With a population just under 12,000, Formentera stays quieter than its famous neighbor for most of the year. Then July and August arrive, and the ferries disgorge crowds so overwhelmingly Italian that you hear more Italian spoken than Catalan or Castilian Spanish. The hotels here are small, family-owned, and mostly one- or two-star; there is nothing corporate about the place. In summer the island even caps how many cars can circulate, requiring a permit from June to September and enforcing it with cameras and police. The absence of an airport is not an oversight. It is the reason the island still feels like the Balearics did decades ago.

The locals will tell you the real sight on Formentera is underwater. Pull on a snorkel and mask, and the sea turns transparent to the sandy floor, fish drifting through light that seems to have no obstacle. The beaches themselves invite comparison to the Caribbean: pale sand, clean water, and, outside peak weeks, remarkable emptiness. The island wears its clothing-optional culture easily, without pressure or spectacle, a mix of states of dress that nobody remarks upon. The sun, though, is fierce and unfiltered. First-timers underestimate it and pay for the mistake by evening.

Formentera became one of the hippie movement's most storied havens, and the inheritance lingers in the island's temperament. Off-season, when the high-spending crowds thin out, a mood of simplicity settles back over the coves and lanes: back-to-nature, unhurried, cheap. Many of the small restaurants scattered across the island still carry that spirit, informal kitchens serving honest food. Increasingly the island manages this fragility deliberately, laying boardwalks through the dunes so the vegetation can regenerate and protecting stretches of the surrounding sea as zones of scientific interest where certain plants and fish are off-limits to harm.

Formentera keeps few museums or castles, and that scarcity is part of its honesty. What history it holds is scattered and modest: megalithic sites, Roman-era ruins, watchtowers thrown up in the 18th century against corsairs, and the plain 18th-century chapel of Sant Francesc Xavier. Two lighthouses guard the island's extremities, Cap de Barbaria on the southern tip and La Mola on the eastern heights, each reachable across scrubland that ends abruptly at a cliff edge. Near the Cap de Barbaria light, a cave opens in the rock. Everywhere, the abandoned salt marshes and the Mediterranean pines mark a place shaped more by weather and sea than by builders.