[UNVRS] Owner Yann Pissenem Tells VF How He Became Ibiza’s King of Nightlife

But when Pissenem first visited Ibiza as a guest in the 1990s, it was clear even then that it was a golden decade. A change had started in 1987, when the future British superstar Paul Oakenfold and some friends had taken ecstasy and danced to DJ Alfredo on the Amnesia nightclub terrace. They’d flown home describing an open-air island nightlife that felt like MDMA, and dopamine-poor Brits started booking flights. After the British government cracked down on raves in the early ’90s, Ibiza became Europe’s place to dance to electronic music.

On his first trip to the island, Pissenem found a loosely regulated world of dance parties. Promotion teams competed on the beach to sell tickets to the superclubs—Amnesia, Pacha, Privilege, Space—but also to pop-up raves in coves and hills. A single night might include a live sex show over the indoor pool at Privilege, an Oakenfold set at Amnesia, and a beachside comedown at Cafe del Mar, the birthplace of “chill out” music. At the time, Pissenem didn’t see an opening for his after-parties among the competition. Still, he was struck by what he saw. “When sunrise came, people would dance on the roofs of the cars at the petrol station,” he said. “People were partying in the morning buying croissants.”

“I think of modern Ibiza in three waves,” Oakenfold tells me. “The first was the late ’80s and ’90s. Open-air clubs, electronic music, and Italo disco, that original movement where people were just dancing around. Then came the second wave in the 2000s, with DJ residencies and closed roofs. And now [UNVRS] is the beginning of the third wave.”

During our next interview, Pissenem took a new page of graph paper and drew a skinny rectangle. This one showed the inflatable couch he slept on when he moved to Ibiza in 2008. After a decade of after-party whack-a-mole with the police, he sold most of his belongings and left Barcelona with his dog. When his ferry arrived on the island, his van broke, and a friend had to help push it off the boat. Then, at age 33, he moved into a 215-square-foot apartment with five roommates and two pets. Most mornings, he commuted on foot to build his first minimal techno beach bar.

As a fresh nobody on the island, Pissenem saw a hole in the market. Ibiza is famous for outdoor dance parties, but by the mid-2000s, after-midnight sound ordinances had pushed its superclubs indoors. Pissenem imagined a daytime beach club that catered to older ravers who could afford VIP beds and younger tourists who wanted to dance in the sand. He found a spot on Playa d’en Bossa, far from the island’s main action. He named his venue after Ushuaia, the Patagonian town “at the end of the world,” and added an ï as a marketing flourish.

Ibiza is hostile to new club owners, and Ushuaïa faced the usual onslaught. His landlords shut off his water and electricity, and his rivals called in noise complaints to the police. Pissenem’s investors dropped out after one year, and he spent the winter sleeping on the inflatable couch on the bar floor with his dog. The next summer, though, his club began to own the island’s evening time slot. The minimal techno brought in a college-educated clientele, while the beach-party energy attracted boys and girls in swimsuits, who reportedly attracted Roman Abramovich’s yacht. At the end of his second year, Pissenem scheduled his closing party the same day as the one for legendary after-hours club Space. Some 14,000 people came to dance at his bar, three times Space’s capacity.