Tired of being confined in Madrid, Antonio Escohotado (Madrid, 1941-Ibiza 2021) decided to move to Ibiza last year to live what he believed to be his last days in a house in es Pou des Lleó. In other words, he retired to die, which is what happened today, in what had been his paradise.
The philosopher, jurist, writer and university professor had a long relationship with the island that began in 1970, when he arrived with a civil servant’s post, which he had obtained in a previous escape, to leave the greyness of the capital in the midst of the Franco era. He did so in search of freedom and settled in a house without electricity or running water, accompanied by his young son, waiting for his wife to arrive.
He himself summarised that first experience in the book ‘Mi Ibiza privada’, about his history of love and hate with the island: “I migrated to the island in 1970 and I hardly moved from there until 1984, when an alliance of crooks and cops suggested it would be a good idea to put some ground between us. Getting over that bad experience, I have spent a good part of September in a nice hostel in Salinas, something which means I don’t get too hung up on my once-adopted homeland”.
“It is obvious to me that writing about oneself irons the subject with the object, and if it does not border on indiscretion, it courts emptiness. However, the metamorphoses of Ibiza perhaps allow me to move from the autobiographical genre to profiles of reality itself, otherwise blurred, and with that as a compass I need some memories and data…”, he wrote.
During this last year on the island many people have approached him, some young people only with the intention, as he himself confessed, of smoking a joint in his company and under the warmth of his conversation. That experience has been reflected in two works that are now the ultimate testimony about Escohotado’s Ibiza, the documentary ‘Antonio Escohotado’ by Samaj Moreno, and the book ‘Los penúltimos dÃas de Escohotado’, by journalist Ricardo F. Colmenero. Both are the result of interviews with the writer at his home in Sant Carles.
In them he recounts his days in Ibiza, the opening of the Amnesia discotheque, of which he was a founding partner, and his departure from the island in 1984, after being involved in a dark drug trafficking plot with the Corsican-Marseillaise mafia, of which he always denied his involvement, to end up locked up in prison in Cuenca. At that time he was already a professor at the UNED and his arrest and conviction was a great scandal.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.