Portinatx sits about an hour's drive from the airport, tucked into the far north of the municipality of Sant Joan de Labritja, and getting there has always taken effort. A single bus, number 20, runs to Ibiza Town, every few hours in summer and only twice a day through the winter. An infrequent boat links the bay to Es Canar and Port de Sant Miquel. The village itself is modest by design: a handful of restaurants and supermarkets, a tobacconist, three cash machines, and small beaches whose gently shelving sands make it a favourite with families rather than partygoers. Above it all rises sa Descoberta, a wooded hill climbing to roughly 250 metres.

The area's great landmark stands about an hour's walk, or twenty minutes' drive, from the village centre: the Punta Moscarter lighthouse, a slender white tower on the rocky headland. It is no antique. Work began in 1975, and when the light came into service in 1978 its fifty-two-metre concrete column became the tallest lighthouse in the entire Balearic Islands, overtaking older masonry towers on Menorca. Set against the blue of sea and sky, its pale shaft is visible for miles and has become the emblem of Ibiza's northern coast, a modern beacon standing over an ancient shoreline. From the headland at its base, the whole northern shore unfolds, a jigsaw of coves and rocky points running away east and west.

Visitors who know only the island's arid south are often startled by the north. Around Portinatx the countryside is heavily forested, a dense green mantle of pine that sets Ibiza apart from its balder Balearic neighbours, Mallorca and Menorca. The hills fold down to the water in a series of sheltered inlets, and the resort spreads loosely among them rather than crowding a single strip. This is Ibiza in a lower key: warm, unhurried, built for families and long swims and slow evenings rather than for the nightlife the island exports to the world. Even in high summer, the pace here rarely rises above a stroll.

Not long ago Portinatx was little more than a scatter of fishermen's houses at the end of a long road, and its transformation into a small resort, an urbanization in the local term, happened within living memory. The remoteness that once made it hard to reach also protected it. Cut off from the rest of the island by distance and thin transport, it never developed the frantic edge of the resorts to the south. What grew here instead was gentler: a place people return to year after year precisely because so little about it changes.

Portinatx guards one persistent piece of folklore. Locals, the Ibithencans as the island's natives are known, have long claimed that the bay stood in for the South Seas during the filming of the 1958 musical South Pacific. No firm record backs the story, and the film's famous scenery was shot largely in Hawaii, so the tale is best enjoyed as a village legend rather than fact. Still, standing on the sand and looking out over the turquoise shallows and the wooded points, it is not hard to see why someone, somewhere, decided the story ought to be true. The claim endures because it flatters the place, and because the shallows really do glow an improbable blue.