The number of home burglaries in Ibiza continues to increase. According to the latest data from the Ministry of the Interior, the robberies with violence in real estate increased in the first half of this year by 11% on the island.
News about thefts in luxury villas transcends our borders because the victims of these robberies are sometimes well-known characters.
The Sunday Times has echoed this type of events, in an extensive report in which, through various testimonies, draws a fairly detailed picture of this ‘high standing’ crime on the island.
One of the most recent such robberies was that suffered by British DJ and radio broadcaster Nick Grimshaw. He and his 81-year-old mother were seduced by a criminal gang when they were staying at a villa in Ibiza to celebrate his 40th birthday.
Ibiza, a magnet for criminals
Natalia Faeh is an Ibiza property agent who rents luxury villas to wealthy people who come to the island on vacation. Her testimony has great value. She explains to the newspaper that the high concentration of millionaires in summer on the island is a real magnet for criminals. She assures that the worst year she experienced in this regard was in 2022, when 16 famous footballers rented as many villas. “We had 16 robberies in one week,” Faeh details.
But he adds something quite interesting. And it is that he assures that in many occasions, these rich tenants are excessively ‘carefree in terms of their valuable possessions, cash and the ostentation they make of it all. Many of them have parties in the villas where many strangers enter and, between that and the alcohol and drugs consumed there, it is very easy to stealr. The real estate agent tells how, on one occasion, a footballer renting a luxury villa told her that a bag containing €500,000 in cash was missing from the house. “Who carries a bag full of €500,000 on vacation?” asks Natalia Faeh in The Sunday Times.
Her view is that many of the burglaries that take place in luxury villas during the vacations of their wealthy tenants have two fundamental components: the carelessness of their inhabitants and that they do not hire to work in these houses to qualified personnel and with references: “You have to be careful who you hire and who you take to the villa. It is these people who have contacts with criminals, but in the end they end up unjustifiably blaming the cleaners,” adds the real estate agent.
As for the statistics of residential burglaries in Ibiza, if you put the magnifying glass on the municipal level, the increase of this type of crime in Santa Eulària and Sant Josep is the driving force behind the 11% increase. While Santa Eulària was the municipality in which more were registered, 63 complaints with an increase of 28.6%; Sant Josep was the one that experienced the highest percentage increase (33.3%) reaching the commission of 52 burglaries in real estate.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.