The first time I went to Ibiza, in 2001, I was already a fully-fledged adult, at least in terms of years. We stayed in a massive all inclusive hotel in Platja des Port de Sant Miquel in the north of the island. The holiday, with young children in tow, was nice enough, although we never once got close to securing a sun bed, with desperate Brits surrounding the pool area from 5.00 am onwards. But it was nice enough, even if you could hardly call it authentic Spain. Two years later, we returned to Ibiza, this time in Cala Gracio, on the west coast near San Antonio, or Sant Antoni de Portmany as we Brits don’t call it. Again, nice enough, again no sun beds and certainly not a Spanish experience. In the early 2000s, I wasn’t really thinking about an authentic experience abroad, just somewhere warm where we could have some fun. It was much later in my life that I came to enjoy being in a different country rather than a warmed-up version of the one I lived in.
My regular foreign jaunts began initially with a one-off ‘lads’ holiday in Cap d’Agde in France which turned out to be the naturist capital of Europe, something I swear we didn’t know about until we got there. As holidays went, the highlights were a horse steak and chips meal, one of the lads buying a huge box of Panaché, thinking it was beer and not a sickeningly sweet shandy, French air force Mirage planes flying low across the beach, sending beach umbrellas flying away at high speed and being moved from a lovely apartment overlooking the quaint streets of the old town to one overlooking the rubbish bins in a large car park. Again, it was nice to be away but there was no sense of being in another country. Even the nudity got boring after a while. From 1985, my Greek experience began.
My first stay in Greece was in Corfu Town, the capital of Corfu, oddly enough. We stayed in the most basic of basic village rooms, a stone’s throw from Garitsa Bay. The first thing we noticed – and you really couldn’t miss it – was the smell. And it wasn’t a particularly nice smell, either, because the Garitsa was an open sewer. It was not just the smell of the water that was so off-putting: it was the things you saw. You can probably work it out yourself.
We travelled the length and breadth of the island in our two weeks and that led to a process whereby I fell in love with Corfu. I noted, even back then, it was an island of stark contrasts from the beautiful sandy beaches of the west coast to the more rugged east and for every attractive resort, there was a crassly over-developed one, too. Back then, the party resorts were the boisterous former fishing village of Benitses, the endless strip at Ipsos (described to us, somewhat accurately, by one wag as Tipsos) and grubby Sidari to the north west, where later we made the mistake of staying. I kept going back to Corfu, although I was fearful that over-development and over-tourism would ruin the things that made it worth visiting in the first place. Judging from the last time we stayed in Corfu, which was in 2022, with one or two exceptions, the island has carried it off. It stepped back from the abyss.
What Corfu managed to do was morph into an island that appealed to a variety of groups. Wisely, the party resort was moved south from Benitses to Kavos, right away from the rest of the island. I am not begrudging the groups of young people whose sole aim is to get intoxicated on alcohol and other less desirable substances – I was young once – but it’s not for me and I don’t think its image helped the island’s reputation. Similarly, for the British tourist who wants to go abroad but enjoy many of the trappings of home – bingo, karaoke, full English breakfast, Robbie Williams tribute nights and all the rest of it – there’s Sidari. Again, I am not knocking that type of holiday. In many places in between, Corfu has managed to survive mass tourism and while I am now in a time of my life where I feel I need to widen my horizons, it will alway retain a place in my heart, if not my travel agenda.
Like Corfu, Ibiza has stepped back from its own abyss, as you can read in this excellent article. It is by no means there yet for a variety of common factors that are occuring in tourism all over the world. Like in our own country, it is becoming impossible for local people to live in their own towns. The proliferation of second homes, AirBnB and the like have skewered the housing market. (Full disclosure: we have used both AirBnB and Booking.com so we are guilty too.) Younger people are leaving the small islands to live on the mainland or abroad because the only jobs are seasonal and low paid. We certainly noticed that over the years.
There have been stories about locals protesting about tourism in various places. It’s important to add that people are not protesting about tourists themselves, but the effects of over-tourism in terms of housing and damage to the environment. I’ve certainly found no hostility from locals in recent holidays to islands off Greece, Spain and Croatia in recent years. On the contrary, I’ve found the opposite to be the norm. In the end, don’t we want the same things as the people who already live there?
When passing through a small part of Ibiza last year, on our way to and from Formentera, I was struck by how scruffy it was, The big resort we passed through was tired and many hotel grounds were overgrown. A local person told me that Ibiza was changing, that the mega clubs of the 1990s were now more organised, corporate-run entities and the days of wild hedonism and 24 hour party people was slowly coming to an end. It had run its course. I was told that actually Ibiza is a very beautiful island once you escape the crass over-developed areas. Perhaps, like Corfu, people had a good think about what and how they wanted their island to be and be regarded. Was it time to welcome a different kind of tourist?
There’s room for everyone to do their own thing, isn’t there? Not everyone wants to visit Split and head to the Diocletian’s Palace – I don’t, my partner does, so I visit a nearby bar to enjoy the local ale instead – and not everyone wants to visit Mon Repos in Corfu. I’d rather watch the planes take off and land at Corfu airport, which is either a terrible eyesore or as good a place as anywhere for plane anoraks, like me, to gather.
Change need not be a bad thing when it comes to the places we like to visit. Whether the changes I have seen in two very distinct islands are happening by accident or design, I don’t know. It’s probably both. One big change I observed last time in Corfu Town was that the branch of McDonalds had closed down. Part of me was disappointed – I enjoy a McDonalds once in a blue moon – but most of me realised that here was a statement. People were coming to Corfu not for high fat, high calorie American junk food but for the authentic Greek variety.
In the end, we go on holiday for our own reasons. Sight-seeing, partying, lazing about on a sun bed, reading and so on. There’s room for everyone and we don’t have to destroy everything, including the very reasons we visit in the first place, to achieve that.
