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. Back in the day, the sleepy hamlet of San Lorenzo had a single bar, the Casanova, where country folk went to smoke cheroots and play cards. Today the space, renamed El Silencio by its new French owners, has morphed into a sand-on-the-floor seaside restaurant with gorgeous wabi-sabi-like styling, a pool out back and a menu by young-gun chef Jean Imbert, known as the Jamie Oliver of France. 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. 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.

The makeover by Dutch interior designer Carmen Straatsma is an exercise in balancing contemporary taste with an injection of personality. Booked out well before it opened, this much-talked- about arrival is drawing hordes of wellness-focused travellers to the north of the island. Everything was still in post-Covid recovery mode and a strange, faintly dazed feeling was detectable.Or a smart seaside hotspot such as Beachouse at the scrappy end of Playa d’en Bossa, where the large Ushuaïa and Hard Rock Hotels fizzle out into overgrown waste ground and car parks.

I drove back west to a place that has lingered in a corner of my mind for a quarter of a century: Punta Galera, where the natural terraces of smooth rock act as shelves for sunbathing like a lizard. I cast myself off a rugged slab into water as intensely blue as turquoise ink and somehow viscous, so swimming in it felt languid and sensuous. 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. My stomping ground was always the rural north: the hills and villages around Santa Inés, San Juan and Cala San Vicente. You might find a sparkly W hotel in a bustling little town never previously noted for its glamour (Santa Eulalia).

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. Meanwhile, the island continues to evolve, even if old-timers such as me sometimes have a hard time adjusting to the new realities. 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). I wandered around in a mild aesthetic trance, registering the twisted wooden gates between stone walls, the aroma of jasmine, the flame-thrower blasts of bougainvillaea against the white façade turned ultraviolet by the midday sun.