Alese Blely, or as he has been renamed in Ibiza, Alex Shiney, is a 53-year-old Czech national who is about to celebrate his ninth year as a resident of the Punta Galera cave, from where he has already seen 3,000 sunsets.
After working as a DJ at festivals in his home country, as well as in Slovakia, Poland, Cyprus, Russia, Jerusalem and Croatia between 1988 and 2013, Alex decided to leave his electronic music career behind. “Two days of rain at one festival, at another festival it was too hot, almost 48oC (118oF), and a party on a boat, even though there was a tornado and it had been prohibited… I left because of things like that,” he explains at the entrance to the cave, showing a publication from the time when he won awards for his work in music.
He took a number of different jobs before receiving an invitation from a friend to come to Ibiza, living at his house in Port des Torrent for two months. On July 11, 2014, a day he remembers “very well”, he drank a bottle of vodka with a woman, picked up a katana that his friend had at home and went to some rocks in front of the Kumharas bar to put on a show, “because I have a black belt in kung fu”, he explains. “And 40 police officers, two helicopters and eight cars showed up. I was on television in Spain,” Alex recalls. “It was my introduction to Ibiza.
If you want to be a star, you need to do it with a good idea or a big scandal. After that, the owner kicked me out of the house, and with just seven euros to my name I started walking,” he says of the path that led him to the cave, where he has now been living since August 14, 2014.
He resides there with five cats, sheltering from the cold and rain, living by the sea and its “waves of up to 10 meters” in winter, and protecting himself from the summer heat.
Alex survives by doing Tarot readings and tending a plot of land in Can Coix where he is allowed to have an allotment. “I have chosen to work directly for the owner of planet Earth, for Pachamama,” he says about his work, which he combines with odd jobs in houses in the area.
He also receives visits from the people who come to Punta Galera, where this year he hopes to reach a total of 3,333 sunsets.
