Ibiza's Wall of Fame

Dalt Vila is the Eivissa walled old town with origins that date back to pre-Roman times. It has a labyrinthine framework of narrow streets and picturesque squares. If instead of going up the steep slopes and stairs that lead to the highest point of the promontory where the cathedral is located, you wander through the adjacent streets, you can find something hidden and often overlooked by tourists. A small exhibition that recalls Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, but in this case, it is a wall of a house where some concrete plates with handprints (or footprints) of some celebrities, not only about cinema, are hung.

Many of the celebrities on the wall hail from German-speaking areas. There are plaques of Germans like the singer Sandra Schwarzhaupt or the actor Fritz Wepper, the Swiss football player Fritz Kün who printed his feet, the filmmaker Fritz E. Maeder, the Austrian actor Ulrich Reinthaller, and Dutch actor Frijda Nelly. There are also representatives of Spain like the sculptor Miguel Ortiz Berrocal, businessman Enrique Sarasola, and the popular actor Penelope Cruz.

The origin of this concentration of celebrities maybe it is due to a local initiative and after continued by a program on German television in the 1990s from the channel SAT1 hosted by Margarethe Schreinemakers, which reached an audience of millions every week between 1992 and 1996 with her talk show Schreinemakers Live. It seems that one of the activities of the show was to appear with these celebrities in Ibiza, many of them linked to the Balearic Islands, to leave their immortalized prints.