The hotel in Santa Ponsa where part of the dining room collapsed on Thursday night will be closed following a decision by the owners, as confirmed by Xisco Camiri, a technician from the Mallorca Fire Service who attended the site to inspect the area. The 520 guests staying at the Zafiro chain hotel will be relocated to other establishments run by the company later today. Tourists are taking taxis and private coaches to travel to their new destinations.
The Mallorca Fire Brigade, the Guardia Civil, Calvia Local Police and town planning officials from the council arrived early this Friday morning at the hotel in Santa Ponsa where part of the dining room where dozens of tourists were dining collapsed. The incident resulted in two people sustaining minor injuries.
Many of the guests had already been relocated to hotels in the area at their own request. The company was considering temporarily closing the establishment until the problems are rectified. On Monday, once the hotel has been closed, the structure will be inspected.
The incident occurred at around 9.30 pm at the Rey Don Jaime hotel, located at number 4 Gran Vía Puig Major. Several guests were having dinner in one of the dining rooms of the complex, which covers an area of around 30 square metres, when, for reasons currently under investigation, the floor gave way. One of the main theories being considered by Guardia Civil investigators is that the floor structure collapsed because it is very old and has not been reinforced with wire mesh.
Fire crews from the Calvia station, along with ambulances, Local Police and Guardia Civil patrols, rushed to the scene to assist any potential victims. Paramedics treated two people with superficial cuts to various parts of their bodies, who were taken by ambulance to hospital.
The Mayor of Calvia, Juan Antonio Amengual, visited the scene on Thursday night: “We have come here to assess the situation first-hand and also to thank the Local Police, Guardia Civil and Fire Brigade personnel, who responded swiftly and whose work deserves to be highlighted once again.
“We have encountered some tourists who were voluntarily vacating their rooms, but in general the situation has remained calm, and there have been no more than two minor injuries resulting from small cuts”.
Guillem Ginard, the Councillor for Tourism on the Council of Mallorca, has described the collapse of part of the ceiling in a hotel dining room in Calvia as an isolated incident and “by no means” representative of the general state of the island’s hotel sector.
Speaking to the media on Friday at the launch of the Smart Destination Platform (PID), Ginard said that engineers had not yet determined the causes of the collapse, which occurred on Thursday at the Zafiro Rey Don Jaime hotel in Santa Ponsa. ‘The damage is minor and this is an isolated incident,’ he emphasised, adding that Mallorca’s hotel sector ‘stands out for its quality and for its investment year after year’.