On the eve of summer, we suggest you visit the last paradise island of the Mediterranean among the Balearic Islands - the island of Formentera. This is the smallest inhabited island of the Balearic archipelago: no more than 10,000 people permanently live on its 83 square kilometers. The island is almost flat - its highest point is located at an altitude of 192 meters above sea level. The climate here is mild, Mediterranean. The sun shines almost all year round, warming the emerald waves of the sea and the quiet white and pink beaches of the Spanish island.
Formentera is an island small, but has 69 kilometers of coast with beautiful clean beaches and delightful rocky shores, with wavy sand dunes and pine groves, with thickets of juniper, which takes unusually amazing and bizarre forms on Formentera, more suitable for man-made, miniature bonsai than a tree growing on the ground.
In the northern part of the coast, near the Spanish island of Formentera, other small but deserted islands of the Balearic archipelago are scattered into the sea. The most significant of which are:
An ancient watchtower has been preserved on the Balearic island of Espalmador, which once helped the islanders protect the island of Formentera and the nearby island of Ibiza from pirate raids.
The main wealth of this Balearic island is certainly its almost virgin nature. Here the coast is not built up by hotels and residential complexes - on Formentera the law is strict: nature first!
The Spanish island accepts a strictly limited number of vacationers, but savages are forbidden to rest here: you can't set up tents or ride trailers on this island. You can relax in hotels and not spoil the environment. Thanks to such strict measures, the islanders manage to preserve this small Spanish island of the Balearic archipelago, almost untouched by man. That's why it is considered the last of the paradise islands of the Mediterranean...
The sea near the island of Formentera has a surprisingly "tropical" emerald green color, which, combined with pink and white coastal sand, makes the Hollywood picture magical and romantically dizzying... It's hard to believe in the reality of this magnificent, slightly overly glamorous, but so attractive world...
In fact, all this exists, and the color of the sea is so unusually bright and saturated, because in the coastal waters, at the bottom of the Balearic Island there is another world: green sea meadows swing to the beat of the waves and currents, with fish grazing on them... Posidonia (Spanish: Posidonia) is the name of this underwater country declared by UNESCO as the World Heritage of Mankind.
In addition to a variety of sea beaches, there are other beaches on the island of Formentera, for example: on the Salt Lagoons, in the Ses Salines reserve, where the islanders have always mined salt... Here, as a thousand years ago, salt miners continue to work. In addition, those who wish can lie in healing mud or take a very healthy salt bath. The lagoons are located right by the sea. They are very beautiful, especially when the sun sets and all shades of pink, merging from the blue sky and the sea into purple harmony that fills the soul with silence and tranquility, appear on the smooth surface of these salt lakes.
In the reserve of Cez Salines, owned by the islands of Formentera and Ibiza, as in other protected lagoons in Spain, there are many rare and beautiful birds: here they nest, breed chicks, rest after a long flight across the sea... The kings among these birds, of course, are beautiful flamingos.
You can talk about the nature of the small Balearic island, carefully preserved by all its inhabitants, but it's time to move on to the cultural and entertainment program, namely to the list of historical sights of the island of Formentera, which are not so few.
First of all, let's go to the third millennium BC, when people already lived on this small piece of land in the middle of the sea. In 1974, archaeologists dug up a tomb from the times of the megalith, which is called Canacosta (Spanish: Ca na Costa), dating back to the 2nd millennium BC. This is the oldest megalithic structure found in the Balearic archipelago. The remains of 8 people buried at different times for 400 years (from 2,000 to 1,600 before the Nativity of Christ, approximately) were found here. Also during the excavations, bone buttons of different shapes were found - triangular and pyramidal, pieces of silicon, fragments of ceramic vessels and much more.
In addition to the megalithic tomb, the remains of slightly later settlements have been preserved on the Spanish island - they are located on Cape Barbaria (Spanish: Cap de Barbaria). This magical place was densely populated during the Bronze Age - around 1600 - 1000 BC. Archaeologists tend to believe that there was a large village here, with different types of houses and outbuildings, from which stone foundations have been preserved.
There are also monuments of the Roman Empire era on the Balearic Island, one of which is the ruins of the Roman fortress in Can Bligh (Spanish: Castellum romano de Can Blai). It was built at the end of the III - beginning of the IV centuries AD, but, according to scientists, it was not completed... Apparently, it was a private fortified castle that served as a refuge for the surrounding residents from attacks by enemies and sea pirates.
Until the 18th century, the island of Formentera was under the rule of the Arab conqueror, who at that time captured a large territory of the Iberian Peninsula. Since that era, nothing significant and of interest has been preserved on the island. In the middle of the XVIII century, the Spanish Formentera was conquered from the Moorish and became part of the Kingdom of Aragon. In the first half of the XIV century, the "black death" came to the Balearic island - bubonic plague... Few survived. In 1369, a small chapel in honor of St. Valero (Spanish: Capella de sa Tanca Vella) was built on Spanish Formentera.
Long three centuries after the plague and then increased raids by Berber pirates, the island of Formentera was almost uninhabited. More than once the Spanish crown tried to populate it again, but it was possible to do so only at the end of the XVII century, when the Spanish island began to be mastered by immigrants from Ibiza, located just three and a half kilometers from Formentera.
Since then, the life of the Balearic island has not stopped... Settlers from Ibiza and other islands received plots of land and built small simple houses located at a sufficiently large distance from each other. These white houses scattered throughout Spanish Formentera are one of the distinctive features of the island landscape of the entire Balearic archipelago.
For a long time, life on the island of Formentera was clerious, separate, only at the very end of the XIX - beginning of the XX centuries did the islanders begin to pile around churches and build roads between settlements. In addition to the chapel of St. Valero, which we described above, there are three more churches on Formentera - all buildings of the XVIII century. The main and largest of them is the Church of St. Francesc Xavier. It served the locals not only as the "house of the Lord," but also as a fortress where they took refuge from pirate raids.