For two thousand years, San Antonio was a small fishing village, but it began to grow in the late 1950s when many hotels and tourist resorts were built as part of a mass tourism initiative which took place across Spain.
By the 1980s, San Antonio had acquired the stigma of being the holiday location of choice for British football hooligans, which lead to a decline in tourism in the area. However, it regained its popularity in the mid 1990s when it gained a reputation in Britain as having the best night clubs and DJs.
Young British clubbers make up the vast majority of visitors to the area, mostly attracted by programmes such as the Ibiza Uncovered series on Sky television.
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2 Passeig de ses Fonts 3 West End |
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The Egg is the best known landmark in San Antonio, commonly used as a meeting place by groups who have become separated.
The Egg is a statue erected in the early 1990s to commemorate the local claim of having been the birth place of Christopher Columbus (there is a similar claim that Hannibal was born in the region). The statue is in the shape of an egg, containing at its centre a model of a 15th century ship.
The choice of an egg comes from a story about Columbus who, when ridiculed over his claim that he could find a western route to the Indies, claimed that he could make an egg stand upright, which he did by cracking the base of the egg.The Egg
The Egg in the port of San Antonio
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