We spoke to a DJ from Manchester, a wedding party from Surrey and a man who wasn’t Peter Stringfellow. Tatty old baseball cap knocking about? Bullseye. Post-divorce Jeff Bezos glowing-up in St Tropez. But, then, anyone who wears a work shirt with swimming shorts looks like they’re worth a few bob, don’t they? It’s the Billionaire-on-tour look. What’s the rest of the crowd like? Worth a few bob, you’d have to say. Not, in a word, the sort of setting you expect to bump into Wayne Lineker.
It’s hard to pick holes in 7Pines Ibiza, but the size of bedrooms might be one 7Pines’ ultramodern Pure Seven Spa is spread over 1,500 sq mīreakfast is served at Cone Club.
Come evening, you can track the sun sinking behind the uninhabited island from 7Pines’ Cone Club. During the day you can marvel at the giant submerged dinosaur from the hotel’s glass-ended, adults-only infinity pool. It’s shaped like a spike on the back of a stegosaurus. Rumour has it that Es Vedrà is the third most magnetic point on the planet. Both claim to mark the spot where Atlantis disappeared. We preferred the steam baths and saunas in the hotel’s ultramodern ocean-facing spa, which looks like a wing of Tony Stark’s house. You imagine the born-again puritan Brand would be all over the hotel’s full-moon yoga classes. The sort of place Russell Brand might once have checked himself into. You can’t even hear the sea crashing against the cliffs below. It’s not just that the hotel is off the beaten track – it emerges out of a pine forest, hence the name, after a five-minute drive down an isolated dirt track – but its vast footprint (it covers the size of eight football pitches) and all-white colour scheme create the sense that you’re staying in a kind of sanctuary. The hotel became a member of ‘Destination By Hyatt’ in 2021, having briefly operated under the Kempinski umbrellaħPines Ibiza styles itself as a ‘resort’, but ‘retreat’ might be a better word. (Almost) Everything else (the shabby lobby doesn’t exactly scream ‘five star’) is pretty much bang on the money. The only clue that the original development probably wasn’t aiming to open with five stars next to its name is the size of the bedrooms and bathrooms, which, and how should we put this, are a little on the cosy side. The hotel briefly operated under the Kempinksi umbrella, before joining the Hyatt group in 2021 – the hospitality giant’s first foray into Ibiza. A cliff-top development consisting of dozens of boxy whitewashed houses in the style of a traditional Ibizan village, the resort – as it exists today – is the vision of Dusseldorf-based investment group 12.18, which, in 2018, finished transforming a half-built hotel into an all-suite complex with three restaurants and three bars (one of which was designed by the Pershing Yachting group). The story of 7Pines Ibiza is a little different. 7Pines Ibiza Resort incorporates 186 suites If you’ve ever booked what’s been advertised as a ‘five-star’ hotel in Ibiza and turned up to a matchbox room with a poky bathroom and weird layout, you now know why.
The only building purpose-built as a five-star crashpad remains the Ibiza Gran Hotel, which, at the tail end of last year, became the first hotel on the island to be awarded a Michelin star. Oku, which opened in 2021, is, partly, a reconfigured apartment block workers on Six Senses Ibiza, the most ambitious reconfiguring of a former hotel yet, had to down tools when a group of dogged environmentalists managed to prove that developers had failed to gain proper planning permission (the hotel eventually opened in 2021, much to the chagrin of said eco-warriors). The no-frills Don Toni Hotel became the Hard Rock Hotel in 2014 a year later, the even less-frills Fiesta Club Palm Beach became the Grand Palladium. Neighbouring Ushuaïa Tower, which opened in 2012, used to be the three-star Hotel Playa d’en Bossa. Ushuaïa, which kick-started Ibiza’s transition from mainstream dance Mecca to VIP playground, was formerly the three-star Fiesta Club. 7Pines’ adults-only infinity pool with Es Vedrà in the background It’s why most of the ‘five-star’ hotels that have sprung up since Ushuaïa opened in 2011 have launched in the shells of former, less shiny hotels. Ibiza’s coastline can barely be touched and anything added to the interior of the island must be in keeping with what’s already there. Thanks to some budgie-smuggler-tight construction regulations, getting proposals for new-builds past the White Isle’s planning department is akin to getting Gary Lineker to a champagne spray party at his younger brother’s O Beach club (we’ll run into that white-haired Lothario a little later, I kid you not). Of course, the problem for anyone looking to build a five-star hotel in Ibiza wasn’t the lack of demand.
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