We have a thrilling voyage to tell you. Care to come along?
Many are the steps that have brought Santa Eulària des Riu to where she is now, from the first prehistoric dwellers to the melting pot of nationalities that today reside in our municipality. Discover our history. Follow the footsteps that came before you on your journey to here. And then sit and listen to the fabulous legends populated by the imps and pixies of Ibiza.
Each stage of development, since the earliest Bronze Age dwellers through to the modern arrival of tourism, has moulded our municipality. Its amazing history goes beyond books to encompass our cornfields with their carved terraces, their oil presses, their mills, their irrigation ditches and their watchtowers. Just as our houses and churches, conceived as fortresses, tell their own stories.
History of Santa Eulària and Ibiza: Life with an eye to the sea
The fact that so many different peoples have passed through our territory is not an accident. Ibiza’s strategic location in the Mediterranean Sea, closer to Algeria than to Barcelona, made it a perfect base for replenishing provisions, a circumstance which attracted the Phoenicians, who chose it as one of the bases on their trade routes thanks to the highly valued salt they obtained in its salt flats and were, in fact, the first people to exploit this resource commercially. The Romans also had their eye on Ibiza and called it Ebusus. From them we conserve certain remains in our municipality, such as the s’Argamassa aqueduct.
The three centuries during which the Moors occupied the island also left their mark on Santa Eulària des Riu, visible in the oil presses, irrigation channels, cisterns, water wheels and mills that still dot our countryside. Another agrarian jewel can be found in Ses Feixes, a direct legacy of Almoravid engineering. The name the Moors gave our territory, Xarc, which means east in Arabic, was carried over by the Catalonians when they conquered the island for the Crown of Aragon in the 13th century. That place name eventually became Quartó del Rei (Quarter of the King) and, over time has transformed again into Santa Eulària des Riu, the name of the first church, built next to the river but destroyed in one of the numerous pirate attacks that befell our coasts until the 17th century.
From the Catalan conquest to the present
Puig de Missa was raised with the aim of being an authentic fortress which could provide refuge against Turkish raids. Additionally, it guarded the watermills dotting the river banks, vital infrastructures for the production of bread, as you will be able to see for yourself if you visit the River Interpretation Centre at Can Planetes. The houses that cluster round the church arose from the efforts at civic planning undertaken toward the end of the 18th century by Bishop Eustaquio de Azara, who proposed the creation of towns in order to offset the traditional demographic dispersion so characteristic of Ibiza. In this way, Santa Eulària, as we know it today, began to grow, although it would not be until the beginning of the 19th century that the main thoroughfares of Sant Jaume and s’Alamera came into existence.
As of the mid-20th century, the municipality began to connect with the outside world, largely as a result of young, moneyed travellers who arrived in search of inspiration for their creative endeavours and their lives in general. Artists, hippies, architects, designers, and disenchanted businessmen tired of the rat race began to drop anchor in Sant Carles de Peralta, Santa Gertrudis de Fruitera and other nearby places, thus giving rise to the cosmopolitan, bohemian milieu which has since characterized Santa Eulària des Riu, a municipality that is always alive and always moving forward, step by step.
Legends of Ibiza: Our pixies are playful; take care you don’t take one of them back in your suitcase…
Mischievous, troublesome, hardworking, gluttonous, edgy… That’s what the imps of Ibiza are like, products of a supernatural inheritance that came with the Catalan Conquest and whose imaginary beings are thought to derive originally from Roman culture. In island superstition, the most popular of these beings is the fameliar, represented in the form of a little bald man with a big head and small extremities. His main value resides in his extraordinary capacity for work, for he is able to accomplish the most laborious farming tasks in a matter of hours. On the other hand, however, he can also be the ruin of the household due to his voracious appetite, which is activated any time he stops working. This is why, as legend has it, he was always given jobs that were impossible to complete.
Tradition holds that, in order to obtain one of these little imps, one must go to wait under the old bridge of Santa Eulària des Riu, on the night of Saint John, until a flower began to grow. Said flower then had to be cut and put inside a black bottle. There it would stay until the farmer needed its help. If you want to learn more about this singular spirit, you can follow Santa Eulària’s River Route, where you will be guided by none other than a fameliar. You can also find one of these naughty nixies in front of the Town Hall, where he is sitting on a rock.
The barruguet, a gremlin with his own festival
Equally impish by temperament, the barruguet, is a small creature with an active mind whose fun consists in playing pranks in the domestic realm, perhaps throwing ash into a cooking pot, hanging off the well bucket, or making the children cry. He is so fondly regarded in Santa Eulària des Riu that one of the municipality’s most important cultural events bears his name: the Barruguet Family Theatre Festival, a series of shows and performances aimed at children – and grown-ups – held every year on the fourth weekend in May. And, since three’s a charm, there is also a third magical being who inhabits the legends of Santa Eulària: the follet, an invisible spirit with a restless character who purportedly enabled people to transit from place to place without being seen, quite similar to an analogous entity also present in French and Italian folklore.
