A day visiting the pretty villages of Ibiza is a day well spent!  You’ll need a car of course.  You can start at the first village for breakfast and the last one for dinner, plus of course there’s lunch and cañas (small beer) / carajillos (coffee with brandy) in between!  Spread them over two or three days, and you’ll really feel like you’ve ‘done’ Ibiza!

I’ve tried to list them in a clockwise direction so you can visit them in this order (starting at any of them) without going back on yourself too much. I’ve also listed both the Catalan and the Castilian (Spanish) names.

• Sant Vicent de sa Cala / San Vicente
  • Tiny village with a church and a highly-recommended Thai restaurant called “casa pepe” (closed on Mondays).  The village is NOT the same as the beach resort Cala de Sant Vicent, which is a couple of km away.

• Sant Carles de Peralta / San Carlos
  • Larger village with quite a few restaurants and boutiques, plus the legendary Bar Anitas, which had the first ever telephone on the island, has hundreds of post boxes inside, and was a hippy hangout until well into the 80s.  There’s also a church, of course.  Las Dalias market is very close by.

• Sant Llorenc de Balafia / San Lorenzo
  • Small village with a church, a cafe and not one but two amazing restaurants.  There´s the famous La Paloma with it´s beautiful garden (book in advance), plus Casa Lhasa which serves delicious food and biodynamic wines.  Also the traditional restaurant La Balafia is nearby (not recommended for vegetarians) and you can take a stroll around the streets there to see the houses built during Moorish times with their original towers.

• Santa Gertrudis de Fruitera (pronounced ‘hetrudis’!)
  • Known as the Notting Hill of Ibiza, the village centre has a lovely little church and a pedestrianised street full of restaurants and boutiques.  There’s so many to choose from, but for breakfast I can recommend Bar Costa (try the sobrasada and honey tostada, and go inside to see all the amazing art!) or Musset Cafe, Ulivans for the best menu del dia on the island (closed Thursdays), and the beautiful garden of Can Mimosa for either lunch or dinner.

• San Rafeal / Sant Rafel
  • Another village with another church and more restaurants!  Not the prettiest village but Can Fresco is a great breakfast option and Can Pilot is a very popular locals’ choice for dinner.

• Jesús
  • A fairly large village with views of the Dalt Vila and close to Talamanca beach – of course there’s a church but there’s also an ancient water mill, table tennis tables, pitches for pétanque, a kids’ playground and loads of restaurants and cafes.  For breakfast or menú del día we recommend the wonderful, lovingly refubished Restaurant Es Bon Lloc.  For dinner there’s the Mexican El Deseo.

• Sant Francesc de s’Estany / San Francisco
  • This teeny village was built for the salt workers to live in.  As well as the obligatory church there´s a lovely little visitors´centre, there’s a bird lookout shelter overlooking the salt lakes, a sculpture dedicated to the salt workers, and you can walk through the woods to the Torre des Carregador (one of 7 watchtowers on the island).  The best restaurant there (there´s of course only two!) sadly closed down in 2023 and we´re waiting for the current refubishments to finish to see what it will be replaced with.

• Es Cubells
  • A lot of people overlook this village high on the cliffs above the south coast, but it’s got a very pretty square with 2 great restaurants: Restaurant Es Cubells (go for the menu del dia) and Bar Llumbi (wonderful sea views and delicious fish).  It’s also the starting point for a fantastic hike to Es Vedrá, and was where the Carmelite priest Francesc Palau spent 6 years in hermitage in the 1850s… take the steps down behind the church to see the font with beautiful carvings which he’s said to be responsible for.

• Sant Agustí des Vedrà / San Augustus 

  • Church and square plus the highly recommended restaurant Can Berri Vell, which is housed in a building that was a traditional family home from the 17th Century, plus the more relaxed Bar Can Berri, which is a lovely garden full of orange trees.  Visit the village on a Sunday in January to March for the Catalan festival which celebrates the humble calçot, a mild green onion which is cooked on an open fire.

• Santa Agnès de Corona / Santa Ines
  • Small village with a tiny church that has a big history!  Apparently there was a murder at the very entrance of the church, so the villagers walled up the doorway and built a second entrance opening onto the square.  There are 2 restaurants and one of them, Can Cosmi, has the best tortilla español on the island.

• Sant Mateu d’Albarca / San Mateo
  • This village has a church and.. 2 restaurants!  Ses Casetes is very relaxed, good for breakfast or lunch, and Juntos House is probably the best restaurant on the island – farm to table food in a wonderful setting, you must visit at least once on your holiday.   The village is as the heart of Ibiza’s ‘wine country’ so it’s surrounded by vineyards and on the third Saturday in December it hosts a festival where you can try the new harvest for free, watch the local dance ‘Ball Pagès’ and eat meats cooked on an open fire.

• Sant Miquel de Balansat / San Miguel
  • One of the larger villages with the church overlooking the town from on top of a hill.  Check out the back of the church which is not painted white, as it faces the sea and so was too visible to the pirates!  In ‘normal’ times you can watch the local dancing ‘Ball Pagès’ in the square on a Thursday evening.