1973 · Ibiza Town · still open
Pacha
The cherry. Smaller, glossier, dressed. Flower Power kept a hippie memory inside a nightclub. In 2001 Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto nights were part of the week. It is the original that never quite became a hangar.
04 — Clubs
Temples of a summer.
In 2000 and 2001 the map was simple and enormous. A few rooms held the world. Some of those rooms still stand. Some only stand in the people who were there.
The old names
They began as fincas, a hangar, a farm, a harbour cherry.
Ibiza’s night is not a franchise that landed from nowhere. Pacha opened in 1973. Amnesia grew out of a country house in the seventies — for a moment the philosopher Antonio Escohotado even ran it as a social experiment. Ku, later Privilege, opened in 1978 in Sant Rafel with a pool under the stars. Space, under Pepe Roselló, became the after-hours church of Platja d’en Bossa. Es Paradis lit San Antonio in 1975. El Divino sat on the marina. Bora Bora held the beach in daylight. The hippie party and the discotheque are relatives.
1970s · Sant Rafel · still open
Amnesia
Alfredo’s terrace. Cream from Liverpool. Godskitchen. Cocoon. Two rooms, no sea view, and a reputation that outlived every fashion that passed through it. Family-run, and still stubborn about being Amnesia.
1978 as Ku · Privilege 1995
Privilege
Once in the Guinness book as the largest club on earth — a geodesic dome, a stage, a crowd that could swallow a town. Manumission, from 1994, was theatre, circus, and scandal on a Monday. The night ended, after a dispute, in 2006. The room later went dark, then returned in 2025 as UNVRS on the same Sant Rafel hill.
Late 1980s–2016 · Platja d’en Bossa
Space
The terrace. We Love Sundays. Daylight dancing after every other door had closed. Carl Cox’s Music Is Revolution, 2001 to 2016. When the lease ended, people cried in the car park. The building reopened in 2017 as Hï Ibiza. The name Space belongs to a closed chapter.
1975 · Sant Antoni · still open
Es Paradis
White columns, a water party, San Antonio’s own temple. Not always in the international press. Always in the blood of people who stayed west.
Circoloco 1999 · DC-10 from 2000
DC-10
A converted finca by the airport runway. Mondays that started when Space finished. Ugly-beautiful, underground on purpose, the counterweight to the superclub. Circoloco made a global brand from a hangar that refused to polish itself.
1992–2008 · Ibiza harbour
El Divino
On the marina, looking back at Dalt Vila. About 1,500 people, dressed, house music, a terrace over the yachts. In 2001 Roger Sanchez’s Release Yourself was in the BBC week. Smaller than Pacha, and proud of it. The Pacha group later turned the room into Lío.
Platja d’en Bossa · closed 2022
Bora Bora
A beach bar that became a day. Sand, a sound system, long sets, the sea a few metres from the booth. Gee Moore’s Bora Bora was where Platja d’en Bossa went when Space was not enough, or not yet. Not a superclub. A climate. It lasted until 2022.
A week in 2001
How the island used to be booked.
BBC Radio 1’s Ibiza club guide for 2001 still reads like a weather chart. Monday: Manumission at Privilege — “the wildest club on the island.” Tuesday: the carry-on at Space in daylight, Godskitchen at Amnesia. Thursday: Cream at Amnesia, progressive and house, Yousef and Hernán Cattáneo. Oakenfold at Pacha. Eden and El Divino in the mix. That was the public map. Private maps were taxis, rumours, a bar in Vila, a house in the north.
I will not pretend every night of mine is in that list. The point is the climate: a whole island organised around music, and enough left over — beaches, friends, a slow afternoon — that the music had somewhere to land.
Sant Antoni
The west had its own night.
Eden. Es Paradis. The Sunset Strip before the clubs, and the West End after them. San Antonio was louder, cheaper, more British in those years, and easy to sneer at from Vila. It was also where a lot of the joy actually happened. If you loved the island, you loved more than one town.
The walk back at dawn, or the taxi along the bay, is as much a club memory as any drop. The night was a route, not a room.
