Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). It reminded me that even as one generation moans about how much more magical and idyllic Ibiza was in their day, successive generations are already finding new sources of magic and idyll. Lying in bed the next morning with the dazzle of a flaming June day filtering through the shutters, I looked up at the ceiling of my bedroom at Can Domo. My stomping ground was always the rural north: the hills and villages around Santa Inés, San Juan and Cala San Vicente. Arriving at the sweeping bay of Cala Xarraca, on the far tip of the island close to Portinatx, I cast my mind back 25 years to a summer weekend’s camping beside a freshwater spring that dribbled out of the cliff.

There was an atmosphere of elegant unflashiness, chastened chic, that seemed somehow attuned with the mood of the times. She also knows about the loveliest new hotels, especially those low-key ones that open their doors quietly.As such, it’s a perfect illustration of a tendency – one that has come to the fore as the island rakes over its recent past – to see what can be retrieved, reassessed, and if at all possible, recycled.

Here, on a site that would have been visible from where I pitched my tent, is where the island’s most talked-about new place to stay has made landfall. The old north-south divide is also increasingly redundant: you’re as likely to discover a cool boho scene among the glitz of the south as a whopping heavyweight resort on a wild northern beach. You might find a sparkly W hotel in a bustling little town never previously noted for its glamour (Santa Eulalia). Parts of my mental geography were virtually unrecognisable: Santa Gertrudis, in my day a one-horse hamlet with a couple of bars and a tobacconist, was now a fully grown town of done-up villas with a world-class cocktail bar, Overall, and Bottega il Buco, an outpost of New York restaurateur Donna Lennard’s Il Buco, also found in NoHo and the Hamptons. With rustic rattan, washed-out linen and sandy floors, Jondal, on the cala of the same name, is Ibiza’s restaurant of the moment, no contest.The funky chairs beside the pool are not from a big-name Scandinavian brand but handmade by artisans in Papua New Guinea. La Torre is not the only delicious makeover of a tired hostel – look at Los Enamorados in Portinatx, the delightful waterside bolthole curated by design freaks Pierre Traversier and Rozemarijn de Witte. Further round the west coast, I stopped for a dip at the pretty cove of Cala Moli, just down the road from the splashy private community Sabina Estates.

It was Marañón who introduced me to the community of estate owners who are restoring and regenerating great swathes of abandoned land. I went there for dinner one evening with Serena Cook who, after almost 20 years at the helm of Ibiza’s most creative concierge business, has her finger firmly on the island’s pulse, can always get the best tables and is the keyholder to some of the most special villas around. Along the road, sun-faded nightclub billboards advertising the closing parties of October 2019 seemed like messages from another world.On the walk down through the forest, balsamic scents of heat-baked pine and rosemary flung open the synapses of my memory. On the rock face above them a series of legends, gobbets of feel-good hippie wisdom, had been written in paint. Six Senses Ibiza is certainly big and opulent, and involves a massive investment by a powerful international brand, but having visited on the eve of its opening, I’m happy to report that the alarm is mostly unjustified. In front of this impromptu shrine, a bearded fellow in the lotus position was doing something with a rolling paper. The passion projects of Rebecca Frayn, who is bringing a spectacular finca in San Vicente back to productive life, and Sophie Daunais and Christian Jochnick, with their ambitious farm-to-table venture Juntos in San Mateo, are remarkable enough to warrant a story of their own.

And with Hilton’s Curio Collection no longer running the show, the Experimental Group has taken over, opening a recharged restaurant designed by Dorothée Meilichzon this summer and bedrooms next year.

From a hardscrabble peasant economy to one of the world’s wealthiest enclaves in the space of 60 years.