The goal to get as much money as possible from an apartment or housing on Eivissa is the same now as it was forty years ago. The consequences of this excessive desire for profit, that moves part of the population (including many tenants who re-rent for more money), are terrible for many people.
Finding a decent, affordable roof over your head and not being thrown out in June was very difficult on Ibiza forty years ago. It didn’t matter if you were a civil servant with job stability and a guaranteed salary, or if you were a couple of teachers. Housing was already then the easiest and quickest way to get money, a lot of (black) money on the island and widespread speculation had made it almost impossible to find housing for the whole year, from which you would not be thrown out before the summer, at an affordable price. Many apartments were closed during the winter to be rented to tourists during the season. Other owners only rented them to teachers, with the condition that in May or June they would leave them free for vacationers, who paid a fortune for them. Just as is the case today.
Roberto de Andrés, a teacher, arrived on Eivissa from Fuenlabrada in September 1981 to teach at the Vara de Rey school in Sant Antoni. A colleague took him into her home until, in October, he managed to find a two-room apartment in Sant Antoni to share with another couple of teachers, but they had to leave in June. “It was impossible to live in an apartment by yourself, even if you were a civil servant, a teacher with a permanent position. And besides, from June onwards it was impossible to find housing for the whole year, everything was for tourists”, he recalls.
In search of a home to reunite the whole family
The following year, in September 1982, De Andrés returned to the island with his partner, also a teacher, who had obtained a position in another school in Sant Antoni, Can Coix. She had three school-age daughters, but as they had not yet found housing, they traveled alone with the eldest, while the two youngest stayed with their father in Madrid. Two teachers opened the doors of their home to them until they found their own housing. It was very difficult. They were offered commercial flats ‘dressed up’ as dwellings; shacks for which they asked exorbitant prices; apartments that they had to leave in June or else pay during the summer months the extortionate amounts that the owners obtained from the tourists. Unfeasible. Just like now.
The couple came from Fuenlabrada, a dormitory town in the Madrid belt where she, with her tight salary as a teacher, lived with her three daughters in a new three-room apartment, bright, with heating. She was making ends meet, but could afford a home for all four of them. The clash between the two worlds was a shock: that of the dormitory town in full urban development and with hardly any services, with a working population and a precarious economic situation, versus an island that was a leading vacation destination in the world, with infinite business possibilities and a population focused on the only engine of the economy, tourism.
The housing offer
Winter rentals
The vast majority of homes on the island are only rented for the winter season, because after that they are used for tourist rentals (even if illegal) to make a lot of money. Just like forty years ago.
Finally they found a studio in Cala Salada without even a bedroom, where only the bathroom was separated, for the couple and the child. They paid 30,000 pesetas a month. The net salary of a teacher at that time was around 63,000 pesetas a month (with 14 payments). Months later they would get an apartment with two rooms in calle Soledad de Sant Antoni for the same price and much more humidity, but that allowed the two young daughters to join the family, after Christmas.