Benirras sits well off the island's crowded southern strips, reached through woodland on the wilder northern seaboard. Pine-clad cliffs rise steeply on either side, sheltering a bay whose clear water makes the cove a favorite for snorkeling, though swimmers are warned to watch for the boat traffic that crowds the bay in summer. Rocks bracket both ends of the beach, and along them stand several old dry-dock fishermen's shacks, low stone boathouses that recall the cove's working past. Private yachts and motorboats drop anchor in the calm water, while footpaths thread up from the sand and into the surrounding woods.

Offshore, in the middle of the bay, a distinctive rock rises from the water: Cap Bernat. Its silhouette refuses to settle into one thing. Islanders and visitors have described it, variously, as a woman kneeling at prayer, a giant baby, and the Sphinx of Egypt, each viewer finding a different figure in the same stone. That ambiguity suits Benirras, a place that has always meant different things to different people. Framed against the sunset, with the drums going, the rock becomes the natural focal point of the cove, a fixed silent shape at the center of all that movement and noise.

The drumming has a specific origin. On Sunday, 18 August 1991, a gathering of anti-war activists, hippies, and other sympathizers assembled on the beach at Benirras to protest the first Gulf War in Iraq. The event became known as the Day of the Drums, and it did not end when the protest did. It grew into an annual gathering, and then into a weekly one, much to the unease of local authorities and emergency services who worried about the crowds descending on so small and remote a cove. Bylaws increasingly restricted the gatherings until, in 2002, the organized event was banned outright.

The ban did not silence the drums. A devoted collective of drummers kept turning up, and the Sunday-sunset ritual quietly reestablished itself as the cove's signature, so that today people still come from around the world to drum the sun down over the water. As the light drops behind the headland, the rhythm builds and dancers move on the sand, entranced by the endless beat, while Cap Bernat darkens to a silhouette offshore. What began as a single day's protest against a distant war has become one of Ibiza's most enduring rituals, proof that a gathering can outlast the cause that started it and simply become a way of marking the end of the day.