Sant Joan

Location

High on the northern hills, the pretty village of Sant Joan lies on the main highway from Ibiza Town to Portinatx, 22km from the capital.

Description

Though only a couple of hundred people live here, the village is a municipal capital and boasts its own modest little town hall. Dominating the skyline, the eighteenth-century church, just off the main highway, has typically high whitewashed walls and an arched side-porch. The slim steeple that rises slightly awkwardly from the main body of the building is twentieth-century addition, which detracts a little from the wonderful simplicity of the original design. Inside, there’s an unadorned single nave, with a barrel-vaulted roof and a small dome, comprising several segments painted with images of Christ.

Not far from this village you can find one of Ibiza’s most idyllic beaches. Benirras is a 300 metre-wide sandy cove set against a backdrop of high densely forested cliffs. Development has been restricted here for decades, but in the last few years a rash of new villas have been built above the beach, despite a protracted campaign of opposition.

The region remains popular with a bohemian bunch of artists and writers, however and the remote terrain around the village is still popular with Ibiza’s psy-trance occasional parties. San Joan first became a focal point of northern Ibiza’s hippies in the 1960s, when a scene developed around the legendary Can Tiruit commune. Later the area served as a primary base for the Bhagwan Rajneesh cult (subsequently renamed the Osho Commune International), where elements of Sufism, Buddhism, Zen yoga were blended with a good dose of hedonistic sexual libertinism. Rave folk history has it that Bhagwan Rajneesh devotees from California were the first people to bring ecstasy to Ibiza in the late 1970s, when there was the first mass ritual use of the drug on the island.

Property for sale in Sant Joan

Due to its beauty, there are some stunning properties for sale in Sant Joan. For example, a finca style house in Benirras in San Joan would have an asking price around EUR 1,500,000.