Formentera counterculture: pre-modern slow world on a tiny Mediterranean island
Formentera in the 1960s was an off-grid Mediterranean refuge where artists and countercultural seekers embraced a slow, pre-modern lifestyle. The place was about to change. Always for the better?
In the mid-sixties, Robert Lewis “Bob” Baldon, an architect from Colorado with a practice in New York City, was undergoing his particular mid-life crisis, motorcycle accident included. At 45, he felt he had reached a road end—he would explain later.
But a new beginning was possible, which to him meant abandoning a hyper-competitive race for professional and material status. An avid reader interested in learning about simplicity, he left for the Mediterranean, eventually exploring Formentera, the smallest among the inhabited Balearic Islands, a few hours off the coast from either Barcelona or Valencia.
Back then, Formentera must have felt like a primeval place. To reach the island, one had to take a boat or ferry from either Mallorca or, especially, Ibiza, the closest to Formentera among the three big Balearic Islands.
A lost sense of freedom and simplicity
Already in the fifties, the island attracted artists and free spirits seeking refuge from a world that couldn’t afford innocence anymore. World War II had exhausted any possibility of naïveté among Europeans. When British ornithologist Dick Coates visited the place in the 1950s, he photographed its people; the pictures are a valuable testimony of what drove visitors to begin with.
Visitors saw the island as a hidden gem in the Mediterranean: the ultimate destination, unknown to tourism back then and authentic, keeping alive a particular peasant Balearic way of living that appealed to those coming from a more connected, faster world not that far away.
Formentera took by surprise those early visitors: it had the shape of a seahorse, many endemic little lizards, white sands beaches, turquoise waters, no airports, and just a few roads between its key points. And it had a Little-Prince-like scale: 19 kilometers long and 2 kilometers wide at its narrowest point, 11 by 1.2 miles.
It was the place to imagine an impossible, idealistic chimera amid the Mediterranean sun painted decades before by Joaquín Sorolla around Valencia or described by Albert Camus when reimagining the pied-noir Algeria of his childhood. And, unlike the Greek islands (say, Leonard Cohen settled for little money on Hydra from 1960 to 1967), Formentera felt closer to the core of Europe, especially once Palma de Mallorca’s airport, Son Sant Joan, began welcoming Europeans through airlines like BEA, Air France, and Aviaco.
First arrivals into a traditional society
In the mid-sixties, only a group of bohemian and proto-hippy youngsters from Madrid and Barcelona, as well as a minuscule group of French and Italian tourists, would visit the place, with its sparse local population of Balearic Catalan speakers, a picturesque lighthouse, and only one cop for the whole place. This microcosm can be imagined as permissive, laid back, almost entirely off-grid, and self-sufficient, with whitewashed low houses against the dirt roads and the intense blue sea entering its coves.
There are pictures of Joan Miró and the less-known Josep Lluís Sert (an architect and planner from Barcelona established in the US at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939) hanging out on the island by that time. Sert had a few projects in Ibiza in those years, and the aging friends must have seen Formentera right when it began to attract the young European counterculture.
From the Paris circle, artists like the painter Marc Tessier “Marcus” found inspiration in the manly flat (192 meters—629 feet—above sea level at the highest point), dry Mediterranean island, which had changed little since the age of corsairs connecting Southern European harbors with the Barbary Coast (the origins of Banca March, an influential private investment bank founded in Mallorca, are rooted in tobacco-smuggling routes between Spanish Morocco and Europe).
An architect from Colorado arrives on the island
By the time Bob Baldon stumbled upon Formentera, many artists and bohemians were trying to live there on the cheap; a place that had spoken Balearic Catalan and Castilian Spanish with a strong accent became a Babel-like microcosm right away, with French, English, Italian, German speakers finding ways to communicate before English became the authentic global lingo (in the Spain of that era, for example, there were many more French speakers than English ones due to what was taught at school as a foreign language).
Mary Wing, a friend of Marc Tessier, connected with people from the British Isles like Iain “Emo” Moore and Pink Floyd’s tormented genius, Syd Barrett. Bob Baldon wasn’t the only American in love with Formentera in the mid-sixties. However, Baldon was the one who decided to stay, recognized by long-term locals as one of them, for many just visited and profited from an environment of permissivity and experimentation much like the one that flourished in California at the same time.
Francoist Spain had just opened to tourism and was evolving quickly, becoming an Opus Dei-led technocracy run by industrialists. Despite the dictatorship, which finished its autarchic strategy in 1955 when it joined the United Nations, Formentera was a permissive haven. In the sixties, weed and psychedelics brought by newcomers blended with the traditional glass of red wine and black, unfiltered tobacco smoked by locals on their “boina” (beret) and “barretina” hats playing dominoes or Spanish cards. And it worked alright. A traditional world was retreating in Formentera, whereas tranquil hamlets like La Mola (El Pilar de la Mola) hosted experimental artists like Julian Beck and Judith Malina from New York’s The Living Theatre.
Sense of time in pre-tourism Formentera
What were Marc Tessier, Syd Barrett, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, as well as German singer Nina Hagen, Bob Dylan, young bluesman Chris Rea, and Pete Sinfield from King Crimson doing in Formentera? What had the place that other places in Europe and North America seemed to have lost? What’s in the simplicity and primeval energy of a small island of whitewashed hamlets and a slow path that resonates in us?
Soon, Baldon became the umbilical cord capable of connecting visitors from abroad with the island. His recovery plan in Formentera consisted of making his place welcoming to anybody who knocked at the door (if you made it there, you deserved to be let in), a collection of cacti, and many books. Having little to read himself at the beginning, Bob Baldon set to create the Casa de Libros (House of Books), a private library turned into a Borges-esque bookstore and meeting place of artists from the outside world, poised to accelerate.
Later, mass tourism would also change Formentera, which would develop as a posh tourist destination for Spaniards, French, and Italian professionals living in the big cities, from Paris to Milan, Rome, Geneva, Barcelona, and Madrid. Bon Baldon turned his library into the Biblioteca Internacional, a legacy of the magic 60s in Formentera—when the slow pace of the Mediterranean lifestyle inspired Pink Floyd, members of the Living Theatre, and Bob Dylan. Legend states that Bob Dylan slept at the Far de la Mola (La Mola lighthouse).
Anyone who wanted to read books in different languages in Formentera had a precious ally in Robert Lewis Baldon’s House of Books. This Quixotic enterprise wasn’t money-oriented but people-driven, working beautifully until the fortunes of tourism and modernity caught up with the small seahorse-shaped island south of Ibiza (Eivissa in Catalan).
The dog and its reflection
It’s surprising, and somehow refreshing, to realize that we can live a fulfilling life with less surrounding material wealth, for status symbols don’t correlate with proportionally increased bliss: over the long-term respect matters more than money.
Of course, if we borrow any self-actualization model like Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we’ll realize that to achieve any elevated purpose in life, anyone needs to have basics covered (physiological needs like good food and rest, a safe place, a few people we can rely on, etc.).
However, once those basics are covered, many people manage to flourish by achieving lifestyles that are less attached to the mandates of what sociologist Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption—keeping up with the status symbols of friends and relatives (and, in our era, the influences enticing us in our feeds.)
Wanting things based on what others own plays into insecurities deep in our psyche, and thinkers like French social scientist René Girard developed their careers by studying its effects on us (he called it “mimetic desire”).
This reminds me of the fable The Dog and Its Reflection by Aesop: a dog with a yummy bone in its mouth sees its reflection in the water (just like Narcissus), and mistaking his own reflection for another dog with a bigger bone than his, it decides to drop the bone to snatch the illusion—losing everything.
Simplicity and personal autonomy
In this respect, contemporary thinkers like German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han are closer to Thoreau and other nineteenth-century thinkers than to the techno-analytical philosophers that make it in academia across the Anglo-Saxon world.
Han critiques our consumer-driven society as a form of self-exploitation; when we internalize the demands of the system we live in and become gamified entities of the achievement race, we fall for self-exploitation. The only way out, to Thoreau in 1850 and Byung Chul Han right now, is rejecting the mandates on us of the acceleration of society. If all we do is work hard to buy better things, the restlessness treadmill we hop on will prevent us from seeking deep, meaningful experiences.
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Chapter 2: Where I Lived, and What I Lived For)
It took Thoreau to leave Concord for a while and build his cabin by the pond nearby to realize that choosing to consume less is the biggest act of slowing down in modern societies. If, say, we can build our house and repair the few essential things we need to be truly comfortable and content, we won’t need to re-enter the treadmill to keep getting things we don’t have use for.
“Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Chapter 18: Conclusion)
Limits of conspicuous consumption
Embracing repair, reuse, and appreciating what one already has broken the chain of self-inflicted slavery from external forces—a conscientious effort that is harder than it seems, according to classic Stoic philosophers who stumbled upon the same issues millennia ago.
Of course, Thoreau didn’t need to escape the “Like Economy” (also, “attention economy,” etc.) and the effective pervasiveness of digital consumerism, but these new incarnations of old distractive forces have always prevented good-hearted people from attaining tranquility or find a meaning to their days beyond conspicuous consumption and hedonic treats.
There’s no one-size-fits-all for what we need to live an authentic life, whether starting at a young age, or at the crossroads of middle age like Bob Baldon when he settled in his Balearic paradise, or at a more mature age. Interestingly, many accomplished people realize there’s another way besides the hyper-competition and race to earn so-we-can-consume-better-toys that has become normality after World War II.
Famously, Thoreau’s pledge from the mid-nineteenth century to live with less found many readers one century later, especially misfits and bohemians who were uninterested in the rat race. There had to be alternative ways of self-realization.
Thoreau’s fight to prevent land monopolies was a towering inspiration to Russian writer Lev Tolstoy. However, they had many more things in common: they reacted naturally against injustice inflicted upon the least educated members of society despite being themselves members of the privileged society of their time.
Three chairs
Like Thoreau, Tolstoy recognized beauty and quality in things and enjoyed some material advantages and luxuries during their youth (especially Tolstoy). But they reached middle age with a taste for simplicity, which—at least to them—meant freedom to do what was important to them at that moment in life.
It’s perhaps less known that Tolstoy’s personal struggle to live up to the ideals of his purest characters (take, for instance, the gentleman-farmer Konstantin Levin from Anna Karenina), aligning simplicity of life and a back-to-basics life purpose, influenced a young civil servant from the British Empire working in South Africa in the early twentieth century, Mohandas Gandhi.
While fighting discrimination against second-class citizens from the Empire, Gandhi modeled a growing mature attitude after Tolstoy’s writings, naming the second ashram he created after the Russian writer.
Unsurprisingly, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi came to cherish only a few material things they deemed essential. In Walden, Thoreau mentions:
Shelter: a small cabin he built for $28.12½, just enough to keep him warm and dry.
Food: simple and homegrown: corn, beans, potatoes, rice, and occasional foraged food.
Clothing: functional rather than fashionable; just enough to cover and protect himself.
Fuel (firewood): gathered from the woods around him for warmth and cooking.
A few essential, versatile tools and books: he had an axe to build his cabin and some books (including The Iliad) for intellectual nourishment.
Thoreau’s focus was on minimizing needs, allowing him more time for thinking, observing nature, visiting a few friends or having them visit, and writing:
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
Tolstoy: seeking simplicity to find focus to write
Tolstoy embraced simplicity later in life, influenced by Christian anarchism, nonviolence, and (Thoreau-inspired) civil disobedience. After renouncing his aristocratic lifestyle, he lived comfortably but in austerity. According to him, his essentials were:
Simple peasant clothing: Tolstoy abandoned his nobleman’s attire for the traditional Russian peasant tunic and boots.
A wooden bowl and spoon for simple meals, reflecting his rejection of luxury.
A bedroll: he preferred sleeping on the floor or a hard surface, rejecting comfort.
A Bible and a few books: he saw the Gospels as the ultimate guide to life and had a small personal library of philosophical and religious texts.
Writing materials: he continued writing letters, essays, and novels, even after renouncing wealth.
A walking stick: like Gandhi, he walked long distances, often barefoot, as a form of humility.
In his later years, Tolstoy gave away his wealth, refused royalties from his books, and lived a simple life of manual labor. He argued:
“There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
Drinking goat milk and reading the Gita
Gandhi’s list of essential possessions is legendary. Near the end of his life, he settled with eleven essential items:
A loincloth and shawl: simple, homespun khadi cloth, reflecting self-sufficiency.
A watch: to keep time for prayers and meetings.
A pair of sandals: handmade and practical.
Eyeglasses: essential for reading and writing.
A bowl and wooden spoon are used to eat simple meals.
A drinking cup for water or goat’s milk.
A prayer book (Bhagavad Gita): his spiritual guide.
A small spinning wheel (charkha): symbolizing self-reliance and resistance to colonial imports.
A walking stick: for long walks, often barefoot.
A toothbrush (a neem stick): a natural, biodegradable way to clean teeth.
A writing kit for letters, speeches, and reflections.
I came to think about the needs of these three interconnected thinkers, members of different societies and from different moments in history, as we reach middle age and already achieved more comforts than we actually need.
If we put aside conspicuous consumption and the mandates of planned obsolescence prompting us to update our most technical tools (computers, smartphones) just to run up-to-date software, what are the actual needs leading somebody to self-actualization? Certainly, a bigger house or a flashier car/s won’t do.
How much does a man need?
These thinkers, archetypes of achievement, and a certain type of virtue seemed to have in their formula a total or at least partial rejection of bending themselves to the mandates of hyper-consumption.
They also established a profound connection between simplicity and personal resistance: they appreciated people and had their loved ones but seemed to flourish by keeping self-discipline and scrupulous autonomy.
No matter the blend (voluntary simplicity, frugality, or simply being aware that overspending can make one a slave of conspicuous consumption instead of setting him free), being less superficial and slower, more profound in life choices seems to lead to a more functioning adulthood and middle-age to quite a few people we admire from all ages.
In the short story How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Tolstoy, a peasant (moujik) named Pahom thinks that owning more land will make him happier, but the move pushes him to exhaustion and, eventually, death. When it’s too late, he realizes that he only needed “six feet from his head to his heels.” His grave.
Which leads me to close the circle with a remark by Thoreau that won’t get old, especially in today’s credit-card-debt-ridden society:
“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”
Freedom and self-actualization
Acceleration has a price. To be able to harmonize the contradictions of hyperconnectivity and personal autonomy will become a superpower attained only by a few. Deliberate living in the digital age isn’t as simple as feel-good memes can make us think.
As for music, I listened to King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, especially Girl from the North Country (also Boots of Spanish Leather: Spotify & YouTube)
Either from the mountains of Madrid. Or from the coast of Barcelona.
Or from the island of Formentera.
I have a very large beautiful oil painting by Marcus Tessier, which I have to sell unfortunately. If anyone interested, I will send details. I bought it directly from him in the early ‘80’s. Yes, we all remember Bob Baldon, we were all living there in the early 70’s. The painting depicts a large nude moorish young lady reclining on a canopy with 4 men dressed medieval style wearing masks and playing the mandolin.on the right side of the paining. Painted in a Renaissance style. A beautiful painting in perfect condition.