Hï Ibiza changes the landscape of the party island

IT is hard to imagine Ibiza without Space.

From the moment you descended towards its twinkling lights and the throb from its iconic dance floor filled the cabin of your plane, the super club was part of the fabric of the island.

Its close proximity to the airport meant that you could sometimes party there before catching your flight back home and the sets played by DJs like Brandon Block and Carl Cox on the Sunday Space Terrace are the stuff of legend.

Now all that has been swept away. Space has closed and a new super club called Hï has opened in its place, run by the Ushuaia club and hotel brand.

We headed there last month and found much to celebrate, although a few things to mourn.

There is no doubt that Hï represents the new Ibiza – glitzy, flash, loud, pulsating with glamour, beauty and energy but also with a hint of the corporate vibe that is transforming its magnetic shores.

A case in point is the fact that Space’s ugly grey parking lot has been turned into a pleasant garden filed with Palm trees, plants and native vegetation.

The inside of the club is almost unrecognisable. There are now two rooms, one chasm-like in its size, the other more intimate, but both hopping with people intensely engaged in the music.

Dancers sporting extravagantly-styled black hair and with broken purple glass pinned to their body suits strut on podiums to one side.

Doe-eyed Spanish girls rub shoulders with frosty Russians in black dresses. In the garden young French tourists smoke cigarettes while locals with thick beards recline in wicker chairs.

Black Coffee has a regular Saturday night residency DJing here and his presence meant the main room was filled to the rafters, the revellers occasionally chilled by a machine that would blow cloudy, ice-cold air across the dance floor.

The cost of a night here was nothing surprising given how prices have inflated over the last ten years. It’s now 12 euros for a bottle of water, considerably more for alcohol and 50 euros for your entrance.

The one thing that did feel slightly sad was that the slick new hull, the beautiful bodies strutting around and the simple perfection of this new night space, is a reminder that Ibiza is quickly losing its grungy edge.

On my last visit to Space, some 15 years ago, I remember looking on horrified as a man in his 50s repeatedly screamed at the top of his lungs while standing next to the bar, lost in a drug haze.

No one tried to stop him or kick him out, it seemed like he had the right to act as deranged as he wanted to.

He would not last two minutes in this new nightclub.