Samitaur In the News
May 1997
Not Just Sex and Sangria – Newsweek
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It’s just after dusk on a recent Friday, a quiet time in the off season on the island of Ibiza. The swimming pool at the nightclub Ku is empty. At Amnesia the machines that spray dancers with foam are shut off. Space is not yet open to revelers from dawn to lunch. The L200-a week package tours from the north of England have not begun to descend on San Antonio Bay, where the crescent scar of midrise hotels resembles a mini-Miami Beach on the Spanish Mediterranean. But up in the cool hills, behind the thick walls of the Church of San Miguel, a few dignitaries and a couple of hundred of Ibizans are gathered for an act of gratitude. With the help of a youth symphony and a choir, they are paying homage to the Getty Conservation Institute of Los Angeles and London’s Courtauld Institute of Art for their role in conserving some 17th-century wall paintings in the Chapel of Benirras. The tourists listening respectfully in the back of the church don’t realize it, but they are part of the historical transformation of Ibiza’s tourist trade.