Can Vinyes opens its doors at 10:30am every day. As soon as you enter you can smell the esparto grass and see the shelves full of hats and senallons, its star products. For at least 120 years this store has been open in the Marina district. “We don’t have any document to prove it, but when they gave the store the Gold Medal of Vila, the City Council was investigating and they told us that they had not found any older documents”, says Ignasi Landaburu Riera, one of the managers.
A recognition that they didn’t need as motivation to continue: “We are one of the oldest stores on Ibiza and we want to continue with our shop”, says the manager. Can Vinyes was opened by his grandmother between 1908 and 1911, the exact date is not entirely clear.
Tourists, yesterday, in the store of Can Vinyes. | J.A. RIERA
At first it was a grocery store selling sugar, coffee, beans or chickpeas, but “in the 1963 or 64 it began selling the kind of products we have now,” confirms Landaburu. “Since the 1960s, the senalló has been evolving. In the old days the straps were made of pita and from the 1960s, when the hippies began to arrive in Ibiza, they began to make leather strips so that they could wear them and so that their shoulders wouldn’t itch. Others decided to decorate them with stars or pockets. Now every year we always make some kind of modification to the senallons,” adds the manager. Although the store sells traditional Ibizan products, they are made on Mallorca.
Ibizans and tourists at Can Vinyes
The products they now sell are mainly hats and senallons, but they have also had traditional espardenyes for a few years, as the manager considers that there is not much more traditional product to be sold on the island. Even so, the type of customer is varied, Ibicencans who come all year round or tourists who come to the island in summer to buy, especially hats.
For the full article, please visit Diario de Ibiza website here.