If you are on the island between now and the end of next week, you are here for the single best week of the Ibiza summer that almost no visitor plans for. Sant Antoni de Portmany is deep into the Festes de Sant Bartomeu, and the town is about to spend nine days doing the thing it does better than anywhere else on the island: throwing an enormous, free, entirely local party and inviting whoever happens to be standing there.
This is not a ticketed event. There is no guest list, no table minimum, no wristband. There is a bay, a town that has been preparing for months, two hundred drones, a fireworks castle, a big band, a swing festival on the sand and — this being Ibiza — several hundred people in a plaza eating tapas and arguing about petanca. Here is what is happening, when, and how to actually see it.
What Sant Bartomeu actually is
Every parish on Ibiza has a patron saint and a fiesta built around them, and most visitors sail straight past all of it. Sant Antoni de Portmany's headline saint is Sant Antoni Abat in January, but 24 August belongs to Sant Bartomeu — the town's second patron festival, and by far the bigger one in terms of sheer scale, because it lands in the middle of high summer when everyone is actually here.
The shape of it is the same every year and worth understanding before you turn up. The week builds through sport, workshops, tastings and open-air concerts, then compresses into a weekend of spectacle, and finishes on the 24th with a solemn mass and procession in the afternoon, folk dancing in the evening, and fireworks over the bay at the very end of the night. The religious part and the party part are not in tension here. They are the same event, run by the same families, and they have been for generations.
If you have only ever known Sant Antoni as the West End, this week is the correction.
Drones on Sunday, a fireworks castle on Monday
The two set-pieces are back to back and both are free.
Sunday 23 August, around 23:00 — a 200-drone show. Drone displays have quietly replaced fireworks in a lot of Spanish towns, and Sant Antoni is running both. Two hundred units flying formations over the bay is a genuinely strange and lovely thing to watch, silent where fireworks are loud, and it photographs beautifully off the water. Get to the Passeig de ses Fonts side of the bay well before 22:30 if you want a clean sightline.
Monday 24 August, at the end of the night — the gran castillo de fuegos artificiales. This is the one. The "fireworks castle" over the bay of Portmany closes the day of Sant Bartomeu and is the single most attended moment of Sant Antoni's year. The whole town walks down to the water. Expect the promenade to be shoulder to shoulder by 23:00, expect every terrace along the front to be full, and expect the boats in the bay to have the best seats in the house.
A local tip for both nights: the far side of the bay, over towards Caló des Moro and the Sunset Strip, is less crowded than the central promenade and the display still reads perfectly from there.
Free music all week, on the sand and in the street
Sant Antoni's programme is stacked with live music that costs nothing.
La Movida de Sant Bartomeu on Saturday 22 August from 21:00 is the town's big open-air music night — a proper street concert as part of the fiesta programme, free and outdoors, and the one where the whole town turns out rather than just the visitors.
Over in Ibiza Town, the X Sunset Swing Festival hits its tenth edition and opens on Friday 21 August at 20:00, with a Hula Party on Sunday 23 August at 20:00 down on Platja de s'Arenal. If you have never seen a swing festival on a beach at golden hour, it is exactly as charming as it sounds — dancers of every age, live bands, and a very low barrier to joining in. The same crew run the Vermút a 45 rpm sessions at Eddie's Diner on s'Arenal, with vinyl DJ sets and beginner swing classes on the sand.
And on Friday 21 August at 22:00, the Ciutat d'Eivissa Big Band plays a free Music in the Neighbourhoods concert at Playa d'en Bossa. Twenty-odd musicians, no ticket, sea air. This is the kind of thing the island's town halls quietly fund all summer and almost nobody outside the island knows about.
The small stuff, which is the best stuff
The headline shows will be crowded. The rest of the Sant Bartomeu programme is where you actually meet Sant Antoni.
Saturday 22 August, 20:30 — trotting races at the Hipòdrom de Sant Rafel. Harness racing is a genuine Balearic obsession and the Sant Rafel track on a warm August night, with families in the stands and a bar doing steady business, is one of the most authentically Ibizan evenings available to a visitor. Free, and utterly unlike anything else on the island's calendar.
Saturday 22 August, 19:00 — X Trikids Sant Antoni at the Can Coix sports complex: a promotional triathlon for kids aged 2 to 15, finisher medal for everyone. If you are here with children, this is a lovely hour.
Saturday 22 August, 19:00 — horchata and fartons tasting on the Passeig de ses Fonts. Free, sweet, and a good excuse to be on the promenade at exactly the right time of evening.
There is also a Sant Bartomeu padel tournament on Friday 21 August, outdoor chess on the same evening, children's craft workshops with the artisans of Sa Colla de l'Horta at Es Molí d'en Simó on Friday from 18:00, and, on the 24th itself, folk dancing from the Grup Folklòric Brisa de Portmany at 21:30 — the ball pagès, in full traditional dress, which is worth staying up for even if you have somewhere else to be.
Beyond Sant Antoni: markets and the north
The rest of the island has not stopped either.
Tuesday 18 August is Las Dalias night market in Sant Carles, the island's best-known hippy market and still, after all these years, a genuinely good browse. Organised trips run from San Antonio from around €17.50 if you would rather not drive.
Thursday 20 August, from 19:00 — the Mostra Artesanal de Sant Rafel returns for its sixteenth edition. Free, craft-focused, and set in the village that has become the island's ceramics capital. Go for the makers, stay for the dinner.
Also on Thursday 20 August, up in Sant Joan de Labritja, a village fiesta programme opens in the traditional way: bell-ringing and flag-hanging at noon, the primera sonada de flabiols — the first playing of the island's ancient reed flutes — the first outing of the dimonis, a communal opening lunch, and a corretapes tapas crawl around the village bars. If you want to understand what Ibizan folk tradition sounded like before the amplification arrived, the flabiols are it.
Practical notes
Get to Sant Antoni by bus if you can. The L3 from Ibiza Town runs frequently and late in August, and parking near the bay on the nights of the 23rd and 24th will be genuinely difficult from about 21:00 onwards. If you drive, park inland and walk down.
Nothing in the Sant Bartomeu programme requires a ticket. Timings on village fiesta programmes do shift, so check the day's listings before you set out. Bring a layer for late nights on the water — August evenings on the bay drop cooler than people expect — and eat before 21:00 or plan on eating very late, because the town's kitchens fill up fast on fiesta nights.
And if you only do one thing: be on the Sant Antoni waterfront on the night of Monday 24 August. The fireworks castle over the bay of Portmany is the closest thing this island has to a single shared moment, and it costs nothing at all.
Find the full programme and every event happening across Ibiza this week on ibiza-calendar.com.