The Road to San Vicente

In 1960 the travel writer Leif Borthen returned to Ibiza after an absence of nearly thirty years. As on his first visit, he arrived by boat, caught a ramshackle bus to San Juan and then hiked across the hills to the remote valley of San Vicente, still beyond the reach of the internal combustion engine.

Astonished by how little things had changed, he bought some land near an isolated cove and settled down to become the valley’s first resident writer. Borthen’s evocation of this hidden Ibiza, moving between 1933 and 1960, is made especially poignant by the fact that he arrived only just in time: in 1964 the long-awaited road was finished and the valley was never again the same.

First published in Norwegian in 1967, this memoir portrays in marvellous detail a vanished world and all its rich traditions – house blessings, blood feuds – together with a gallery that includes a roguish art dealer, an eccentric aristocrat and a notorious assassin.

Six other descriptions round out this unusual portrait of a valley: an overlooked letter by Walter Benjamin, an elegiac piece by Norman Lewis, an extract from Enrique Fajarnés’s little-known Viaje a Ibiza, Jacques Massacrier’s cautionary tale about an overzealous tax collector, Emily Kaufman’s article on the area’s extraordinary history, and Paul Richardson’s firsthand account of restoring an ancient casa payesa. The result is a work that gives the other Ibiza a recognition long overdue.

Dimensions: 220 pages, 35 woodcuts, 13.5 × 20 cm