Fresh or dry figs, goat cheese and the excellent peix sec – fish dried in the sun, then cut up small and added to salads –are some of the secrets of the local specialities.

The hippy culture has left its mark in many of the handicrafts that the visitor can buy in Formentera. Jumpers made of hand –women wool- rough, warn and confortable- are another magnificent buy.

Crafts

Crafts and traditions

Traditional music is still very much alive in Formentera. The ball pages (folk dance) is not just a showpiece but part of the people´s festive expression, never missing form island fiestas (Santa Maria, 5th August; San Ferran, 30th May; Nostra Senyora del Carmen, 16th july; Sant Jaume, patron of the island, 25th july; El Pilar, 12th October; Sant Francesc Xavier, 3rd December). Along with traditional music, música de raíces has taken strong hold in Formentera: young local performers compose their own creations going back to their roots in traditional folk music. Formentera´s arts and crafts are varied and reflect the island´s newfound diversity. In the La Mola bazaar (on late Sunday afternoons during the summer), naturalized Formenterans from distant places offer their wares of jewellery, paintings, ceramics, clothing, and a long, wide-ranging etcetera, all of which can be purchased in the knowledge that handcrafted production of all these goods is guaranteed by the comission of craftsmen that organizes the market. Together with such items of cosmopolitan inspiration, visitors will find others that are more traditional, such as thick hand-knitted sweaters of crude Formenteran wool.

What to buy
Handicrafts, in any shape or form, are the most usual and recommendable purchase in Formentera. Visitors appreciate well-crafted work and will find it here with creators from all over the world, whose work is midway between craft and the strictly artistic. Painters and sculptors from the island, or some with international reputations, who have second studios in Formentera, show and sell their work, sometimes in the studio itself.