The Spanish island promises gorgeous beaches, hippy market and a unique fragrance – only found on the island.

SANT FRANCESC XAVIER - If old churches, important museums and great architecture are what you are looking for, then forget about going to Formentera. You could check off a list of its sights in a day.

Nevertheless, more than a few holidaymakers visit Formentera, the smallest of the inhabited Balearic Islands, again and again. Perhaps it is because you can still drift through the day here, a former hippy haven.

Although in midsummer the Spanish island has become as lively as it is everywhere else in the Mediterranean, in the spring and autumn there are so few tourists that you keep running into the same ones.

Formentera's special fragrance - a combination of rosemary, pine, and the sea - even hangs over its main street, not the smell of petrol.

But on Formentera, too, modernity has long arrived. The island's transportation network used to consist solely of sandy paths travelled by bicyclists.

Today motor scooters and rental cars roar down its two big streets.

And new construction in the island's largest settlement, Sant Francesc Xavier, keeps reaching, octopus-like, further into the surrounding area.

A trip to Formentera is for people with seaworthy stomachs.

Just 18 kilometres in length and less than two kilometres wide in places, the island is too small for an airport. So to get there you have to take a boat from the nearby island of Ibiza (which has an airport) to Formentera's port La Savina.

The passage takes half an hour, and normally everything goes smoothly. But sometimes high waves make even big boats pitch and roll continuously. For Formentera lovers, riding the waves is as much a part of the island experience as getting around on bicycles.

The only way to explore Formentera's extensive network of unpaved byways is on bicycle. Stops suggest themselves here and there - to observe a group of young goats under an artfully braced fig tree, for instance. Or to pick large sprigs of rosemary and oregano for the evening meal. Or to briefly watch an old woman in traditional costume working in the garden of an old finca.

Most holidaymakers are attracted by the beaches. The sand is white and soft, and the water is turquoise, as it is in the Caribbean.

The most popular beaches at the moment are Illetas and - on the other side of the island's tip - Tanga at Llevant. The former is named after several small islands nearby, and the latter after a fashionable beach bar. A lot of yachts dock there, especially on weekends.

The yachts arrive from Ibiza. Their passengers like to be ferried by dinghy to the beach, where they do lunch. Back on board, they pop open a bottle of champagne before returning to Ibiza.

These visitations by the rich and supposedly beautiful can be irritating. To avoid them, you can head to Migjorn beach, where it is more relaxing. Or you can opt for an outing: to Sant Francesc Xavier for a stroll and a look at the Ethnological Museum, for example, or a tour of Formentera's lighthouses.

The hippy market in the little village of El Pilar de la Mola is also worth seeing. A relic of the 1970s, it is open twice a week. Rubbing elbows with shaggy-bearded painters and female potters in batik pants, you can imagine how it was in the days when flower children, not package tourists, thronged to Formentera.

Internet: www.spain.info, www.illesbalears.es.

text by dpa / Expatica
photos by Turespana, flickr contributors Samu73, diluvi and sanferan