Thursday, April 16th, 2009, Ibizza, Spain

Bob:

Our stop for the day was Ibizza in the Belearic Islands just off the eastern coast of Spain. As we eased into port early in the morning we had a grand view of the ruins of a fortress and a whitewashed church on the hill overlooking the harbor. It was a very impressive as well as picturesque sight. The walls and bastions of the fortress were a warm buff color in the rising sun, and the walls of the church fairly sparkled in the brilliant sunlight.

After breakfast (first things first!) we took advantage of the complementary shuttle bus that Holland America had provided to get us the two or three kilometers into the center of the town. We could have walked that, of course, but we were intent on climbing the hill to see those ruins and a archeological museum that I had noticed on a map of the town, so we wanted to save our legs for that. Of course, I'm always on the lookout for an Internet cafe, so I was very pleased to see one just across the street from where the bus dropped us off on the waterfront.

Having found that, we could concentrate on enjoying the walk up the hill to the ruins through the old section of town. The town was really quite pretty, with an abundance of tourist boutiques, cafes and bars, of course, but also the regular homes of the inhabitants. We enjoyed the narrow, crooked streets of the old town area. The tall, slender row houses were equipped with pretty balconies that often sported flowers, captive birds, and so forth. The streets supposedly had been intentionally laid out in a confusing zig-zag pattern in order to confuse invaders, a rumor I was never able to confirm or disconfirm from reading the plaques lining the route of our walk.

Surely Ibizza had more than its share of invaders during its three millennia of history. The archeological museum located right next to the cathedral up on the hill was a gold mine of information about the waves of settlers and invaders that repeatedly washed over the island. Prehistorical people had settled the island and pursued an agricultural way of life as early as 1100 B.C., and those folks continued to enjoy a peaceful existence even when the Phoenicians colonized the island in 700 B.C., apparently to help guard their trans-Mediterranean trade routes.

Then things got nasty for well over two thousand years with the Carthaganians taking over from the Phoenicians and the Romans conquering the Carthaganians and the Vandals conquering the Romans and the Moors conquering the Vandals. Then the island changed hands among competing Moorish leaders for several hundred years until the Crusaders together with the Spanish finally conquered it and held it. The waxing and waning economic prospects of the inhabitants was clearly shown by the collections of reconstructed pottery from each era plus the dominant coinage in circulation and other miscellaneous artifacts. One tidbit that disturbed me was the implication that slavery had only started on Ibizza after the conquest by the Romans. If true, the earliest people, the Phoenicians, and the Carthaginians did not practice slavery like the Romans and Greek civilizations did, which would make the former civilizations much more humane in my view than the latter.

All in all, it was my type of museum, short on flash but heavy on information, and in the two hours we were there I read every word in English in the place. Warning: go to that museum early in the day as they close from 2-6 p.m. for siesta! Since the museum had reasonably priced reproductions, I bought a clay imprint of a satyr holding a rabbit that was cast from an original millenias-old mold! Monika bought a small effigy of the god Bes, after whom Ibiza is named, to go into our curios cabinet.

From the museum we wound around the ruins of the old fortress at the top of the hill, but the ruins were closed off either for preservation or restoration, so we could just peek in from the outside. The views outward over the Mediterranean Sea were, however, magnificent. The light blue horizon met the dark blue of the sea, which came in ripples up to the aquamarine coastal waters.

To finish off our walking tour, we curled back through the old quarter of the town and wandered up and down some of the commercial streets by the waterfront, where we found many high-class shops. Most were closed for the siesta period, however, so we continued on to the Internet cafe beside the harbor and did some email, and then took the shuttle bus back to the ship for the day.