Shadows Across The Moon. Helen Donlon

those hanging out around Dalt Vila and the port would have. On the other side of the island meanwhile, the town of Sant Antoni was slowly evolving from a quiet fishing village into a tourist area with specially built hotels to cater for the new European tastes and expectations. Aided by its stunning sunset position, and the remarkable beauty of the surrounding area, Sant Antoni’s development was the result of Franco’s main tourist drive in Ibiza, which also included the installation of a bullring (a concept totally alien to Catalan thinking) – and that bullring has in fact gone down in history as one of the first great rock ’n’ roll arenas on the island. Bob Marley played there, as did Thin Lizzy and Eric Clapton.

      The French-Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus remarked about the scene in the harbour cafes in the mid-1930s, where he’d sit and write, or watch the world go by, “Towards five in the evening the young people would stroll back and forth along the full length of the mole; this is where marriages and the whole of life are arranged. One cannot help thinking there is a certain grandeur in beginning one’s life this way, with the whole world looking on.” The highly acclaimed British travel writer, Norman Lewis, spent time in Ibiza in the 1950s, and later wrote, “According to local gossip, in which I was soon included, the peasant women (although not the fisherfolk, who were more honourable in such matters) disposed of unwanted husbands by poisoning or other methods. A local beauty who ran a bar a few miles away was said to have got rid of hers by throwing a stick of dynamite down the well in which the man was at work.”

      With its very mixed up international tribal history, the native islanders’ tolerance of outsiders and visitors couldn’t help but evolve rapidly and considerably over time. New groups of individual international settlers were accepted, and the peluts were eventually as integrated as the earlier beatnik, artist, traveller, dropout or experimental cosmonaut.

      The British actor Terry Thomas, renowned for his upper class bounder character parts in dozens of films and television programmes made between 1933 and the mid-1970s, was coaxed into moving to Ibiza in 1967 by fellow thespian Denholm Elliott. Thomas built his own house high up in the hills above Sant Carles, on the east of the island, and the house is still run by his son and daughter-in-law, and used for weddings and other gatherings. At one event held at this charming hilltop roost a few years back, I sat down with filmmaker Terry Gilliam who, despite coming up against endless Ibicencan bureaucratic hitches and obstacles, had thrown himself into the role of patron of the island’s Film Festival. “It seems to me there’s no escape from Ibiza,” he sighed with some resignation. “I mean once you sort of show some interest you become like a prisoner of the island. It’s like the siren song was sounded.”