Active Ibiza: Experience The Island As A Major Sporting Destination In 2024

08.11.2023 - 07:35 / breakingtravelnews.com

Once exclusively known as Spain’s main party island, Ibiza has been growing its sports and wellness offering, to become a burgeoning tourism hotspot for athletic travellers and avid sports fans. Unique for its beautiful landscape of golden beaches, rolling hills, pine forests, lush mountains and warm climate with 300 days of sunshine a year, Ibiza is embracing the great outdoors with a diverse array of exciting sports events taking place in 2024.

In 2022, Ibiza hosted 9 sports events attracting 28,800 visitors to the island with an average spend of €1,047 per person and generating an economic impact of €30.1 million, according to the Institute of Statistics of the Balearic Islands.

PTO European Open

The Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO) European Open will return to Ibiza next year on 28 -29 September, ready to crown the new ‘European Champion’. The announcement was made by the PTO and Spanish Triathlon Federation at World Travel Market 2023, in the company of the island’s president Vicente Mari, who is there to promote Ibiza’s growing reputation as a world-class sports destination.

Vicente Mari, president of the Consell de Ibiza, says:

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“It’s really important for our image and income to be recognised as a world-class sports destination because we saw when the PTO Tour came to our island at the beginning of May this year it helped create the best start to a summer season in our history. The triathlon races brought in twelve thousand [12,000] extra visitors, which in turn helped generate an estimated economic impact of €12.5 million Euros as well as repositioning how people think about us. It will also change when they consider coming to the island, by sending a clear message that we are ‘open for business’ from early Spring right through to the Autumn, rather than only over the Summer months of June, July and August.”

The course will start on the south side of the island, at Figueretas Beach, before the athletes headed out on their bikes towards San Antonio and finish with a run through Ibiza Port into the World Heritage protected old town. The event is back by popular demand, after the success of 2023, which brought in 12,000 additional visitors to the island, and provided a significant economic boost at the end of the summer season. Click here for more details and to sign up to race.

The island has an array of other exciting sporting events in the pipeline, that will help to extend the season and encourage people to travel to Ibiza before, and beyond the summer months.

10K Ibiza-Platja d’en Bossa

Kickstarting the year on 28 January, the Ibiza-Platja d’en Bossa is one of the fastest races in Spain. The race is characterised by its wide and long roads that run at sea level,