Cala d'Hort

Cala d'Hort is on the south-western coast of Ibiza, a small pebble and sand cove looking directly at Es Vedrà, a limestone islet rising four hundred metres straight out of the sea two kilometres offshore.

The rock is the reason people come. Es Vedrà is uninhabited, a nature reserve, and the subject of an unusual quantity of claim: that it is the third most magnetic place on earth, that it is a fragment of Atlantis, that compasses fail near it, that it was Homer's island of the sirens. None of these survives checking — the magnetic claim in particular has no measured basis — and the register says so, because the rock is genuinely striking without any of it and the folklore has become a small industry.

The cove itself is modest: pebble and coarse sand, clear deep water, a couple of restaurants, and a car park that fills. It faces west, so the sunset goes down behind the islet, which is the actual draw and needs no mythology. The islet's goats were removed in the 2010s to let the vegetation recover, which is a more consequential fact about it than any of the folklore.

The area is protected as part of the Cala d'Hort nature reserve, established after a proposed golf development and urbanisation in the 1990s was defeated by a local campaign — a fact worth more than the Atlantis story, since it is why the cove is not built on. Cala Carbó and Cala Molí just north are quieter coves on the same stretch, and Sa Caleta south of them has the Phoenician settlement.

The rock is not magnetic, is not Atlantis and does not stop compasses, and it does not need to be any of those things — four hundred metres of limestone rising out of the sea two kilometres away is sufficient. The cove was saved from a golf development by a local campaign in the 1990s, which is the fact worth carrying up the hill.