History & heritage
A Bronze Age tomb, a Roman fort and centuries of salt: Formentera’s heritage
A Bronze Age tomb, pirates, salt and lighthouses.
Photo Credit
Image courtesy of © Michael Merkel · CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Video Credit
Video © Spain Tourism (Turespaña) · plays from YouTube, which may set its own cookies once it startsFormentera is small, flat and quiet, and its history has been shaped by the sea. Its first people built a megalithic tomb around four thousand years ago; Rome farmed its wheat; pirates emptied it for centuries; and the families who resettled it from the 1690s built the white churches and windmills you see today.
At a glance
Population: 11,483 (INE, 1 January 2024): the smallest of the inhabited Balearic Islands.
Names through history: Frumentaria (Roman, “the wheat island”), Formentera.
UNESCO World Heritage: part of Ibiza, Biodiversity and Culture (1999), including the Ses Salines natural park and the posidonia meadows between Ibiza and Formentera.
The first islanders
Ca na Costa, near Es Pujols, is a megalithic tomb of standing stones around four thousand years old: the oldest known monument in the Pityusic Islands, which shows that people lived here in the Bronze Age.
Frumentaria
The Romans called the island Frumentaria, the wheat island, and built the fort of Can Blai in the centre in the fourth century. Under the Moors it was farmed from Ibiza.
The empty island
After the Catalan conquest of 1235, raids by pirates and plague emptied Formentera for long periods from the fifteenth century. Watchtowers such as the Torre des Pi des Català and the Torre de sa Gavina were built along the coast to warn of raiders.
Resettlement
In 1697 the crown granted land to settlers from Ibiza, and the island slowly filled again. The church of Sant Francesc, finished in 1738, was built like a fortress, with thick walls and a flat roof for cannon. The stone windmill Molí Vell de la Mola, and the church of El Pilar de la Mola, belong to the same story of farming families on the high plateau.
Emptied by pirates for centuries, Formentera was resettled in the 1690s, and its white churches were built as forts.
Salt and posidonia
Salt from the pans of Ses Salines was the island’s export for centuries. Offshore, meadows of posidonia seagrass, among the largest and oldest living things on earth, keep the water clear; UNESCO lists them with Ibiza as World Heritage. The lighthouses of La Mola and Barbaria watch over the island’s two ends.
Our advice: hire a bicycle and follow the green routes from Sant Francesc to Ca na Costa, the salt pans and the Barbaria lighthouse, and visit La Mola for its Wednesday and Sunday market in season.
Sources
Population: Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), population at 1 January 2024. History: Consell Insular de Formentera; Museu Arqueològic d’Eivissa i Formentera; UNESCO World Heritage Centre (Ibiza, Biodiversity and Culture).
Why it's on our list
- 11,483 people (2024)
- The first islanders
- Frumentaria
- The empty island
- Resettlement
- Salt and posidonia
Location
The map comes from Google Maps, which sets its own cookies once it loads.
More in depth
The back storyWild Formentera: Flamingos, Seagrass and ShearwatersFlamingos, UNESCO seagrass and a unique seabird: wild Formentera.
The back storyFormentera’s lighthouses and capes: from La Mola to Cap de BarbariaTwo lighthouses, an ancient tomb, a Roman fort and a church.
The back storyFormentera Art, Architecture & Culture: from a stone circle to a lighthouse galleryFrom a Bronze Age stone circle and an unfinished Roman fort to a fortress-church built against pirates and an art collection in a clifftop lighthouse: the story of Formentera’s art and architecture, and where to see it now.