El Corsario, Eivissa/Ibiza

This place is fantastic for the view, but the annoying thing is the doors, which clank and bang all night. The toilet in our bathroom had a strange flush as well which wouldn’t stop all night. The landlady was a little bit wary of us because we arrived so late at night, and then we didn’t eat there the whole time we were there! Which was silly actually, because the restaurant did have a fnatastic balcony with beautiful views, it was just a bit expensive for what it was.
There was a beautiful little courtyard garden filled with flowers, and then a huge entrance foyer that was beautiful to sit in, very quiet and inhabited by a little cat and a lizard.
We were very near the cathedral, so it was nice to be woken up by the sound of bells.
The only thing was looking at the other rooms, some had private balconies, which would have been fantastic. Still it was great to be able to look down on the town walls and see everyone go about their business in the market square, watch the expensive boats in the harbour and watch the ferries coming and going.
And while I remember there was no air conditioning and the fans were incredibly noisy, so it was a bit difficult to sleep at night. But we could hear the jazz festival coming up from the walls of the town. Which was nice.

I stayed here with my boyfriend in September 07 and it was great. I made reservations online via their website and, although there was a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing with regard to requesting my credit card details by email (needless to say I rang them to give them the details - never give your credit card details by email, kids), they were very accommodating with what I wanted. I advised them when I booked that our flight would come in after midnight and when we got there after 1.00am there was a note on the door asking us to call a local number but we were inside our room within about 20 minutes so it wasn’t too bad. The staff were friendly but they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Spanish or Catalan. Happily, they did speak French and we understood each other on my schoolgirl French.

Hmmm - doesn’t sound very good so far now that I read this back but once we were in our room there was very little to complain about. The hotel was very well kept and the room was cleaned daily. There was a basic minibar (which we didn’t use) and the tiny ensuite had a shower. Everything was nicely decorated and there was very little street noise at night. They provided a fan as there was no air conditioning but we found it comfortable enough with just the window open. The hotel had a bar and a restaurant which is apparently quite good but we didn’t actually eat there. It was always busy in the evenings.

The very best thing about this hotel was the view from our room which was right at the top of the house, which was about halfway up the old town. We could see the harbour and the market place as well as everything else on the lower levels of the walled town.

If you just want a place to crash when you’re not partying or anodyne 5 star luxury you should really look somewhere else. El Corsario was a nice place to stay in a nice part of Eivissa which was easy to get back to from wherever we had been to that day and gave us a real flavour of Ibiza.