Ibiza’s west coast is a single, uninterrupted sunset and its old town is a sunrise, and almost everybody books the island for the wrong half of the day.
The island is small enough that orientation decides everything. The west coast — Cala Comte, Cala d’Hort, Benirràs — looks straight out at open sea with Es Vedrà standing off it, and from May to September the sun sets into the water there with nothing in the way. That is the famous Ibiza and it is genuinely as good as the photographs. The east coast and Dalt Vila do the opposite: the walled town sits on a hill above the harbour facing east, so it is lit at six in the morning, empty, cool, and looks like a different island entirely. What nobody says is how much of the year that works and how little of it is bookable. In July and August the road to Cala Comte is a queue from seven in the evening, there is no parking within a kilometre, and a hundred people are standing where the photograph is. The same location on a Tuesday in late May, or the third week of September, is empty. The island’s season and its photographic season overlap by about six weeks, and they are not the same six weeks.
Pick the session and roughly when. Thirty seconds, and the price is fixed there.
They pick the hour, because in Spain the hour decides the photograph.
Edited photographs in your private gallery, on the turnaround stated for your session.
Late May, June and the second half of September are the island at its best: warm water, full light, and a fraction of the people. July and August are the peak of everything including the prices, the traffic and the crowds at every viewpoint — a session is still possible but it is scheduled around access rather than around light. October is beautiful and quiet and half the island has closed. November to April the island is genuinely shut: no restaurants, no boats, and a cold, clear, empty landscape that a few couples come specifically for.
Here is where to shoot in Ibiza, with ideal times and permit notes.
A small pebble beach looking straight at Es Vedrà, a 400-metre limestone rock standing out of the sea two kilometres offshore. The sun goes down beside it rather than behind it for most of the summer, which is better: the rock stays a solid dark shape against a lit sky instead of being swallowed.
A walled Renaissance town on a hill, stacked whitewashed houses, bougainvillea, and a cathedral terrace looking down over the harbour and out to Formentera. At seven in the morning you will meet two street cleaners. From eleven it is a cruise-ship route and there is no session to be had.
North-west facing, with a rock offshore that the island calls the finger of God, and a long shallow bay that goes rose and then violet after the sun drops. On Sunday evenings the drummers arrive and it becomes several hundred people; any other day it is a handful.
Flat evaporation pans that hold a mirror of sky, with flamingos on them through the autumn and a pink cast to the water that is salt rather than a filter. It is the one landscape on the island that looks like nowhere else in Spain, and at sunrise there is nobody in it.
These come under the Ibiza rate: a photographer travels out from the city at no extra charge, and the session is priced exactly as it would be in Ibiza itself.
Realistic, but not at Cala Comte or Benirràs, which by then are a car park problem before they are a photographic one. In that week we use the smaller west-coast coves — Cala Escondida, Punta Galera — where the same sun goes into the same sea and there are twenty people instead of four hundred. The alternative is a sunrise, and in August a sunrise in Dalt Vila is the best session on offer.
Yes, and it changes the day rather than adding to it. A small charter out of Sant Antoni at six in the evening gets you the west coast from the water with the light behind the island, which is the one angle nobody standing on a beach has. It is a separate cost, arranged directly with the operator, and it needs a flat sea — the day before is when it is decided.
