The settlement of Sa Caleta is a unique example of Phoenician town planning in the Mediterranean. It is also the most important model of the beginning of the Phoenician colonisation of the Pitiüsas Islands, and the origin of the town of Eivissa. A piece of history which has been considered a World Heritage Site since 1999.

This site is one of the latest ones to be excavated on the island, and remained hidden until the end of the 1980s. The town, however, was founded in the mid 7th Century BC by Phoenicians who came from the far west Mediterranean. They were probably searching for metals.

It is set on a small flat peninsula known as sa Mola de sa Caleta, between es Codolar beach and the Puig des Jondal, in Sant Josep de sa Talaia municipality, in the south of the island. It was inhabited for forty or fifty years and had a population of about three hundred people. Its urban layout occupied some four hectares, and consisted of a great number of architectural units which, taken as a whole, made up a plot.
 
All these remains take us back to the time of this people, exquisitely skilled in the engraving of metals. Narrow streets, small, irregular squares (the platform of a communal bread oven is conserved in one of them), and the combination of very distinct architectural structures, makes this a monument which is unique in the whole of the Mediterranean area.

An example of this diversity is the so-called 'south quarter'. It consists of a total of eight constructions of different sizes and forms: of one, two and three rooms, juxtaposed or lined up along it. There are a few that are particularly large, with seven rooms distributed around an almost rectangular floor plan.

It is very possible that some of them were used as a storeroom to keep salt which was gathered from the nearby pools of the salt beds. According to some studies, sa Caleta may have been a link along the long route from the famous Phoenician port of Tyre to Cadiz.

But its inhabitants abandoned the settlement at the beginning of the 6th Century BC to move to the Bay of Eivissa, a much more comfortable place to live, and founded what today is the capital.

On the left side of Sa Mola de Sa Caleta, there is a small fishing port, which the same Phoenicians probably created. It is very pleasant and there is always a nice atmosphere.

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