Ibiza, the Beatnik Paradise

June 14, 1962, Vol. VII, No. 34

By Louise Levitas

This time of year, the beats are returning to Ibiza like birds in season. They're en route from Bloomsbury, Schwabing, Bleecker Street, Montmartre, and other coffee-house neighborhoods to congregate on this olive and fig-tree island through October.

Izbiza is a Spanish dot in the Mediterranean close to Africa and still living partly in a Phoenician-Carthaginian-Roman-Arab past. In the tiny capital, also named Ibiza with its white Moorish-looking houses, its sixteenth-century walled quarter, its two traffic cops directing the bicycle, motor-scooter traffic, the beats meet each noon for breakfast under the awnings of a cafe on the main square. The rest of the day they take the fierce, perpetual sun in bikinis on some sea-splashed rocks outside town -- avoiding the tourist beaches -- and every night they collect at the Domino, a small cafe on Ibiza's waterfront.

Domino, halfway below street level, is as steamy as an equatorial jungle or a New York subway at rush hour, and a Village coffee-house patron would instantly recognize his habitat -- a cellar noisy with talk, crowded with other bearded, long-haired types in dungarees, barefoot girls in tight jerseys, and throbbing to the hip jazz on the record-player. The only difference is that the Domino conversations are in six or seven languages...

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