Walk into any florist in Ibiza town this week and you will not find bouquets for dinner parties. You will find chrysanthemums — buckets of them, white and ochre and deep rust, wrapped in paper and stacked three deep on the pavement outside. They appear every year in the last days of October, and they are the surest sign that the island has arrived at Tots Sants.
Most visitors spend this week looking for Halloween. Fair enough: there are costumes, there is horror cinema, there is one last loud night before the island exhales. But running underneath all of that is something much older and much quieter, and it is arguably the most Ibizan week of the entire autumn. Tots Sants — All Saints' Day, 1 November — is when the island goes to see its dead, eats too much at a long family table, and formally agrees that summer is over.
Here is what actually happens, and how to be part of it without getting in the way.
What Tots Sants in Ibiza actually is
Tots Sants is the Catalan name for All Saints' Day, a public holiday across Spain on 1 November. In 2026 it falls on a Sunday, which means no extra day off and no long weekend — but it also means the day lands exactly where it belongs, on the day families already gather.
The shape of it is simple and almost unchanged. In the morning, families go to the cemetery. They bring flowers, they tidy the grave, they stand around for a while talking to relatives they bump into doing the same thing. Then everyone goes to lunch, which lasts several hours. That's it. There is no procession, no spectacle, nothing staged for an audience. It is a domestic ritual performed simultaneously by almost everyone on the island, which is precisely what makes it worth understanding.
It is worth saying clearly: this is not a sombre day. Spanish and Ibizan grief has a sociable edge to it. Cemeteries on 1 November are busy, bright, full of children and gossip and people complimenting each other's flowers. The mood is closer to a village reunion than a vigil.
The week before: scrubbing stone and buying flowers
The real work happens in the days leading up. Through the last week of October, village cemeteries fill with people doing maintenance — scrubbing marble, repainting the whitewash on family niches, pulling weeds, replacing cracked glass on photographs. If you drive past the cemetery at Sant Josep or Sant Joan around now, you will see buckets, brushes and ladders, and someone's grandmother supervising.
Then the flowers. Chrysanthemums are the Tots Sants flower across Spain, to the point that many Spaniards find it strange to receive them at any other time. Florists in Ibiza town, Santa Eulària and Sant Antoni order them in bulk, and temporary stalls pop up near the cemeteries themselves. White is traditional. Prices climb noticeably in the last three or four days, which is why organised families buy early and smug.
If you want to see this phase, the last weekend of October in any village cemetery is the moment. Bring nothing, buy nothing, just notice how much care goes into it.
The island's cemeteries, and how to visit respectfully
Ibiza's cemeteries are, quietly, some of its most beautiful architecture — and almost nobody tells visitors this.
The Cementeri de Nostra Senyora del Pilar in Ibiza town is the big one, a walled grid of whitewashed niches and cypress trees below Puig des Molins. It is calm, geometric and oddly uplifting in late-autumn light. The village cemeteries are the ones that will stay with you, though: small whitewashed enclosures attached to the parish churches at Sant Josep, Sant Joan de Labritja, Sant Carles, Sant Miquel and Sant Mateu, built in the same thick-walled, flat-roofed language as the churches themselves. Sabina-wood doors, a cross, a bench, and a view over terraced fields. They are the casa payesa aesthetic applied to the afterlife.
A visitor is genuinely welcome, with a few obvious courtesies. Dress as you would for a church — shoulders covered, nothing beachy. Keep your voice down and your phone away from people's faces; photographing the architecture is fine, photographing families at a grave is not. Don't go on the morning of 1 November itself unless you have a reason to be there, because the paths are narrow and families need the space. The day before, or the afternoon of the day itself, is the respectful window.
What Ibizans eat for All Saints' Day
Then comes lunch, and this is where the week gets delicious.
Bunyols are the centrepiece — small, irregular fritters, fried and rolled in sugar, somewhere between a doughnut and a cloud. On the island they are often made with sweet potato (boniato) or pumpkin worked into the dough, which gives them an autumn colour and keeps them soft for days. Village bakeries start selling them from late October and they vanish fast.
Panellets arrive alongside them: dense little marzipan sweets of ground almond and sugar, the classic version rolled in pine nuts and glazed, others flavoured with coffee, lemon or coconut. They are a Catalan-Balearic tradition and they are everywhere this week. Buy them by weight from a proper forn rather than a supermarket if you can — the difference is enormous.
You will also see huesos de santo, "saint's bones": tubes of marzipan filled with sweet egg yolk cream, very rich, very good with coffee. And across the Balearics the autumn table leans on roasted chestnuts, roasted sweet potato, and the first of the season's figs-turned-dried.
The savoury half of the meal is pure Ibizan autumn: sofrit pagès, arròs de matances, slow-cooked lamb, anything that justifies sitting still for three hours. A bottle of island red from one of the interior bodegas, a glass of hierbas at the end, and the afternoon is gone.
Sant Martí, the first fires and the turn into winter
Tots Sants doesn't stand alone — it opens a season. Ten days later comes Sant Martí on 11 November, and with it the old Catalan saying "per Sant Martí, mata el teu porquí": by Saint Martin's, kill your pig.
That refers to the matances, the family pig slaughter that for centuries defined Ibizan late autumn. It was a communal, multi-day event — neighbours arriving at dawn, the whole year's sobrassada, botifarró and ventresca made in one go, enormous meals eaten standing up. Industrial farming and food regulations have made the full traditional matança rare, but the rhythm survives in the food: this is when sobrassada appears on every table and when restaurants inland start putting arròs de matances back on the menu.
The other marker is smell. Around the first week of November you start catching woodsmoke on the inland roads in the evening — the first fires of the year in village houses that have been shut up all summer. For a lot of residents, that smell, not any date on a calendar, is when Ibiza officially becomes winter Ibiza.
If you're here this week
Go to a village cemetery the day before. Buy bunyols from a bakery in Sant Rafel or Santa Eulària rather than a supermarket. Book lunch somewhere inland for 1 November and expect it to be full of three generations of the same family — and expect to be given the good table anyway, because that is how Ibiza tends to treat people who show up for the quiet parts.
And remember that nearly everything administrative is shut on 1 November. Banks, offices, most shops. Restaurants, bakeries and buses run, though on reduced Sunday timetables. Plan nothing that requires a counter and an official stamp.
The parties will get the photographs this week. This is the bit worth being there for.
