In front of this impromptu shrine, a bearded fellow in the lotus position was doing something with a rolling paper. Today the space, renamed El Silencio by its new French owners, has morphed into a sand-on-the-floor seaside restaurant with gorgeous wabi-sabi-like styling, a pool out back and a menu by young-gun chef Jean Imbert, known as the Jamie Oliver of France. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Here, the reinvention effort was a labour of love, taking an Eighties, plain-Jane family hotel to the next level with a total overhaul, a fine, Italian-inflected restaurant in La Mesa Escondida, wonderful gardens and rooftop tables for soaking up the extraordinary panorama. On the rock face above them a series of legends, gobbets of feel-good hippie wisdom, had been written in paint.

La Torre is not the only delicious makeover of a tired hostel – look at Los Enamorados in Portinatx, the delightful waterside bolthole curated by design freaks Pierre Traversier and Rozemarijn de Witte.Parts of my mental geography were virtually unrecognisable: Santa Gertrudis, in my day a one-horse hamlet with a couple of bars and a tobacconist, was now a fully grown town of done-up villas with a world-class cocktail bar, Overall, and Bottega il Buco, an outpost of New York restaurateur Donna Lennard’s Il Buco, also found in NoHo and the Hamptons. And that was where I headed next, drawn by the single-track roads winding among almond fields and the secret calas (creeks) of the coast. I stood on my balcony and took in the sight below: a beauteous pool, bright young things lounging in swimwear, the gentle thud of house music.

It reminded me that even as one generation moans about how much more magical and idyllic Ibiza was in their day, successive generations are already finding new sources of magic and idyll. For 10 whole years, I reflected, something very similar to this view of beams and rough-hewn plaster was what I gazed at. Lying in bed the next morning with the dazzle of a flaming June day filtering through the shutters, I looked up at the ceiling of my bedroom at Can Domo.With rustic rattan, washed-out linen and sandy floors, Jondal, on the cala of the same name, is Ibiza’s restaurant of the moment, no contest. Moving from its party-hard peak, Ibiza has gone through an introspective shift, with a desire to slow life down so it can hit its rhythm again.

The passion projects of Rebecca Frayn, who is bringing a spectacular finca in San Vicente back to productive life, and Sophie Daunais and Christian Jochnick, with their ambitious farm-to-table venture Juntos in San Mateo, are remarkable enough to warrant a story of their own.Another example of this is Petunia, where I stopped one evening for dinner on a terrace with mesmeric views of the rocky islet Es Vedrà. Along the road, sun-faded nightclub billboards advertising the closing parties of October 2019 seemed like messages from another world. But if the coast is reimagining the infrastructure of the package-tour era, out in the countryside the movement is fuelled by nostalgia for the Ibiza of a much earlier time: simpler and more pastoral. Raising my eyes along the horizon, I saw a sweep of dull identikit rooftops – the coastal suburbs of ‘San An’ – and, through a gap between the buildings, an enticing slice of blue sea.

The makeover by Dutch interior designer Carmen Straatsma is an exercise in balancing contemporary taste with an injection of personality. As such, it’s a perfect illustration of a tendency – one that has come to the fore as the island rakes over its recent past – to see what can be retrieved, reassessed, and if at all possible, recycled. On a hot day it bustles with beautiful people who come for chef Rafa Zafra’s impeccably prepared fish and shellfish.

Here, on a site that would have been visible from where I pitched my tent, is where the island’s most talked-about new place to stay has made landfall. Everything was still in post-Covid recovery mode and a strange, faintly dazed feeling was detectable. Six Senses Ibiza is certainly big and opulent, and involves a massive investment by a powerful international brand, but having visited on the eve of its opening, I’m happy to report that the alarm is mostly unjustified. I wandered around in a mild aesthetic trance, registering the twisted wooden gates between stone walls, the aroma of jasmine, the flame-thrower blasts of bougainvillaea against the white façade turned ultraviolet by the midday sun. Of course, this is a high-end hideaway that pulls out all the stops, but we’re a long way from Ushuaïa.