The birth of a community
After the Second World War, the world was gradually rebuilt. Creativity and freedom became increasingly important, and many artists already accustomed to the islands flocked back. They were soon joined by young Europeans and Americans who had fled Vietnam, all more or less followers of the nascent hippie movement. For these souls enamored of freedom and peace, of a healthy relationship with nature, the Pityuses offered all the ingredients for happiness. As a result, a hippie community quickly sprang up around La Mola in the early 1960s.
While San Francisco is considered the cradle of the movement, London, Amsterdam, Nepal and India are also important centers of this emerging culture. What Formentera offered hippies was direct, simple contact with nature, a mild climate and an area still untouched by mass tourism. The island's inhabitants receive this new, slightly eccentric population with curiosity and benevolence, calling them "peluts" ("hairy" in Catalan) because of their shaggy hair. Coexistence was quite good. During this golden age of hippies in the Pityuses (1965-1975), thinkers, artists, idealists and gentle dreamers returning to the land helped popularize the islands. Among the most famous visitors to hippie Formentera were Bob Dylan, Nico (singer of The Velvet Underground), David Gilmour (singer and guitarist of Pink Floyd) and members of the British band King Crimson, who recorded an album on the island (including the track Formentera Lady).
An idealized cohabitation
The people of Formentera regard these "peluts" as harmless originals, which is not to the liking of the current nationalist regime. In fact, the latter noted the complicity, if not the sympathy, of a significant proportion of Formentera's population towards the hippies. With this tolerance threatening to spread to the rest of the islands, and then to the peninsula, tainting Spain's image with an aspect of poverty and decadence, the regime's commanders decided to take action.
It was an article published in the ABC newspaper on August 27, 1969, the publication of which was partly steered by the Dirección General de Seguridad (one of the Franco regime's main tools of repression), that set off the powder keg. It describes a meeting of hippies in a cave on the evening of a full moon. The article, eloquent and caricatural, describes a "Dantesque spectacle": "hundreds of totally naked young people (and) prisoners of the effects of drugs" were sitting "around a skull" that they had obtained "by desecrating a cemetery". The article goes on to say that the under-age daughter of a diplomat attended the meeting. That's all it takes to outrage public opinion. The hippy movement is corrupting the morals of Spanish youth.
A few days before the article was published, Antoni Serra Torres, mayor of the island (since 1938), reportedly sent a letter to the central government asking it to take action. The letter asserted that these hippies were leading "a licentious and uncontrolled life", indulging in fruit-picking and adopting extravagant, anti-social behavior, jeopardizing the heritage of the island's youth. Another letter, this one signed by some 200 of the island's heads of household, was submitted to the town council a few days later. The letter called for the young nudists and free-lovers to be legally barred from entering the island. According to statistics at the time, the hippies numbered around 700 in 1968 and 1,300 in 1969, out of a population of just over 3,000.
The repression of a movement
In 1971, Spanish sociologist Carlos Gil was the first to note the active participation of Formentera's inhabitants in the repression of the hippie movement. Groups of citizens were formed, scouring the territory of Formentera, hunting down anyone sleeping in the undergrowth or on the beaches. These punitive expeditions, which take place at night or dawn, are carried out by groups of 5 to 8 people accompanied by a civil guard, but are not violent. Aware that hippies are adepts of non-violence, the groups are unarmed. Rather, their aim is to lead them to the Civil Guard barracks and then expel them from the island. Legally, these expulsions are based on an intensification of the so-called "vagos y maleantes" ("vagrants and ruffians") law, also known as "La Gandula", dating from 1933. It legalized the repression of vagrants, nomads, beggars and anyone else considered anti-social, and Franco extended it to homosexuals. As a result, expulsions accelerated, reaching 3,000 in 1970 throughout the Pityuses. Maritime controls were also stepped up, reducing the number of new hippie arrivals on Formentera by the summer of 1971. Little by little, the hippies who remained on the island abandoned passive resistance and took up a more active position, integrated into the island's economy.
The hippie heritage
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, tourism gradually began to gain ground, diluting the authentic hippie spirit of the early days... What remains of this era is a certain bohemian atmosphere that is becoming gentrified, Flower Power parties, hippie markets and the authorization of nudism on all the island's beaches. In 2016, a bronze sculpture of a hippie and his child (inspired by a famous photograph of the period) was inaugurated in the Marina d'Eivissa, in homage to this fundamental episode in the history of the Pityuses.
On another note, the current presence of a plant on Formentera is attributed to the hippies. It's a hallucinogenic plant called Peganum Harmala, nicknamed the European ayahuasca. The fact that this plant is not found on any other Balearic island, coupled with the fact that it has psychedelic effects, leads us to conclude that it was introduced by hippies for their own consumption!
