels like the whole beach is vibrating.
You don’t need to do anything except be there. Tap along if you like. Watch the light. It’s been happening since the 1970s and it still doesn’t feel like a performance.
Practical note: if you’re visiting on a Sunday in peak season, car access to the beach is restricted from around 3pm. Shuttle buses run from a car park at Sa Plana, a few kilometres back. Go early and make a day of it.
The Quiet Coast: Cala Xarraca, Port de Sant Miquel, and the Ghost Hotel
The north coast between Benirràs and Portinatx runs through some of the island’s least visited stretches, and it saves its strangest sight for last. It’s worth the drive.
Cala Xarraca is a wide, shallow bay with gentle water and pine-fringed slopes. In calm conditions, it’s one of the better swimming spots on the north coast. In any wind coming in from the north, it catches it badly. We arrived on a day that had other ideas. Check conditions before making it the centrepiece of your afternoon.
Port de Sant Miquel is a small, developed bay worth a quick stop for the cave system in the cliffs above and a straightforward seafood lunch if you haven’t eaten elsewhere.
Playa de Portinatx is a gentle sandy bay in the far north, calm and family-friendly, with a low-key hotel strip and a few seafood places doing reliable lunches. A solid stop if you’re rounding off the full north loop.
And then there’s Cala d’en Serra.
Follow the road from Portinatx east, take the turnoff slowly when you see the sign, and descend a narrow track to a small cove that would be entirely ordinary if it weren’t for what’s standing above it. Looming over the beach on the clifftop is the skeleton of a hotel that was never finished. The plans for the complex date back to the 1970s, drawn up by the celebrated Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, who was living in exile in the United States at the time, having fled Franco’s Spain. Work began, then halted, and when Sert died in 1983 the project was abandoned for good. The half-built concrete structure has stood over the cove ever since: terraces and stairwells slowly being reclaimed by vegetation, covered in graffiti left by everyone who’s ever made the walk down.
People have argued over what to do with it for decades. The Sant Joan council has now voided the original building permits and signed off on a demolition project, so the structure’s days are genuinely numbered. Which makes this one of the last moments to see it.
One genuine warning before you head down: the ruins are unstable. There’s rubble and loose masonry throughout, holes in the ground, and no safety barriers. If you do visit, view it from a respectful distance rather than climbing through it. Enter at your own risk.
The cove below it, by the way, is pristine. Clear water, small beach, completely quiet. The contrast between the ruin above and the untouched sea below is part of the whole thing.
Getting Around the North
A car is non-negotiable. There’s no realistic way to string these places together without one. Roads in the north are good but narrow in places, with sharp bends on the coastal sections. Download offline maps before you leave base.
The logical loop from Sant Antoni runs roughly: Santa Gertrudis for the morning, Sant Joan around midday (Sunday market if the timing works), Benirràs for the afternoon, then east along the north coast to Cala d’en Serra and back via Portinatx. Allow a full day. The distances are short but the stops deserve time.
What to Eat Before You Leave the North
A few things worth picking up before heading back south.
At the Sant Joan market: local olive oil if you see it, artisan cheeses, any jams or preserves from island producers. These make genuinely good souvenirs and they travel well.
If Bar Costa has its Ibizan sobrasada [so-bruh-SAH-duh] (a spreadable cured sausage made with paprika and local pork) on the counter, buy some to take back. Spread on bread with a little olive oil, it’s one of the island’s best simple things.
And if you’re shopping for a bottle of hierbas ibicencas [YAIR-bas ee-BEE-thehn-kas], the herbal digestif made from wild rosemary, thyme, fennel, juniper and up to a dozen more island herbs, look for it at a local supermarket on your way back through rather than at tourist prices. The dry version (seca) is the one worth keeping.
So: the north in a day. A village square, a market, a legendary finca restaurant, a beach that plays its own soundtrack, and a ruin that time couldn’t quite finish off. Which of these are you most tempted to explore first?
Visited in spring 2024, revised in summer 2025 and spring 2026. Practical details can change, it’s always worth checking opening times and current status before your trip.
