Bronze hippie monument on Ibiza honours the countercultural movement

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This sculpture by Ció Abellí shows a father, with long hair and a typical hippie appearance. He walks with his little daughter who looks the same way. At their feet is a world map with the places in the world where the hippie communities were concentrated: San Francisco, Amsterdam, Kathmandu, Goa, and Ibiza. The monument pays tribute to the hippie movement that has played an important role in the development of Ibiza .

The bronze sculpture group is the three-dimensional materialization of an image taken in 1973 by photographer Toni Riera . You might think that it reflects a scene that took place in Ibiza, but it actually happened in a park in Amsterdam .

Riera was only 18 years old, and one weekend in Vondelpark, he saw two strangers: a father and his daughter. He snapped a photo that would become his best-known work, though he didn't know it at the time. During that time, Toni Riera first traveled to Ibiza and started working at Pachá washing glasses, and Ricardo Urgell, the owner of this famous nightclub, hired him as a photographer. On the walls of Pachá, he portrayed his version of some of the most important characters of the 20th century.

In the 90s, Urgell wanted to relaunch the place and give it an appearance more typical of the island's beginnings, as the hippie community that it once was in the 70s, and asked Riera for a photo that represented that image. The photographer searched through his negatives and found that old photo from 20 years ago taken in Amsterdam. Needless to say, that image of Pachá would end up becoming an icon of hippie Ibiza and at the same time meant a relaunch of the famous nightclub. In this way, a grateful Urgell commissioned the sculptor Ció Abellí to create a bronze statue that represented the photograph, and after that he donated this sculpture to the city of Ibiza, where, since its inauguration in 2016, we can see it immortalized in the port of the Ibizan capital.