Away From the Beach Parties, Ibiza’s Inland Villas Are All the Rave
By SHIVANI VORA
Wed, Sep 6, 2023 9:19am
4 min
4 min
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.”
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
By
Thu, Sep 3, 2026 5 min
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
