Ibiza Beaches: Find the Coast That Fits Your Stay

Ibiza has somewhere between fifty and eighty named beaches depending on who is counting and whether a six-metre strip of shingle with a boathouse qualifies. That number is the source of most bad Ibiza beach days. People arrive with a list of six, try to do three in a day, spend four hours in a car and a car park queue, and end up somewhere overcrowded at the worst possible hour.

The island rewards the opposite approach. Pick one beach, get there early or late, and stay. The coastline is short — you can drive from Portinatx in the north to Ses Salines in the south in fifty minutes — but the roads down to the calas are narrow, single-track in places, and in August they are the bottleneck, not the distance.

How to choose a beach here

Four qualities matter, and almost no beach on the island has all four. Decide which two you care about most and the shortlist writes itself.

• Sand versus rock. Real, deep, walk-on-it sand is confined to the south: Ses Salines, Es Cavallet, Cala Bassa, Cala Nova. Most calas are coarse shingle over slabs, which is beautiful and hard on bare feet.
• Shelter. The west coast gets the afternoon sun and the sunsets but takes the prevailing westerly swell. When it blows, cross to the east: Cala Llonga, Cala Nova, Aigües Blanques.
• Facilities. A chiringuito, toilets and rentable shade change a day with small children entirely. Cala Bassa, Cala Nova, Ses Salines and Benirràs all have them. Cala d'en Serra and Cala Llentrisca have nothing at all.
• Effort. Some of the best water on the island is at the bottom of a fifteen-minute scramble. That filter is why those coves stay quiet.

Choose one cala and commit to it. The island is small enough that beach-hopping feels plausible and just crowded enough that it never works.

The west coast

This is the postcard side of the island and the reason people come. Cala Comte — Cala Conta on older signage — is a series of shallow terraces of ochre rock stepping into water that genuinely is the colour it appears in photographs, because of the pale sand shelf and the offshore islets breaking the swell. It is also the single most crowded beach on Ibiza between eleven and four in August, and the sunset there has become a scheduled event with a car-park queue attached.

Cala Bassa, ten minutes south, is the family answer: proper sand, pine shade reaching the back of the beach, a large beach club, and a ferry from Sant Antoni that removes the parking problem entirely. Cala Salada and its smaller sibling Saladeta are the prettiest pair on this coast, reached by a road that is closed to non-residents at peak times in summer — walk the last kilometre, or take the bus.

Cala Tarida is over-built and worth skipping unless you want a sunbed and a cocktail delivered to it, which is a legitimate thing to want. Benirràs, strictly on the north-west, is the drumming beach — Sunday evenings from June, a genuine hippy-era survival, and best experienced with low expectations of finding a parking space.

The south and the salt flats

Inside the Ses Salines nature reserve, the beaches change character completely: long, straight, dune-backed and sandy, with the salt pans behind them and flamingos on the water in spring and autumn. Ses Salines is the island's fashionable beach and has been since the seventies; it is also two kilometres long, so the crowds thin considerably if you walk south past the last beach club.

Es Cavallet, over the headland, is quieter, wilder and the island's naturist beach. The walk between the two along the shore takes about twenty-five minutes and is one of the better short walks on Ibiza. Both are inside a protected reserve, which means no new construction, no music beyond the existing licensed bars, and a parking system that fills by ten in August.

The north

The north — the municipalities of Sant Joan and Santa Eulària's upper reaches — is where the island still feels like an island. The coast is steeper, the pines come right down to the water, and the coves are small: Cala Xarraca with its mineral mud and natural shade, Cala Xuclar's three red boathouses, Cala d'en Serra at the end of a rough track and the ruin of an abandoned hotel, Portinatx's three sheltered bays which are the best family swimming on the island outside the south.

This is the part of the coastline worth the effort of a hire car. Public transport thins out markedly north of Sant Joan, and the good coves are at the end of tracks the buses do not use.

The east coast

The east is the pragmatic choice. It catches the morning sun, it is sheltered when the west is blown out, and it is where most of the island's mid-range family resorts sit. Cala Nova has the best sand and reliable small surf; Cala Llonga is a deep, calm inlet ideal for young children; Cala Mastella is a tiny shingle cove famous for a fish shack up the rocks that takes no bookings and closes when the day's catch runs out; Aigües Blanques is a long, wild, cliff-backed stretch that is the east coast's naturist beach and its best sunrise.

What a beach day costs

A no-frills beach day on Ibiza costs almost nothing: a bus fare, a supermarket picnic and a parasol you brought. Realistically, most people spend between €45 and €130 per couple. The variables are shade (€25–45), lunch (€18–30 at a chiringuito, €55–90 at a beach club) and parking (€5–8). Bring cash — several of the north-coast car parks and the best fish shacks still do not take cards.

Parking, shade and timing

Three practical rules cover most of it. First, the 10:00 or 17:00 rule: in July and August, be parked before ten or arrive after five, and the day transforms. Second, check the wind before you choose a coast — if the forecast shows a westerly above 15 knots, go east. Third, the car parks at Cala Comte, Cala Bassa, Cala Salada and Ses Salines are the four that fill first; all four have a bus alternative, and in August the bus is genuinely faster.

Beaches we would skip

Playa d'en Bossa is the island's longest sandy beach and also a wall of hotels, jet-ski hire and beach-club sound systems. If that is the holiday you want, it is excellent at it. As a beach, it is the least Ibizan place on Ibiza. Es Canar's main beach is serviceable but crowded and shadeless. Cala de Sant Vicent has a beautiful setting undermined by two large hotels and water that stirs up murky in any swell. And whatever the drone footage suggests, do not attempt to drive down to Atlantis — the descent is a scramble, people are rescued from it every summer, and there is no beach at the bottom.