Away From the Beach Parties, Ibiza’s Inland Villas Are All the Rave

Demand for historic, inland homes is driving the latest housing boom in Ibiza—Spain’s party-loving island in the Mediterranean that’s better known for attracting celebrities and business tycoons to rent seaside villas or bask in their mega yachts along the coast.

Prices for renting or buying a property on the island have long been a pricey proposition, with demand high and inventory low. Since the start of the pandemic, however, this interest has grown significantly, along with prices. Waterfront properties are perennially popular and glamourised in the global press, but the residential market on the inner part of the island away from the sea has underpinned this recent spike, according to Jack Harris, a partner in the International Residential Department at the London-based firm Knight Frank.

“The coastal areas are more touristic, and as a result, they’re more transient and seasonal, with a fluctuating population that peaks in summer,” he said. “The centre of the island is a year-round destination with a variety of villages that bustle with life that include festivals, Christmas markets, art galleries, restaurants and more.”

Located off Spain’s eastern coast and one of the main Balearic islands, Ibiza may rank as the world’s most legendary party destination. It’s a culture that’s epitomised by the electronic dance music scene and nightclubs such as Pacha and Hi, where all-night bashes are the norm and tables command up to $50,000. According to Serena Cook, the founder of the luxury lifestyle company Deliciously Sorted Ibiza and a local resident, Ibiza has always been a hub for creatives.

Cook added that Ibiza’s mild winters, which see plenty of sunny days, have attracted home buyers to move there full time. People also come for the free-spirited vibe

“It’s a free-spirited place where anything goes, and there’s a melting pot of different nationalities,” she said. “In the last half-decade or so, it has gotten more and more luxury-focused.”

Booming Inland Towns

Santa Gertrudis is at the epicentre of inland living and has numerous notable restaurants and cafes as well as the international children’s school Morna International College, where transplants and locals enrol their children. Other towns include Sant Joan de Labritja and Sant Josep de sa Talaia.

In contrast to the contemporary villas typically near or on the water, these inland areas stand out for their fincas—either traditional homes dating to the 18th and 19th centuries that are constructed of mud and stone or new properties built in the classic finca style but reinterpreted for modern-day living. Harris and Cook said that the latter are hard to come by because the local government is stringent about protecting the landscape and doesn’t grant permits easily.

Fincas feature views of hills and olive trees instead of the ocean, and over the last three years, Harris said, the market for them has appreciated in the double digits.

“The advent of remote working is in large part behind this rise,” he said. “People are drawn to the serenity of the countryside, the amount of outdoor space you can get and the fact that you’re surrounded by nature.”

Given Ibiza’s relatively small size, the coast from any of these inland towns is less than a 30-minute drive away.

“If you feel like going snorkelling one day, you can choose the beach with the calmest water, and if windsurfing is what you’re after, you’re never too far from the beach with the best wind,” Harris said.

Local real estate firms also report an increase in sales of inland properties. It’s a local boom that’s defying a global slowdown that’s impacted high-end markets from London to Berlin in the face of rising interest rates and economic uncertainty.

Javier Medina, an agency manager at the real estate firm John Taylor Ibiza, said that his company has seen “soaring sales” in the past two years. “We had an increase of 30% in the first half of 2023 compared with 2022,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cook said her business “has gone through the roof.”

“We’ve jumped by 20% and sold five countryside homes last year for US$5 million or more,” she said. Inland homeowners include buyers from the U.S., especially New Yorkers and tech entrepreneurs from the West Coast, Europeans from countries such as England, France and the Netherlands. Several notable examples include the French designer Isabel Marant and the New York art gallery owner Howard Greenberg.

In following the trend, Cook herself sold her coastal home in 2021 and moved to a countryside property because she wanted more outdoor space and a garden to grow her own produce. Cook is the founder of Ibiza Preservation, a nonprofit that protects the local environment. The group recently reported that organic farming in Ibiza has jumped 20% in the last 10 years, with many inland homeowners growing their own fruits and vegetables.

Not Exactly a Bargain

A finca’s lack of sea views doesn’t mean bargain pricing, Harris said.

“With pricing high, your money shall certainly go further inland in comparison with the coast,” he said. “That said, properties historically hold their value no matter where they are.”

A countryside finca that’s in good condition and has four bedrooms, open views, a swimming pool, pool house, multiple outdoor terraces and possibly some olive trees, costs at least US$3.5 million, Harris said. Coastal properties of the same caliber are more than US$5 million and can be higher if they offer especially dramatic views.

The architecture firm Blakstad Ibiza is behind the most sought-after and priciest inland homes. Founded by Rolf Blackstad in the 1960s, it’s now run by his son, also named Rolf. The company refurbishes rundown fincas and also builds new ones, the younger Blakstad said, with prices averaging between US$6 million to US$18 million for a property.

“We had a half dozen or so projects a year pre-Covid, but now work on a dozen,” he said.

Blakstad’s fincas typically span between 5,000 and 6,000 square feet and feature sustainably sourced timber, bedrooms with outdoor showers, solar energy, large doors that open to outdoor spaces such as terraces and gardens that may blend into farmland.

As an example, Knight Frank is currently offering a renovated turnkey Blakstad-designed finca in the village of San Rafael that costs close to US$6.5 million and is set on a hillside. Surrounded by pine forests and Mediterranean plants, it has five bedrooms spread over a main and guest house, five baths, an abundance of outdoor space including a landscaped garden and a swimming pool.

“Ibiza’s parties will forever be iconic and appeal to tourists,” Harris said. “Look a little deeper, however, into the middle of the island, and you’ll discover why so many people are choosing to make it their home.”

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Away From the Beach Parties, Ibiza’s Inland Villas Are All the Rave

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.