Palma Police report having applied the city's new ordinance in imposing the first fines on people who buy products from illegal street sellers.
The report comes from the police's 'Litoral' district, which covers the area by the sea from Can Pere Antoni to Arenal. In one case, eleven sunglasses were seized from the seller as evidence of illegal vending, while the purchaser was fined for "making a purchase from an unlicensed street vendor on the public way". This doesn't say if the person fined was a tourist or a resident.
The new ordinance came into force on May 26. The town hall has launched an information campaign to warn both residents and tourists about the risks of purchasing products from unauthorised vendors. The police emphasise that this type of trade harms legal establishments and can result in a financial penalty for the buyer.
Sellers themselves are subject to fines of between 750 and 1,500 euros. For buyers the range is 100 to 750. Yet for all the publicity given to this, fines for purchasing from illegal vendors are nothing new. Provision for this was in ordinance from 2018. Much of the May 26 set of bylaws was an update on existing regulations.
There is something of an imbalance in the pursuit of fines. It is easier to get a resident or a tourist to pay rather than an illegal seller. For years it has been the case that fines have been issued to sellers, but how many have ever been paid? Typically they have no known address to which the fine notice can be sent, so they never receive notification and never pay.
The Official Bulletin of the Balearic Islands regularly publishes pages and pages with lists of offenders, a mandatory procedure when a person whose whereabouts are unknown is fined. But the effectiveness of this in practice is questionable.
Before he became mayor in 2023, Jaime Martínez paid a visit to Playa de Palma one night and vowed that his party, the Partido Popular, would give priority to security in the area and tackle illegal street selling that was operating "with total impunity".