What’s greater – the fine for having demolished a hotel without a licence or the fine for having rebuilt a hotel without a licence? As far as I am aware, based on a July 2023 report of a fine for the demolition of the Hotel Formentor, knocking down is a heck of a lot of cheaper. In fact, one could knock down 17.5 Hotel Formentors for the price of building one without a licence.
Pollensa Town Hall, by then under new government of course, issued a fine of 293,919 euros for the demolition, which represented a breach of planning rules as the licence granted hadn’t been for complete demolition. Subsequently there was, courtesy of one of the mysteries of planning law, a legalisation of the demolition, not that legalisation necessarily annuls a fine; payment is often in fact a condition of legalisation.
A fortnight ago, the town hall raised the fine ante considerably – 5.14 million euros for the rebuilding without a licence. The owning company, Inmobiliaria Formentor S.A., was given fifteen days to appeal, so we are about to find out what will happen. If the company admits responsibility, the fine can be reduced by 40% to 3.08 million.
Might the company challenge another fine, this one a mere snip at no more than 15,000 euros? This is for the demolition of old garages and the building of a tennis court without a licence. Mayor Marti March is surprised that the town hall is even in a position of having to issue a fine. “I don’t understand why they didn’t request the permission, given that they have experience of asking us for licences and that they knew they could carry out the work.”
Meanwhile, whatever happened to all that rubble from the demolition phase that was dumped not far from the hotel? The estimate was 120,000 tonnes. These had to be transported for treatment by Mac Insular, the company in Mallorca that takes care of building waste. The mayor says some of the rubble has gone, but not all of it.
