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If You Want To Adapt To The Ibizan Lifestyle, Leave Your Socks At Home
Did you ever wear socks under your sandals? Have you ever been to Spain? If the answer is yes and yes, you are a guiri.
by Tanit Parada Tur
There is no consensus on what the word guiri stands for exactly. However, most Spaniards use the name to refer to the millions of tourists that come to Spain each year. Guiris are the stereotypical tourists that come to Spain, sunburned, wearing shorts, long white socks and sandals, preferably Birkenstock. However, some Spaniards call every foreigner guiri, regardless of their appearance.
It is no secret that Ibiza is a guiri magnet. In 2009, around 1.5m visitors flocked to Ibiza, swamping its 113,000 permanent residents. However some tourists in Ibiza stand apart from the guiris, and aren’t there to go clubbing all night long before watching the sun go down. Even the hard to please locals respect these tourists.
The island's first tourists were attracted to the island by its laid-back lifestyle, its rural architecture and the local’s primitive customs. All of this combined to give the island a magical and untouched quality. Many avant-garde artists and intellectuals were inspired by the island at the beginning of the twentieth century.
One of these was the dadaist Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971), founder of Berliner Dadaism, who lived in Ibiza between 1933 and 1936. He heard that Ibiza was “a virginal place, beautiful, cheap and ideal to work” and moved there, escaping the rise of Nazism. Other artists that spent time on the island were the writer Walter Benjamin who stayed there between 1932 and 1933, the architect Erwin Broner and the painter Will Faber. The Swiss architect Le Corbusier visited the island in 1929.
According to Rosa Rodríguez’s book “Avantguarda artística i societat a Eivissa, 1933-1985” (Artistic avant-garde and society in Ibiza, 1933-1985), the presence of these artists and intellectuals who were drawn to Ibiza by its low cost of living and natural beauty eventually gave way to mainstream tourists. An official document released in 1969 during Franco’s dictatorship states that hippies were encouraged to go to Ibiza because artists had already been there in the 1940’s.
Generations of visitors came to Ibiza to see for themselves what the island had to offer. These tourists, many of whom own houses and spend long periods on the island, have a completely different lifestyle than average package-holidaymakers. For example, Julian, a German whose father bought and restored a house in Ibiza in the 1970s, says that when he spent the summer in Ibiza as a kid he always played with his Ibizan neighbour who lived half a kilometre away. Now as an adult, they are still friends, even though Julian doesn’t speak Spanish and his neighbour doesn’t speak German or English. Ibizans are used to seeing the local “non-guiris” in the bars that the island’s first hippies set up. Ibizans realise these locals know a lot about their island and in turn, the Ibizans have learnt from them. For example, a popular German bakery supplies bread to the whole island. Some people prefer the bread to the typical “pan payés”.
When Julian goes to Ibiza, he goes to his secluded country house where he cooks German or Ibizan food, depending on how he feels. However, there is one thing that makes him very Ibizan: when he comes in the summer, he leaves his socks at home.