Villain arrived in Ibiza carrying a notorious past. In a Paris cafe in 1914 he had shot and killed Jean Jaures, leader of the French Socialist Party and the most eloquent voice against the war then about to engulf Europe. Jaures died on the eve of the First World War, silenced for the very pacifism that made him beloved. Villain stood trial in 1919 and, despite overwhelming evidence, was acquitted, a verdict that outraged the French left. Threatened and hounded, he fled the country, drifting for over a decade through the Baltic port towns of Danzig and Memel before washing up on this Mediterranean island in 1932. Here, he believed, no one would remember his face or his crime.

In 1933 Cala de Sant Vicent had no development at all, and Villain set about building a home of his own. He hired local labourers and worked alongside Paul Rene Gauguin, grandson of the painter Paul Gauguin, raising a concrete house that was nearly finished by August 1936. On a hill behind it he planted a crucifix, a gesture that would later count against him. That summer, Spain fell into civil war. Nationalist officers had briefly seized Ibiza in a small coup, and when a detachment of soldiers rowed ashore at the cove to help retake the island, they grew suspicious of the solitary Frenchman with his hilltop cross and confined him to his house as a suspected fascist and spy.

What happened next survives only in fragments. That afternoon, Italian bombers flew down the coast and struck Ibiza Town, the explosions carrying all the way to the bay. Hearing the raid, the soldiers seem to have decided to withdraw to the capital, and they tried to take Villain and his hidden valuables with them. He resisted, and was shot in the back, the bullet passing out through his throat. The wound did not kill him at once. Warned not to approach, the villagers could only watch as he lay on the sand for two days before he died. When it was over, they wrapped his body in a French tricolour found in his house and buried him in the cemetery at nearby Sant Vicent de sa Cala.

The valley's darkest chapter is far from its oldest story. On the steep rocky slopes of the Cas Rierons uplands above the bay hides the Cova des Culleram, a cave that lay at the heart of Punic religious life more than two thousand years ago. Between roughly the fifth and second centuries BC, worshippers climbed here to leave offerings to Tanit, the great goddess of fertility, protection, and war. When the sanctuary was rediscovered in 1907, excavators pulled more than six hundred terracotta figurines from the rock, along with a thousand modelled heads, one of the richest hoards of Punic art ever found. Many of those finds now rest in Ibiza's archaeological museum, but the cave itself still opens onto the same valley, its mouth dark against the pale rock. The goddess had listened here long before anyone spoke of civil wars.

Modern Cala de Sant Vicent wears none of this heaviness. Reached by the EI-321 from Sant Joan de Labritja or the EI-200 north from Santa Eularia des Riu, it is a calm, child-friendly resort wrapped around a broad sandy beach. The water shelves gently, the headlands block the worst of the wind, and pine-dark hills rise on either side. Families spread their towels where a man once bled into the sand and pilgrims once climbed to a hidden goddess. Few beaches hold so much beneath such an easy surface.