Hotels in Sant Miquel De Balansat

Sant Miquel De Balansat

Sant Miquel de Balansat is a scattered village in the north of Ibiza, the most populous parish of the municipality of Sant Joan de Labritja. It is not a single settlement but several: the village itself, the Port de Sant Miquel down on the coast, and Es Pla Roig inland between them. Its church stands on a hill above the houses, a position that earned it the byname Puig de Missa, and its oldest fabric dates from the fourteenth century, making it one of the earliest surviving churches on the island. A central nave was added in the sixteenth century and two chapels, Rubio and Benirras, at the end of the seventeenth; inside them are frescoes of floral and religious motifs that are among the finest of their kind on Ibiza. The whitewashed, blocky, flat-roofed form of the building is the classic Ibizan rural church, and the village around it has kept the same architecture. Three kilometres north the road drops to the Port de Sant Miquel, a narrow and dramatic bay enclosed by high ground on both sides, with a sheltered sandy beach at its head. In the cliff above the port is the Cova de Can Marca, a cave system once used by smugglers to bring goods ashore out of sight and now open to visitors. East of the village lies Benirras, the cove where drummers have gathered to play at sunset since the 1970s, overlooked by the rock formation known as the Finger of God. Behind Benirras the hill of Es Pujolots rises to 195 metres, and the lanes that cross this country pass through terraced fields, carob and almond. This is the quiet, agricultural north of Ibiza, twenty-odd kilometres from Ibiza Town and a world away from the clubs of the south-west.