The arrival of the hippies in Formentera
After the Second World War, the world was gradually rebuilt. Creativity and freedom are values that become more important, so many artists already accustomed to the islands flock again. They were soon joined by young Europeans and Americans who had fled Vietnam, all more or less followers of the emerging hippy movement. For these souls in love with freedom and peace, with a healthy relationship with nature, the Pityuses offer all the ingredients for happiness. So much so that a hippy community was quickly formed in the early 1960s in the area of La Mola.
If San Francisco is considered the cradle of the movement, London, Amsterdam, Nepal and India are also important centers of this emerging culture. What Formentera offers to the hippies is a direct and simple contact with nature, a mild climate, but also a territory still spared from mass tourism. The islanders received this new, slightly eccentric population with curiosity and kindness, calling them "peluts" ("hairy" in Catalan), because of their shaggy hair. The coexistence is rather good. During this golden age of hippies in the Pityuses (1965-1975), thinkers, artists, idealists and sweet dreamers returning to the land helped popularize the islands. Among the most famous visitors to the hippy 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 song Formentera Lady).
An idealized cohabitation
The inhabitants of Formentera consider these "peluts" as harmless originals, which is not to the liking of the nationalist regime in place. The latter, in fact, noticed a complicity, if not a sympathy of a notable part of the population of Fomentera towards the hippies. This tolerance threatened to spread to the rest of the islands, and then to the peninsula, tainting the image of Spain with an aspect of poverty and decadence, and the commanders of the regime decided to act.
It was an article that appeared in the newspaper ABC on August 27, 1969, whose publication was partly directed by the Dirección General de Seguridad (one of the main tools of repression of the Franco regime), that set off the fire. It describes a meeting of hippies in a cave on a full moon night. The article, eloquent and caricatural, describes a "Dantesque spectacle": "hundreds of young people totally naked (and) prisoners of the effects of drugs" were sitting "around a skull" that they had obtained "by desecrating a cemetery". The article states that the underage daughter of a diplomat attended the meeting. This is all it takes to outrage the public's self-righteousness. The hippy movement is corrupting the morals of Spanish youth.
A few days before the publication of the article, Antoni Serra Torres, mayor of the island (since 1938), would have sent a letter to the central government asking it to act. The letter stated that the hippies were leading a "licentious and uncontrolled life", looting fruit and behaving in an extravagant and anti-social manner, endangering the heritage of the island's youth. Another letter, this one signed by some 200 heads of families on the island, was submitted a few days later to the municipal council. This letter demanded that these young people practicing nudism and free love be legally prevented from entering the island. According to the statistics of the time, the hippies were about 700 in 1968, 1,300 in 1969, on a population of a little more than 3,000 inhabitants.
The hippy repression
The Spanish sociologist Carlos Gil was the first to note in 1971 the active participation of the inhabitants of Formentera in the repression of the hippy movement. Groups of citizens were formed, going around the territory of Formentera, hunting down all those who slept in the undergrowth and on the beaches. These punitive expeditions, which take place at night or at dawn, are carried out by groups of 5 to 8 people accompanied by a civil guard, but are not violent. Conscious of the fact that the hippies are followers of non-violence, the groups are not armed. Their objective is rather to lead them to the barracks of the Civil Guard and then to expel them from the island. Legally, these expulsions are based on an intensification of the law of "vagos y maleantes" ("vagrants and thugs"), also known as "La Gandula", dating from 1933. This law legalized the repression of vagrants, nomads, beggars and anyone else considered anti-social, and Franco extended it to include homosexuals. The expulsions accelerated, reaching 3,000 in 1970 in the whole of the Pityuses. Maritime controls were also intensified, 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 began to take a more active and integrated position in the island's economy.
What's left of the hippies
At the end of the 1970's, beginning of the 1980's, tourism gradually starts to gain ground, diluting this authentic hippy spirit of the first hour... Nowadays, a certain bohemian atmosphere remains from that time, with Flower Power parties, hippie markets and the authorization on all the beaches of the island to practice nudism. In 2016, a bronze sculpture of a hippy and his child (inspired by a famous photograph of the time) was inaugurated in the Marina d'Eivissa, as a tribute to this fundamental episode in the history of the Pityuses.
In another register, the hippies are credited with the current presence of a plant on Formentera. It is a hallucinogenic plant called Peganum Harmala, nicknamed the European ayahuasca. The fact that this plant is not found on any other island of the Balearic Islands, coupled with the fact that it has psychedelic effects, leads to the conclusion that it was introduced by hippies for their own consumption.
