Formentera spends the summer being looked at. In September it gets to work.
This month the Qué Celeste festival reaches its tenth edition on the island, and Ibiza & Formentera Preservation has joined the programme with four free activities spread across September — a beach clean, a morning out with the scientists who monitor the health of the Balearic coastline, a collective exhibition of art made from recovered waste, and the planting of a butterfly garden. None of them costs anything. Two of them require nothing more than turning up.
"Ten editions of the Qué Celeste Festival show that there is a real appetite in Formentera for coming together, taking part and acting on the environment," says Itziar Arratibel, programme director at Ibiza & Formentera Preservation. "We are glad to be part of that trajectory and to contribute a programme that lets people approach conservation from very different angles — science, biodiversity, art."
Here is what is on, in order.
Saturday 12 September: cleaning S'Estufador
The programme opens with a beach clean at S'Estufador, from 10:00 to 12:00. The meeting point is the church at La Mola.
S'Estufador is one of those small, rocky, north-facing inlets that quietly collects whatever the sea has been carrying — which is precisely why it is worth cleaning and precisely why it is worth seeing. Two hours is enough to make a visible difference to a cove that size, and enough to change how you look at every other beach on the island afterwards.
It is free, open to anyone who wants to join, and no advance registration is needed. Bring a hat, water and shoes you do not mind getting wet.
Friday 18 September: a morning with the people who measure the Mediterranean
The most unusual thing on this list happens on Friday 18 September, from 09:00 to 13:00, at S'Illa de s'Aigua Dolça. This is a research outing opened up to the public — a chance to go into the field alongside the scientists who study the state of the Balearic coast.
Leading it is Samuel Pinya, biologist and professor of Ecology at the Universitat de les Illes Balears. Participants will observe marine species in situ and learn what those species actually tell us about the health of the Mediterranean. Not a lecture with slides: the real thing, in the water, with the people who do it for a living.
The outing forms part of the Coastal Health Monitoring Scheme (CHMS), the UIB's long-running scientific programme tracking the condition and evolution of coastal ecosystems across the Balearics. This year, for the first time, the scheme is co-funded by Ibiza & Formentera Preservation.
Participation is free but registration is required at info@ibizapreservation.org. Bring a swimsuit, a towel, and footwear suitable for beach or rock.
Sunday 20 September: fourteen artists, four islands, one pile of rubbish
On Sunday 20 September at 20:00, the Centre Antoni Tur 'Gabrielet' in Sant Francesc opens a collective exhibition dedicated to art and the reuse of waste. It runs until 27 September.
Fourteen artists from all four Balearic islands are taking part — five from Formentera, five from Mallorca, two from Menorca and two from Ibiza. The works are built from recovered objects and materials: plastics and debris collected from beaches, reused glass, old sails, discarded fishing nets, all transformed through a range of artistic and craft disciplines.
If that sounds worthy rather than interesting, it is worth knowing what these pieces actually look like. At the equivalent show in Menorca, beach plastic sorted by colour and size was mounted on plywood panels like geological strata, so that a visitor standing in front of them was really reading a cross-section of the sea.
Elsewhere, drawings appeared on sheets of handmade paper flecked with the very plastic fragments the paper was made from — figures emerging from a surface that is itself part of the subject.
And a fish was assembled entirely from black plastic offcuts — remote controls, fan housings, a shoe sole — which from three metres away read as a single dark creature, and from one metre away read as an inventory of everything we throw away. The material does the arguing.
The Formentera show continues the work of the first Encuentro de Artistas y Artesanas del Reciclaje, held in Menorca in November 2025 as part of Tejiendo Futuro: Alianza por la Preservación de las Baleares, a cross-island project run jointly by Ibiza & Formentera Preservation, Menorca Preservation and Mallorca Preservation. That first gathering brought together 25 artists and craftspeople from the four islands to share techniques and experience around reusing materials, and closed with a group exhibition in Alaior.
"That this initiative is now reaching Formentera lets us keep weaving links between creators across the islands, and offer people other ways of thinking about waste through creativity," says Arratibel.
Entry is free, and the show is up for a week — so if you cannot make the opening, you have until Sunday 27 September.
Saturday 26 September: planting for butterflies
The programme closes on Saturday 26 September, from 10:00 to 14:00, with the creation of a butterfly garden at the Espai Cultural in Sant Ferran.
It will be the second such garden on Formentera under the Mariposas para la Biodiversidad project, which since 2024 has planted close to 2,000 aromatic herbs at various points across Ibiza and Formentera to support butterflies and other pollinators. Aromatic herbs are the right tool for the job here: they cope with the islands' dry summers, they need almost no water once established, and they flower long enough to feed pollinators through the shoulder seasons.
It is free, and registration is required at info@ibizapreservation.org.
Why September is the right month for this
There is a practical logic to holding all of this now. The summer crowds have thinned, the sea is still warm enough to get into without flinching, and the light in Formentera in late September is the best it gets all year. It is also the moment when the island takes stock of what the season left behind — which is, more or less, the subject of every one of these four activities.
Two of them need no booking at all. Two need one email. Between them they cover a morning in the water with a marine biologist, two hours of picking plastic off a cove, an exhibition that makes something out of that plastic, and a garden planted for insects. That is a reasonable month.
Registration and information: info@ibizapreservation.org
For everything else happening across Ibiza and Formentera this month — fiestas, concerts, markets and free screenings — check the Ibiza Calendar agenda.
Photographs: Encuentro de Artistas y Artesanas del Reciclaje, 'Tejiendo Futuro', Menorca 2025.
