26 Sep 2016
San Antonio, Ibiza, Spain:
The Party Line

By Corey Sandler, Destination Consultant Silversea Cruises

Early Monday morning we sailed around the corner to San Antonio on the west coast of Ibiza. In doing so, we moved to the second-largest town on the island, and a place that has only a bit of history.

The rest? Bars, restaurants, hotels, beaches, and clubs including Es Paradis, one of the first of Ibiza’s party sites.

Also in San Antonio one of the architectural highlights is an odd monument called “The Egg.”

It was erected in the 1990s—in the middle of a round-about, a traffic circus—in honor of Christopher Columbus.

Why? Because of a very flimsy claim by a writer and now by tourism folk that Columbus had been born on the island of Ibiza. (There may have been a party that preceded the claim.)

But just for the record: Columbus, it is pretty widely believed, was born in the Republic of Genoa.

But that’s kind of like saying Rudyard Kipling was born in the United Kingdom; Kipling was born in Bombay in British India in 1865 and died in London in 1936. British all the way.

Or, for what it is worth, that George Washington (and John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and half a dozen more of the first American presidents) were born in the United States. There was no such place when they were born.

Back to Columbus:  Might have been born in Genoa, where they can show you a house that is almost certainly not his. Or Corsica—which was fully part of the Genoese empire—where they can show you the ruins of a house in Calvi. Or Aragon in what is now Spain, or in Portugal.

But Ibiza? Local politicians and the tourist bureau will have you believe that Columbus was born in Dalt Vila, the medieval part of Ibiza Town.

Why? Because his style of writing in his journals is said to be Ibizan, and because he used coastal names from the Balearic islands for some of his discoveries in the Caribbean: Punta de la Mata and Punta de la Rama among them.

That’s the party line, anyhow.

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