The complete story after the 2016 closure — the touring years, the Ibiza sunset-strip return in 2022, the permanent Italian comeback in 2024, and Cyprus 2026.
The headline you remember is "Space Ibiza closed in 2016." It is true in one sense and badly misleading in another. The original building — the long, low industrial shell on Playa d'en Bossa with the open-air terrace under the airport flight path — did host its last fiesta in October 2016. The building reopened the following season as Hi Ibiza under different owners. But the brand, the audience, the touring infrastructure and the founder all kept going. What followed is one of the most interesting cultural-equity stories in modern club history.
This is the timeline, sourced from public coverage, of what actually happened after the lights came up on 2 October 2016.
The 27th and final season of Space Ibiza closed on Sunday 2 October 2016. The closing fiesta ran around 22 hours with a line-up that read like a Greatest-Hits of the previous decade: Carl Cox, Tale Of Us, Joseph Capriati, Nic Fanciulli, Apollonia, dozens more. Carl Cox played the closing slot — a marathon 9-hour set across roughly 113 tracks that is now one of the most-listened post-event recordings in the BE-AT.TV archive.
If we get a licence, Space Ibiza is 100 per cent coming back. — Carl Cox, multiple post-2016 interviews
The next year the building was acquired by Ushuaia Entertainment and reopened in May 2017 under a different brand: Hi Ibiza. That ended the original venue. It did not end the brand.
Owner Pepe Roselló, who founded Space in 1989 and ran it for all 27 seasons, made clear in interview after interview that Space would continue — just not as a fixed building on Playa d'en Bossa.
The touring concept was not new. Space Ibiza On Tour had already been running international stops for years before closure — the brand had touched New York, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Sao Paulo, Beirut, Mykonos, Cape Town and Johannesburg through the late-2000s and early-2010s. The post-closure tour era simply scaled up what already existed.
The clearest documented stops from the post-closure period:
| Date | Venue | City | Headliners |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Apr 2017 | Switch | Southampton, UK | Touring line-up |
| 20 May 2017 | Spring Festival | Alicante, Spain | Touring line-up |
| 14 Aug 2017 | Medusa | Valencia, Spain | Steve Lawler, Stefano Noferini |
| 25 Nov 2017 | Studio 338 | London, UK | "The Legend Continues" terrace party |
| 1 Jan 2018 | Greenwood Hotel | Sydney, Australia | Patrick Topping, Pleasurekraft, Adana Twins, Jasper James, Javi Bora |
| 16 Jun 2018 | Studio 338 | London, UK | Mini-festival: Felix Da Housecat, Timo Maas |
| 18 Aug 2018 | Groove Loch Ness | Inverness, Scotland | Space-themed open-air festival stage |
| 15 Sep 2018 | Studio 338 | London, UK | David Morales, Tiefschwarz |
| 1 Jan 2019 | Greenwood Hotel | Sydney, Australia | Carl Cox, Eric Powell, Javi Bora |
| 2019 | Studio 338 | London, UK | "Into the Future" series |
| 30 Dec 2019 | R&V | Gisborne, New Zealand | Bicep (Live), James Zabiela |
Several patterns are worth noting. Studio 338 in London became the de-facto European home of the touring brand — a Greenwich venue with an open-air terrace whose layout is the closest UK analogue to the original Space terrace. The Space–338 partnership actually predates the closure (the 25th-anniversary tour's final party was at 338 on 8 August 2015) and now spans nine years through to the 2023 Summer Mini-Festival. The Greenwood Hotel in Sydney became the New Year's Day equivalent: a Southern-Hemisphere terrace residency that ran every 1st January from 2018 to 2020. Carl Cox himself described playing the Greenwood as the closest thing he had felt to playing Space Ibiza since the closure.
Scotland features in the tour history through Groove Loch Ness Festival, where a Space Ibiza On Tour billing ran during the post-closure years — a one-night-only festival stage on the banks of the loch. And while it pre-dates the closure, the South Africa tour of April 2013 (Shimmy Beach Cape Town on the 26th + Johannesburg on the 27th, headlined by Roger Sanchez, Camilo Franco and Danny Marquez) was the original proof that Space could travel and remain Space. Every post-closure event traces its DNA back to that template.
Each of the four major Space Ibiza On Tour destinations has its own dedicated history page on this site — venues, dates, line-ups and what each one meant:
The tour kept moving through 2019, then COVID arrived. 2020 and most of 2021 were lost to the same global club-closure that shut down every comparable touring brand. Public-facing Space content went quiet, though Pepe Roselló continued to give interviews promising both a return to Ibiza and new international venues.
This is the period that gave rise to the popular — and slightly wrong — "Space Ibiza disappeared" narrative. It did not disappear. It paused. The brand kept its merchandise, its archive, its audience email lists and its social channels; it just had nothing physical to point at.
The first concrete post-pandemic return happened on the island itself. In summer 2022 Pepe Roselló opened Space Eat & Dance on the famous Ses Variades sunset strip in San Antonio — the bar-and-restaurant stretch better known to most visitors as the sunset strip.
The venue opened on 30 July 2022, next door to Cafe Savannah inside the Posta del Sol building. The concept was deliberately not "another Space superclub." It was a music-themed restaurant and bar built around the memory of resident DJ Jose Padilla and the sunset-strip Balearic sound, with periodic operatic interludes drawn from the libraries of Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Joan Sutherland and Placido Domingo.
If the Studio 338 era proved the brand could survive abroad, Space Eat & Dance proved it could survive in Ibiza without the original Playa d'en Bossa room.
The biggest single post-closure event happened in Italy. On 2 June 2024, Space opened its first permanent post-Ibiza club: Space Riccione, on Italy's Adriatic coast, ten minutes from Rimini airport.
Riccione is one of Italy's oldest beach-resort destinations and a long-established summer-clubbing town. The new venue was structured to mirror the original Space layout in spirit: four areas — Arena, Garden, Terrace and Lounge — covering indoor and outdoor space so the night could run from daytime sessions through to early-morning closes. The Terrace is the explicit nod to the original.
The project was built through a joint venture between ECulture, an international entertainment and equity-marketing company, and the Cipriani Group, the luxury hospitality family best known internationally for Harry's Bar and the Cipriani restaurant chain. Pepe Roselló stayed involved as the originator and brand custodian.
We are happy to continue 27 years of Space Ibiza history here in Riccione, an iconic place that represents entertainment. — Pepe Roselló, on the Space Riccione opening
The opening fiesta was, inevitably, headlined by Carl Cox — a hybrid live set that closed the loop on his closing performance in Ibiza eight years earlier. Saturday-night residencies through summer 2024 brought the international names every Saturday, the way the original Space had done on Sundays.
Riccione matters historically because it is the first permanent Space-branded superclub since 2016. The tour era proved demand. Space Eat & Dance proved local affection still existed. Riccione proved the model could once again support a real building, a real residency calendar and a real four-area capacity.
2025 was a year of repeated speculation. The most widely-shared rumour was an April Fool's Day announcement claiming Space would reopen on the original Playa d'en Bossa site under a new entity called "Extasis" — it was a prank, but the speed at which the story travelled was a useful measure of how much demand there still is for a real Ibiza return.
A second strand of speculation centred on a possible new partnership or licensing arrangement bringing Space back to Playa d'en Bossa as a partner-brand under one of the existing operators. None of this was confirmed in 2025. What was confirmed was that the brand still carries enough emotional equity to make global dance-music media chase every rumour.
The next official confirmed Space-branded weekend event happens in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, on 6–7 June 2026, at AYA Resort. It is the first time the brand has run a two-day Mediterranean event since the original closing fiesta. Confirmed performers mentioned online include Arodes, Echonomist, Mateo Vitale, Jane Ryse and the Zamna Soundsystem.
What makes Cyprus interesting from a brand-history perspective is the format. Space Riccione is a club; Space Eat & Dance is a restaurant-bar; the tour stops are largely single-night events. Cyprus is the first time post-2016 that the brand has built a multi-day, daytime-and-evening, pool-and-terrace event in the original Space DNA — the same shape as the legendary We Love Sundays parties that ran from 2003 to 2012 on the original terrace.
That is why we believe Cyprus 2026 is not "just another tour stop" but a meaningful next step in the post-2016 evolution. The full event schedule, line-up and tickets are all here on the site.
Three short lessons stand out from the post-2016 timeline.
Space's audience did not stop wanting Space. The touring decade and the Ibiza, Italian and now Cyprus extensions all happened because the demand never disappeared.
Pepe Roselló stayed in the picture. Almost every post-2016 development — the tour, the restaurant, Riccione, Cyprus — carries his fingerprints. Brand-equity stories without the original founder tend to drift; ones with the founder tend to keep their cultural authority.
Trying to recreate the original Playa d'en Bossa room one-for-one would have been a mistake. The post-closure brand instead built a tour, a restaurant, a four-area club in Italy, and now a daytime Mediterranean weekend in Cyprus. Each fits the moment and the location it was built for.
Space Ibiza did not disappear in 2016. It evolved — from a single permanent venue on Playa d'en Bossa into a global cultural brand that tours, opens new permanent rooms in new countries, runs sunset-strip hospitality on the original island, and now runs a multi-day Mediterranean event in Cyprus. The 2016 closure was the end of a building, not the end of a story.
Space Ibiza closed its Playa d'en Bossa venue on 2 October 2016. The building reopened the following season as Hi Ibiza under different ownership. The Space brand itself continued as the Space Ibiza On Tour event series with documented stops in London, Sydney, Valencia, Alicante, Cape Town and Scotland. In 2022 Pepe Roselló opened Space Eat & Dance on the Ibiza sunset strip in San Antonio. In 2024 Space Riccione opened in Italy as the first permanent post-2016 Space club, with Carl Cox headlining the opening. In June 2026 Space Ibiza runs a two-day event in Cyprus.
Sunday 2 October 2016. The closing fiesta ran around 22 hours and included a marathon 9-hour Carl Cox set. It was the 27th and final season after the club opened in 1989.
The original Playa d'en Bossa building was bought by Ushuaia Entertainment and reopened in May 2017 as Hi Ibiza — a different club under different ownership. The Space brand itself never reopened in the original location, but did return to Ibiza in 2022 as Space Eat & Dance on the San Antonio sunset strip, and opened Space Riccione as a permanent venue in Italy in June 2024.
Riccione is a beachfront resort town on Italy's Adriatic coast, easily reached from Rimini airport. Space Riccione opened on 2 June 2024 as a four-area venue — Arena, Garden, Terrace and Lounge — through a joint venture between ECulture and the Cipriani Group. Carl Cox headlined the opening fiesta.
Space Ibiza On Tour is the touring brand the original Space Ibiza owners ran around the world both before and after the 2016 closure. After closure, documented stops included Studio 338 in London ("The Legend Continues", 25 November 2017), the Greenwood Hotel in Sydney for New Year's Day events in 2018 and 2019, Medusa in Valencia, the Spring Festival in Alicante, R&V in Gisborne New Zealand, Shimmy Beach Club in Cape Town and Groove Loch Ness Festival in Scotland.
Pepe Roselló returned to Ibiza in 2022 with Space Eat & Dance — a Space-branded music restaurant and bar on the San Antonio sunset strip — but the original Playa d'en Bossa club is now Hi Ibiza and is unlikely to return under the Space name. There have been repeated rumours of a full reopening including an April Fool's announcement in 2025, but no confirmed return of a Space-branded superclub on the original site.
Pepe Roselló is the founder and long-time owner of Space Ibiza. He opened the club in 1989, ran it for 27 seasons, and after the 2016 closure continued the brand through Space Ibiza On Tour, Space Eat & Dance in San Antonio, and the joint venture behind Space Riccione.
It is a two-day Mediterranean event, not a single-night touring booking. The format mirrors the legendary We Love Sundays parties that ran on the original Space terrace from 2003 to 2012 — daytime sessions, pool atmosphere, terrace culture, evening main rooms. It is the first time post-2016 that the brand has run this shape of event in the Mediterranean.
Sources include Wikipedia (Space nightclub), Mixmag closing-party coverage (October 2016), DJ Mag and Time Out coverage of Space Riccione (2023-2024), Resident Advisor event archives for Studio 338 and Greenwood Hotel listings, Welcome to Ibiza coverage of Space Eat & Dance (2022), and Pepe Roselló interviews carried by Mixmag and DJ Mag. This page is editorial and is not affiliated with the official Space Ibiza brand.