Es Vedrà
Isla de Es Vedrá
Interesting facts
- About 166 plant species grow on the rock, and one of them, the shrub Santolina vedranensis, is found nowhere else in the world.
- The island covers only about 60 hectares, yet supports a dozen plant species endemic to the region, including wild onions, sea lavenders and Micromeria.
- Feral goats, reintroduced in 1992, damaged the vegetation so badly that the Balearic government ran a cull of around fifty animals in 2016.
- Es Vedrà and its neighbouring islets were declared a nature reserve in 2002, and landing is forbidden except for permitted research or education.
- Besides Eleonora's falcons, the cliffs shelter the Balearic shearwater, Audouin's gull and the shag.
- A single laurel tree and specimens of the rare tree spurge grow among the rocks.
Why it is worth it
Rising straight out of the sea off Ibiza's south-west coast, Es Vedrà is a single limestone crag 413 metres high, steep-sided and uninhabited, its jagged silhouette dominating the horizon from the cove of Cala d'Hort. At sunset, when it turns into a dark sawtooth against the sky, it is one of the best-known sights of Ibiza, and it has collected a remarkable weight of myth for a rock with no permanent human history.
Es Vedrà is made largely of Mesozoic limestone. It is a fragment of the same mountain system that gave rise to the Balearic Islands, an outlying offshoot of the Betic ranges of southern Spain, separated from the main island by tectonic movement and erosion; the smaller islet of Es Vedranell lies alongside it. The rock and the surrounding sea belong to the Cala d'Hort nature reserve. Its cliffs are a refuge for Eleonora's falcon, an endangered migratory bird of prey, and for a subspecies of the Ibiza wall lizard. Popular belief credits Es Vedrà with unusual magnetic properties, but there is no geological basis for the claim.
Local legend makes the island home to the sirens and sea nymphs who tried to lure Odysseus from his course, and links it with the Phoenician goddess Tanit, patroness of Ibiza. A traditional Ibizan folk tale, "The Giant of Es Vedrà", tells of two brothers who rowed out to gather rock samphire to cure their father and outwitted the giant living in one of its caves with the help of sea urchins. One figure from real history did seek out the rock: in the 1850s the Carmelite friar Francisco Palau, exiled from Catalonia, rowed out to Es Vedrà to pray in solitude and later wrote of visions he experienced there. He was beatified in 1988.
Getting there
Es Vedrà lies about 2.5 km off the coast at Cala d'Hort, in the municipality of Sant Josep de sa Talaia; the town of Sant Antoni de Portmany is about 15 km away. Ibiza Airport (IBZ) is about 15 km away in a straight line. The rock is seen from the shore around Cala d'Hort and from the sea.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Ses Illetes 24.1 km · beach
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Es Vedrà is a small rocky island off the south western seaboard of the Spanish island of Ibiza. The island, which is 413 metres tall, is part of the Cala d'Hort nature reserve and lies 1.5423 miles (2.4821 km) off the coast at Cala d'Hort, which is in the municipality of Sant Josep de sa Talaia. The island is uninhabited.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
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