Week in Review: Royal dinner, taxis queues, illegal holiday lets and hotel conversions

Easter week, and it has traditionally been a time when the royal family travels to Mallorca. Well we can recall, for instance, the business in the Cathedral one Easter Sunday when Queen Letizia and the Queen Mother, Sofia had a spat over a photo with Princess Leonor.

The family is no longer arriving en masse, and neither the King nor the Queen had been expected. So, surprise it was when the King turned up to have dinner with some friends in Palma. And where did he dine? It was none other than Sandro Restaurante, previously made famous by Morgan Freeman, who had eaten there on a couple of occasions while filming on the island back in January. The King said nice things about the pasta and posed for some photos with Sandro and the staff. Unlike Morgan Freeman, the King didn’t draw attention to his favourite vodka. Sandro subsequently acquired two bottles of the Hollywood star’s tipple. Was the King offered a shot? Probably not.

The King went to see the Queen Mother, who has been staying at the Marivent Palace but he didn’t meet up with his sister’s ex, Iñaki Urdangarin, who just so happened to also be in Palma with his girlfriend. It was the first time that he, the former Duke of Palma, had been in Mallorca since receiving the court papers ordering him to prison. That was in 2018. He was released on probation in March last year.

Immense queues for taxis and monumental traffic jams

How did the King travel to the restaurant? If it was by taxi, he may have been in luck, as the summer schedule for taxis in Palma started on April 1, meaning that there are far more of them available than in the winter. The taxi drivers were saying that the number of tourists in March had led to “immense” queues at the airport and were having a go at Palma town hall for its “disastrous” policy and a lack of consultation. Nothing new there, then.

The government felt it necessary for it to have its say. Spokesperson Iago Negueruela insisted that there wouldn’t be any problems with taxi services or other transport being “overwhelmed” this summer. “We believe that everything will be fine,“ he said, adding that there is “one of the best transport networks” from the airport.

The cabbies were meanwhile warning that traffic jams in Palma this summer will be more than immense; they will be “monumental”. Roadworks, those on the Paseo Marítimo in particular, will add to problems that have already been evident. And then there’s the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane, the impact of which hasn’t really been put to the test yet. As far as the taxi drivers are concerned, the HOV lane, while it is of some benefit to them, is in the wrong direction. It should go to the airport and not from it; this is where the main issues are.

And there is another issue with airport traffic. This is because of all the drivers who don’t want to go into the main car park or the one at arrivals for pick-ups, where it is free but only for fifteen minutes. So when they are going to collect friends or family, they occupy one of the access lanes and wait. As a result, there can be tailbacks on the highway itself. One taxi driver says that he’s never seen anything like the queues that there are now - they are usually in the late afternoon - and fears that they are an accident waiting to happen.

Tourism, the same old talk and incidents

With the season getting under way, there was the inevitable talk of how much tourism there should be. Rosana Morillo, who was the Balearic director-general of tourism until December last year and is now Spain’s secretary-of-state for tourism, restated a Balearic government position: “The strategy in the Balearics should not be to continue growing.” She then went on about diversification from sun-and-beach tourism and avoiding peaks in demand, i.e. the massive numbers of tourists in high summer, which, regardless of all the talk, will be repeated this summer and quite possibly exceeded.

Morillo touched on tourism of excesses, stressing that “image is everything”. Which it is, so it was somewhat unfortunate that a British tourist was arrested in Magalluf for having run over two people following a fight in a bar. As things turned out, the 29-year-old had apparently been uninvolved with this fight but had been sprayed in the face. He couldn’t see properly when he got into his hire car, which was how he came to drive into the two outside the bar, who also had had nothing to do with the fight. They were discharged from hospital later the same day, and the 29-year-old was released by a court.

Of course, it isn’t only the British who misbehave; most certainly not. A video emerged of some ten or so Spanish youths beating up a single Spanish youth in the vicinity of BCM. And while all this was going on in Magalluf, Playa de Palma registered the first balcony fall of the season. The profile certainly didn’t fit the usual one. This was a 50-year-old Austrian. It was unclear whether this may have been attempted suicide. He was taken to Son Espases in a critical condition.

Geolocating illegal holiday lets

Much attention is being paid, again, to illegal holiday lets, specifically apartments in Palma. The Council of Mallorca and the University of the Balearic Islands have come up with a method whereby illegal lets can apparently be geolocated, which might prove to be a more certain means of tackling illegality than tourism inspectors posing as clients and paying with credit cards in order to get details. Legal experts were saying that this is a perfectly legal thing to do but were raising doubts as to whether the courts would accept evidence as being sufficient.

The Council let it be known that its target this year for detection of illegal lets in the whole of Mallorca is around four times what it was in 2022 - 237. The Council is also in discussions with the Habtur association for holiday rentals (legal ones) regarding the installation of automated noise control systems. The proposal for these is in response to numerous complaints. If necessary, these systems would notify the police.

Illegal conversions and hotel conversions

Illegality of a different type applies to commercial premises that are converted into residential accommodation. The architects and property administrators associations are of the view that while these conversions are a good option in helping to ease housing problems, they can also be “extremely dangerous” if they are not undertaken in accordance with regulations. There are cases of conversion which do not comply. Not only do these attract heavy fines, they also pose risks to occupants because they fail to meet habitability requirements. A lack of proper ventilation is just one example of this failure.

The Balearic government was meanwhile revisiting its desire to convert obsolete hotels (one and two star) and hostels into residential accommodation. Apart from provision for conversion in the 2022 tourism law, for which there hasn’t been a single taker, President Armengol stated last October that ten million euros were to be set aside for buying such establishments. This sum, courtesy of European funds, is now up to 16 million, and the areas where these purchases could be made has been extended beyond those covered by the tourism of excesses decree, e.g. Magalluf. It still wasn’t entirely clear how the government intends going about identifying these establishments or indeed obtaining agreement, while there is a question as to how much 16 million euros could actually purchase.

Rather than conversion, there is always demolition, and so the saga of El Bungalow, the beach restaurant in Ciudad Jardín threatened with demolition, was back in the news. The environmentalists GOB have sent a letter to Spain’s ministry for ecological transition, reminding the ministry that the order for demolition issued by the Costas Authority (which is part of the ministry) has not been acted on. Moreover, the period for the execution of the order has in fact elapsed. GOB insist that the restaurant has been “completely illegal” for forty years and point out that it is currently operating “as normal”.

Theft at Lluc Monastery

Finally, the case of theft from Lluc Monastery has been a most curious one. The head of maintenance, an employee for some twenty years, was arrested following a Guardia Civil investigation into the disappearance of valuables from the museum and money (some of it from donation boxes). In court, he confessed and then broke down. The court was adjourned as he was unable to continue, which added a sense of sadness to a case which seemingly only came to light when a member of the public, a regular visitor to the museum, spotted that items of jewellery were fakes; they were substitutes for the real things that had been stolen.