Sant Ferran de ses Roques

The area around Sant Ferran has had a scattered population since well before the town itself took shape. A parish was established in 1785, but building an actual church proved complicated. The Spanish crown wanted it built at the Royal Salt Flats, which had been confiscated and brought under royal ownership in 1715. The bishop sided with the crown, but this put him directly at odds with the local people, who lived in the districts of sa Punta and ses Roques — far from the salt flats. For many years the parish functioned without a church of its own, served by the priest from Sant Francesc. The church was finally opened on 30 June 1889, and a cemetery on the same plot followed in 1903. Around these buildings the village gradually coalesced, drawing in the dispersed population of the surrounding area.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, many young people from Sant Ferran and the rest of the island emigrated to the Americas, though some later returned. The Spanish Civil War left a double mark on the village: Republicans attacked the church's religious symbols, and later the Fascists carried out extrajudicial executions of left-wing militants against the cemetery walls. The 1940s and 50s brought repression and hardship.

The 1960s brought a different kind of arrival. The Fonda Pepe, which had opened in 1953, became a gathering point for young people from around the world — many of them Americans fleeing the Vietnam War or rejecting the social norms of home, who had come to Ibiza and then Formentera looking for an alternative. The relationship between these newcomers and local residents was shaped by cultural friction and produced episodes of real conflict. Towards the end of the 1970s, conventional tourism began to arrive, along with workers from mainland Spain, and the village grew to roughly its present size.