Restaurant collapses in Mallorca: four dead, eight injured still hospitalized

Two young German tourists, a Senegalese man and a Spanish employee, were killed on Thursday evening when a bar and restaurant collapsed on the waterfront of Palma de Mallorca, in the highly touristic Spanish archipelago of the Balearic Islands, where the season was already in full swing. full. Authorities believe the tragedy may have been caused by excess weight, which caused the terrace of the newly renovated Medusa Beach Club to collapse.

“The victims were two German women aged 20 and 30, a Spanish clerk aged 23 and a Senegalese man aged 44,” a police spokesman told AFP on Friday. Of the sixteen injured in the accident, eight Dutch citizens are still in hospital, Palma Mayor Antonio Jimenez said. “They are out of danger,” he said.

Two young German women were holidaying on the island while a Senegalese man, who was widely featured in local media in 2017 for saving a swimmer from drowning, and a Spanish bar-restaurant employee were on the island. , the main archipelago. At 12 o’clock a minute of silence was declared in the city.

The Balearic Islands, located in the Mediterranean Sea and known for their crystal clear waters and beaches, are the second most visited region by tourists in Spain after Catalonia. According to official data, they received more than 14 million foreign tourists in 2023. The archipelago is especially popular among German, British and Dutch tourists.

Like a “bomb”

The noise caused by the collapse sounded like a “bomb,” Santiago Aranda, a witness to the incident who was walking his dog at the time and said he went to help emergency services, told Trece television. “It was very difficult to try to calm down and get away from people who speak a different language to you,” he added. Yeray Exposito, a courier and friend of a restaurant employee, told AFP that he “heard screams and people calling for help” immediately after the collapse.

This three-level building, located on the seafront in the tourist area of ​​Playa de Palma, included a bar and restaurant on the first and first floors of Medusa Beach Club and a basement bar, CocoRico. The site was heavily visited during the drama, and the Balearic Islands, an archipelago that also includes the islands of Ibiza, Minorca and Formentera, are already entering the tourist season.

Fearing that other victims may have been trapped, firefighters spent part of the night under the rubble before calling off the search. According to Eder Garcia, Palma’s fire chief, most of the victims were found in the basement bar.

Seniority and excess weight

Authorities were investigating the cause of the accident on Friday. “What we know for sure is that the first floor collapsed, causing the floor of the first floor to collapse into the basement,” Eder Garcia said. “Everything suggests” that the collapse was related to “the age of the structure and excess weight,” he continued.

In a post on social media Wednesday ahead of the drama, Medusa Beach Club touted its “new roof.” Residents of the area interviewed by local media said that this premises became the subject of discussion only recently.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez expressed his “condolences for the death of four people in yesterday’s accident in Palma” during an economic conference in Barcelona on Friday. In 2009, the collapse of a three-story building in Palma de Mallorca killed seven people, including two Germans and three Colombians.