The Palacio Of Follies

An organisation called One DMC Mallorca reckons that Mallorca has lost out on staging a hundred or so conventions because Palma's Palacio de Congresos is still a building site, one where there is no building actually taking place at present. How does One DMC Mallorca arrive at this figure? Anyone got the answer, because I don't know. It sounds like a good headliner though, but when the organisation issuing it is a group of travel agencies and events organisers that makes up One DMC it probably would be. One DMC has an interest in shaming the regional government into action and out of the inertia that has brought the Palacio building works to a standstill; it wants to be Run DMC, running events at the convention centre that occupies a prime seafront site in the Mallorcan capital.

Lack of finance, debt, a monthly cost of over half a million euros just to cover maintenance and security, no company willing to operate it, the partly built Palacio is a folly that assaults the senses and embarrasses all the thousands who pass it each day. It is a folly half-built on the folly of the grand project, just the type of project that has helped to bankrupt most regional governments in Spain. It is a folly that can be laid at the door of the Balearics president for grand projects. Who else but Jaume Matas.

In the scale of grand projects across Spain that have gone disastrously wrong, the Palacio is by no means the greatest disaster or the most expensive, but it is one that has been a disaster of vanity, vagueness, lousy timing and legal wrangle. Its justification was as a means of adding dynamism to the local economy and especially the local economy in the low and winter tourism seasons. It was a justification, however, that took no account and still doesn't take account of competition from popular convention centres on the mainland or of the low contribution that meetings and business tourism offers to the local economy - less than 1% of tourism business in 2009.

With the new Palacio, this less than 1% would rise one would hope, but to what level? A dream of boosting winter tourism is only as strong as direct international flights in winter; not that strong, therefore. Why do you suppose it was that the recent sports tourism forum at the Palma Arena was held in October and not in November? Flights would have been one reason.

Despite the vagueness as to just how much the Palacio would contribute, it was still just about justifiable to build it if only in the hope that it might make an increasing contribution and only if funds were readily available. Economic crisis has not helped where funding has been concerned but then neither has the legal wrangle helped, the one that led to the original operator and major shareholder, the hotel group Barceló, definitively pulling out of the project early in 2011, just a month before the Palacio had originally been scheduled to open.

Barceló headed the company that was awarded the concession for constructing and operating the Palacio and its hotel in early 2007. The consortium that made the award comprised Palma town hall and the Matas government. When Matas lost the election in spring that year, he soon left Mallorca for Washington. He went to work for Barceló.

The political complexion of the consortium changed after the election. It was no longer Partido Popular but PSOE. Two years after the 2007 election, Barceló announced that it was temporarily abandoning the Palacio project because of what were described as "legal and economic irregularities", one of the irregularities having to do with part of the land having been discovered to not be public property.

Barceló, which had bought out other members of the company and so by then owned 95% of the shares, took almost two more years to then come to its definitive decision to wash its hands of the Palacio. With its withdrawal, it was necessary for there to be a tender for a new operator. None was forthcoming. A second tender process brought an offer from the Melià hotel group, only for this to be rejected because it didn't meet certain conditions.

And so we are where we are now. Building has been suspended, there is no operator, the builders Acciona, part of the original company with Barceló, are owed pots of money, and the whole stupid folly stands there waiting the day when or if it might actually be finished. This stupid folly which offends and embarrasses.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.