If something is going wrong with Ibiza’s nature, there is a good chance Jaume Estarellas saw it coming. A biologist at the environment department of the Consell d’Eivissa, the island’s governing council, he has spent years translating the island’s ecological problems into plain language: what is happening, why it matters, and what can still be done.
His latest warning is the starkest yet. Studies suggest, he says, that by 2030 the Pitiusan lizard, the island’s only endemic vertebrate, will have disappeared from Ibiza or be reduced to very few. The cause is the plague of invasive snakes that has spread across the island over the past two decades, upsetting the food chain from top to bottom.
From the salt flats
Born in Barcelona in 1967, Estarellas moved to Ibiza as a child. He studied biology, specialising in the environment, at the University of the Balearic Islands, and worked in natural parks in Catalonia, from the Aiguamolls de l’Empordà wetlands to the volcanic landscapes of La Garrotxa.
But Ibiza and Formentera have been at the centre of his work since the late 1980s. He has taken part in the annual census of waterbirds in the islands’ wetlands for more than three decades, helped draw up the first Red List of Balearic vertebrates in 1990, and monitored the breeding colonies of the Balearic shearwater and Audouin’s gull, two of the Mediterranean’s most threatened seabirds. Many of his early studies focused on Ses Salines, the salt flats he has written about for years: the birds that nest there, the shelducks that began breeding there, and the natural values that make the area unique.
More than a symbol
For Estarellas, losing the lizard would not just mean losing a cultural emblem, the little reptile that appears on souvenirs, logos and local folklore. It would set off a chain of effects on the soil, the vegetation, insect pests and other protected species that depend on the balance the lizard helps to keep. And because the species exists nowhere else, he likes to remind people that “it disappears from the planet forever.”
He has been raising the alarm since the first snakes were found. As early as 2016, when some proposed bringing in predators such as mongooses to hunt them, he was one of the voices against it. “Using predators from outside the island to fight a plague can have much worse effects,” he warned, pointing to Australia, where foxes introduced to control rabbits ended up preying on native species. The real solution, he argued, was to control the imported olive trees and ornamental plants in which the snakes were arriving.
Pines, water and limits
Snakes are only part of his work. In 2025, after two years with very little rain, he explained how native beetles that normally feed on dead trees had begun attacking healthy pines weakened by drought, and why removing the affected trees was essential to protect the forest and reduce the risk of fire.
His concerns go beyond any single species. Years ago he was already arguing that Ibiza had passed the limits of what its ecosystems could bear: overused aquifers, Posidonia meadows damaged by anchoring and poor water quality, and more and more people on the island each summer. His answer was not to stop tourism, but to calculate how many people the island can hold and plan accordingly, and to be very careful about simply extending the summer crowds into the rest of the year. “We have to be brave,” he says about the limits the island needs to set.
The voice of the island’s wildlife
What sets Estarellas apart is not only what he knows, but his determination to explain it. In a place where the next record season is often celebrated, he has spent years reminding Ibiza that some losses cannot be undone, and that the island’s lizards, pines and seagrass are as much a part of its identity as its beaches.
